From Time, an interview with Rupert Murdoch: "They're taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control in an industry in crisis!" The Rupert Murdoch effect: The progressive LA Weekly has gone from a well-reported newspaper to a flashy tabloid with "gotcha" articles. From n+1, a review of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer. A new monthly satirical tabloid, The Levee, aims to get New Orleans residents to see the humor in their situation while at the same time holding local officials accountable for their post-Katrina misdeeds. Right now, many companies are trying to figure out cool new ways to use paper. But who is trying to figure out cool new ways to employ smart, highly trained print journalists? Prostitution is Legal: When advertising is king, media that "puts out" can be queen.
From Salon, a review of It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News. Once a novel idea, now a must: Though a technological minimalist, Marianne Wiggins, like, totally got why she needed a video for her latest book. The literary universe is bigger in the blogosphere: Literary opinions on the web do not have the same status as those in the established press, but they have a much wider scope. A review of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright. The iCommons harvest: There's no tragedy in a digital commons where quality content is king. When public records are too public: Open records are an established tradition, but does Internet access call for a change? One of the thorniest problems of the information age: data collected for one purpose and then used for another, or "data reuse".
From The Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan reviews Generation Myspace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence and To Catch a Predator: Protecting Your Kids from Online Enemies Already in Your Home. How the second-generation Internet is spawning a global youth culture. Do you prefer Facebook to MySpace? The class divide is thriving on the internet. Facebook gets help from its friends: Music, horoscopes help boost site's user base; will new offerings allow it to catch MySpace? In Your Face: How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google. Oh, that John Locke: There's a new sport on the Internet: competing to come up with the best examples of how Wikipedia, the Web's home-grown reference source, is skewed towards pop-culture topics. A review of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen.
