One of the big failings of traditional media is its fetishization of “objectivity” in the face of facts. At its best, objectivity is an attempt at fairness to present opposing views. But too often it reflexively reduces issues to non-sensical polarized he said/she said arguments without the journalistic application of facts. If I say the […]

Krystian Zimerman is one of the world’s best pianists. Sunday night he was making his debut at LA’s Disney Hall. And then: Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski’s “Variations on a Polish Folk Theme,” Zimerman sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to […]

In the early ’00’s, the movie industry looked on as the music industry’s business model was cannibalized by file sharing services. Bandwidth issues bought Hollywood a few extra years to figure out how to adapt to the digital threat. Eventually iTunes proved a viable model to sell music over the web, even as the recording […]

The genius of Steve Jobs is not that he has great ideas. Many people have great ideas. It’s not that he can hire people with great ideas, or even that he can recognize a great idea when he hears it. The genius of Steve Jobs is that he has the ability to look at a […]

Two articles over on the ARTicles blog at the National Arts Journalism Program. First, Laura Collins-Hughes has a take on this year’s Pulitzer for theatre and why it’s important that the finalists are all women: …women playwrights are vastly underrepresented on our stages. Because “diversity” isn’t just a buzzword. The Pulitzer isn’t important in itself; […]

Mark Ravenhill argues that endless choice has shortened our attention spans, to the detriment of all art. Maybe we should blame the invention of the TV remote control: people often do. At some point around 30 years ago, it became possible to hop aimlessly between channels. Programme-makers became convinced that they had to make a […]

The high-profile launch this week of an effort to create a paid pass to access news content got a lot of attention because of the principals involved. JournalismOnline is the idea of veteran media execs Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery. Their venture aims to supply publishers with ready-made tools to charge Internet fees, […]

A shameless plug for a piece on All Things Considered by Laura Sydell on what’s happening with arts journalism as newspapers drop arts coverage. As I say in the piece, IMHO what’s happening is not the destruction of arts journalism, but the reinvention of it. Arts journalism has often had an uneasy home in newspapers, […]

I love this – art made from the distinctive spine patterns of the first 15 years of Wired magazine. Question: is there a discernible pattern or plan to the way Wired planned this out over the years? A code, a DNA map, or the weaving of an issue-by-issue genome perhaps?

People want things how they want them. In Japan, “five of last year’s top ten best-selling novels started life as mobile phone – or keitai – novels.” There was a time when mobile phones were used simply to communicate. In high-speed Japan, where more than 100 million people own mobile phones, they are not only […]