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Hungry Media Dragon Policing the Media
The Australian media largely ignored a major conference looking at its own future
YOU could be forgiven for not noticing, but at the beginning of this month Sydney hosted one of the most significant conferences on the impact of new media yet to take place in Australia.
Why didn’t you notice? Well, if you are an academic it was probably because it was pitched at journalists, and we all know how suspicious the academy is of hacks and, in turn, how anti-intellectual journalists can be. If you are an ordinary member of the public you may well have missed it because the mainstream media organisations barely reported it at all. This is very strange, given that many of them sponsored the gig, and the title of the conference was The Future of Journalism. You’d think they’d be interested. The leading British media commentator Roy Greenslade attended the conference and wrote about it on his blog at the Guardian. But the Australia media almost ignored it.
• Meyer: I was 'verballed' by Murdoch ; [Eric Beecher, who runs four websites including the iconoclastic crikey.com.au, said: Crickey I can't see a funding model for serious journalism in future, not one that will pay for large staffs with specialists, and foreign correspondents and stringers, everywhere. I can't see ads paying for big operations that costs tens of millions of dollars. Websites can attract millions but not the necessary tens of millions ]
• · Keeping Up with Class Actions: Reports, Legal Sites and Media Dragons of Note ; Harvard Law faculty votes for 'open access' to scholarly articles - In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible ; Blogging has become a mainstream method of communication...
• · Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones. The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around Every move tracked ; Related, also from Slashdot: Path Intelligence has developed a proprietary, patent-pending, new technlogy that is able to accurately locate mobile phones whilst indoors Path to Intelligence
• · · Canadian Lawrence Hill's THE BOOK OF NEGROES, about a West African girl sold into slavery in 18th-century South Carolina who eventually returns home, won the overall Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Tahmima Anam of Bangladesh won the Best First Book prize for A GOLDEN AGE. Someone Knows My Name ; Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, Dear Reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied. Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Slavs
• · · · Literature can transmit what is best in us but with equal zeal and power can transmit what's worst in us. You'll find as much racism, sexism, cruelty and intolerance in literature as you'll find in the real world. Literature is beautiful and it is wise and it is foolish and it is cruel. Literature is a lot like us. Which is probably why I love it so. I'd like to thank also literature. ;
• · · · · ABCD: embracing a digital future
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has launched four new internet services, designed to explore the interactive possibilities offered by digital media, and to ‘connect with its audiences with distinctive, innovative, Australian content’. ABC Playback is an internet television service which offers, for the first time in Australia, full-screen definition and quality over an internet connection. The ABC’s website allows users to register for the beta-testing phase, which commenced on 26 March. ABC Playback initially comprises three channels:
• ABC Catch Up — showing recently aired programs from ABC TV;
• ABC Real — showing natural history programs and documentaries; and
• ABC Shop — showing ABC programs which can be purchased from the ABC’s website. ABC Managing Director Mark Scott on Digital Media Dragons; THE ABC plans to launch a breakfast television program on ABC2 as part of another push into digital media ABC woos internet viewers