ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

MEDIA

Apple Wants To Upend Podcasts The Way It Did Music Downloads

The company - which was one of the first to jump on the podcasting train, providing podcast sourcing through iTunes in 2005 - is now figuring out how to get podcast creators paid, which could be a game-changer for podcasters. - Fast Company

The History Of The Hollywood Foreign Press Association And Black Movie Critics

It's not great, as we all know. Here's the detailed story of Samantha Ofole-Prince, who was invited in 2013 to become a member, sponsored by several other members - and then had her application tanked, apparently because some other members (all white at the time) were worried about "territorial competition." Now, Ofole-Prince says, "They’ve had decades to address the...

Barry Jenkins’ Underground Railroad Is Different From Other Slavery Stories

Some of the show, though it does depict the violence of enslavement and other forms of anti-Black oppression, draws on an almost spiritual connection to the land through which the refugees are running (and taking the train). - The Atlantic

It’s Actually Good For Ellen – And Us – That Her Show Is Ending

Though she handled the end of the talk show far worse than anyone thought she could, even given the circumstances, she had to get free of that grind. "DeGenenres’ career before Ellen was unique. As a stand-up and then a sitcom star, she elevated LGBTQ rights in this country — courageously, tenaciously and at great personal cost. The sitcom...

The 90-Day Theatrical Window For Movies Is Fully Dead

Thanks, Disney: "After months of teetering precariously on the precipice, the final blow came on Thursday following Disney’s announcement that Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the Ryan Reynolds’ action comedy Free Guy would screen in theaters for 45 days before landing on home entertainment." Good luck, movie theatres! - Variety

Revisiting TikTok Before It Was TikTok, A Long, Long Time Ago

"From 2014 to 2018, the Chinese app Musical.ly was where kids — as in, literal children and very young teenagers — would lip-sync to 15-second clips of Shawn Mendes and Bebe Rexha songs, or maybe an audio track of a funny Vine. The music played as you recorded; you could slow it down and speed it up and make...

Research: Livestreaming Has Become A Vital Connection

“Our research has highlighted how important it is for audience members to be able to communicate with, and feel connected to, each other and the musicians performing,” said Co-author Sam Leak, lecturer in Popular Music at Middlesex. “As a performer, this finding is interesting to me not only because it impacts my livestreaming practice, but also because it could...

NPR Is Starting To Put Its Most Popular Podcasts On Traditional Radio

The traffic started out the other way, of course, with over-the-air programs being released as or adapted into podcasts. "But podcasting has turned into an incubator of sorts for new radio shows, with several now making their way to local airwaves. … Starting out as a podcast offers show creators a chance to explore and experiment while also building...

Hollywood Is Now Producing Companion Podcasts To Movies And TV Series

Why? Money, of course: to put it in business-speak, the companion podcast "offers a new way for creators to diversify IP assets." What's the draw? "People want to spend more time thinking and talking about the shows that they're watching, whether they're binge-watching it or watching it once a week," says HBO's director of podcasts. "It's on their mind,...

SAG/AFTRA Sign First Agreement On Social Media Influencers (What Does That Mean?)

The Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists' national board voted to adopt its first-ever agree­ment for influencers—personalities and performers paid to promote products and services on networks like Instagram and TikTok, plus non-networked websites. In addition, those side hustles are no longer prohibited for current members of SAG-AFTRA. - Dance Magazine

Disney+ Isn’t Using Show-runners For Its Shows. A New TV Model?

Effectively, the studio is making its TV shows as if they were roughly six-hour movies, applying the same production methodology it’s used for the 23 unprecedentedly successful interconnected feature films that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That means empowering directors to lead a lot of creative decision-making, in collaboration with a small cadre of hands-on Marvel creative executives who...

The Long Checkered Career Of The Golden Globes

Hollywood viewed the awards as meaningless at best and corrupt at worst — most notable for their open bar and the industry perks enjoyed by their some 80 voting members. Jack Mathews, who was a film critic for Newsday, once called them “the best-fed freeloaders in the entertainment industry.” - The New York Times

YouTube Will Spend $100 Million On Creators In New “Shorts” Program

YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform, announced the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100 million pool of money it’s promising to distribute to creators of the most-engaging clips of its new TikTok-style feature. YouTube expects the program to kick off in the fall of 2021 and continue into 2022. - Variety

What Happened When A Video Game Mixed ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, Artificial Intelligence And Choose-Your-Own-Adventure? Things Got Ugly

Last summer, the game AI Dungeon (less than a year old at the time) got an upgraded version of AI text-generation software that lets users type an action or piece of dialogue for their characters and then creates a new piece of narrative. Before long, some users started creating sexual situations involving children. But when the company put in...

With New Hosts, NPR’s ‘Invisibilia’ Podcast Is Reorienting Itself

"'Something we've thought about for a long time is how the show has historically had a strong emphasis on the individual and the internal world and how there was an absence of perspective about the larger structures that the individual exists inside of,' said Wendle. To describe the intended shift in somewhat reductive terms, then, this new iteration...

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');