The Non-Verbal Newspaper
In 1977, Swiss graphic designer Hans-Rudolf Lutz conducted an interesting experiment by stripping all language from a daily newspaper — I’d like to try this process with some contemporary publications:
This book consists of an inventory of all the non-verbal information contained in a daily newspaper. All of the words have been cut out of the Edmonton Journal of 16 August 1977 (the day on which Elvis Presley died). How do we ‘read’ pictures with no verbal context or information? What is the informative value of typographical structures and orders when stripped of meaning? The visual material in this publication provides a basis for the debate on these questions.
Newspapers To Disappear By 2040?
Taking, for example, the New York Times’ inability or unwillingness to properly cover the Occupy Wall Street protests, maybe this news isn’t all that bad. AFP reports:
Newspapers will disappear and be replaced by digital versions by 2040, the UN intellectual property agency’s chief said in an interview published on Monday.
Francis Gurry, who heads the World Intellectual Property Organisation told the daily La Tribune de Geneve that “in a few years, there will no longer be printed newspapers as we know it today.”
“It’s an evolution. There’s no good or bad about it. There are studies showing that they will disappear by 2040. In the United States, it will end in 2017,” he said.
Gurry noted that in the United States there are already more digital copies sold than paper copies of newspapers. In cities, there are also fewer bookshops.
A key problem is the revenue system.
“How can editors find revenues to pay those who write…
Yesterday’s News Could Be Tomorrow’s Fuel
Everyday millions of newspapers are read and then throw out or, hopefully, recycled. Instead of turning those papers into other paper products, they may be able to be used for fuel. Via Discovery News:
Tulane University scientists discovered a strain of clostridia bacteria, dubbed “TU-103,” that can devour old newspapers to produce butanol, a substitute for gasoline.
Old editions of the Times Picayune, New Orleans’ daily newspaper, have been successfully used by the researchers to produce butanol from the cellulose in the paper. Cellulose is a structural material in plants.
TU-103 is the first bacterial strain found in nature (not genetically engineered) to produce butanol directly from cellulose. It is also the only strain yet found that can grow in the presence of oxygen. Keeping bacterial fermentation chambers air tight makes other strains more expensive to work with.
“This discovery could reduce the cost to produce bio-butanol,” said David Mullin, who’s lab discovered the…
The Media’s Language Of Persuasion
Parapolitical notes the contrasting linguistic framing used by the Associated Press in two stories five decades apart:
How does the Associated Press choose which unanimous votes to dismiss as the slavish resolutions of a rubber-stamp parliament and which to praise as examples of bipartisan cooperation?
Which ‘Expert’ Pundits Make Accurate Predictions?
Wondering which political pundits are actually smart and which are full of hot air? Now we know (maybe).
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman is a modern-day Nostradamus — his predictions (usually concerning the economy) almost always come true. At the other end of the spectrum, if mustachioed conservative columnist and Fox News “expert” Cal Thomas says something is going to happen, it is almost certain that the opposite will occur. All this is thanks to a study concocted at Hamilton College:
Op-ed columnists and TV’s talking heads build followings by making bold, confident predictions about politics and the economy. But rarely are their predictions analyzed for accuracy.
Now, five Hamilton College seniors led by public policy professor P. Gary Wyckoff have analyzed the predictions of 26 prognosticators, sampled the predictions of 26 individuals who wrote columns in major print media and who appeared on the three major Sunday news shows – Face the…
NY Times, Guardian Newspapers Analyze Their Coverage Of WikiLeaks
This past weekend saw some major introspection by the newspapers that led the mainstream media’s dissemination of the U.S. diplomatic cables provided by WikiLeaks. In the New York Times Magazine, Executive Editor Bill Keller led with a cover article detailing how little they liked or trusted Julian Assange — but worked with him anyway. Describing the visible change in Assange as his media stardom blossomed, Keller writes:
Assange was transformed by his outlaw celebrity. The derelict with the backpack and the sagging socks now wore his hair dyed and styled, and he favored fashionably skinny suits and ties. He became a kind of cult figure for the European young and leftish and was evidently a magnet for women. …I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that…
America’s 30 Hackiest Political Pundits
Salon’s War Room has unveiled the Hack Thirty, counting down America’s worst political columnists and television pundits, with representative quotes of their most dismal work. The focus isn’t on obviously-partisan loons such as Glenn Beck; rather it’s on “respectable” and “moderate” writers and cable news commentators who use their enviable positions to spout banalities, unthinkingly regurgitate accepted wisdom, and bow down to those in power. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman comes in at No. 3:
Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from…
Gruesome Murder Pamphlets From Pre-Civil War America
People had a thirst for blood-drenched, depraved news long before there was a New York Post or British Mirror or Sun to provide it each morning. The National Library of Medicine has published online a collection of murder pamphlets from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The brochures were sold on street corners and detailed the latest gristly crimes. Today they shed a light on villains from the dark underbelly U.S. history, such as Lucretia Cannon, circa 1841:
Cannon’s first name was Patty, but the press nicknamed her Lucretia after the Renaissance aristocrat who murdered her victims with poison. At 16, “Lucretia” married Alonzo Cannon, who died suspiciously of “failing health.” Widowed, she set up a tavern in Maryland, and headed up a gang which captured free blacks and fugitive slaves and sold them into slavery. She was alleged to have beaten a crying infant and then burned it alive; murdered tavern patrons for their money (one…
All Hail The Tea Party
For me this is the clearest sign yet that Rupert Murdoch has turned the Wall Street Journal into just another political mouthpiece, little different in its Republican boosterism from his tabloid New York Post. The Journal’s lead story today, titled “Birth of a Movement” is a fawning assessment of the Tea Party with the message that it’s here to stay and that’s a wonderful thing:
Less than two years ago, Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin were 30-something suburbanites in metro Atlanta, frustrated by recession, dismayed by the election of Barack Obama and waiting for the next chapter of their lives.
Ms. Kremer, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant, had quit her career to raise her daughter. The child had grown up and just moved out, and now Ms. Kremer was filling her time with two blogs—one on gardening, one on politics.
“I had this empty space in my life,” Ms. Kremer recalls.
Ms.…
African Newspaper Purposefully ‘Outs’ Gays, Suggests Hanging
Photo: AP
This is quite a shocker, reported by Godfrey Olukya and Jason Straziuso for AP, especially as it seems to have been instigated by American Christian fundamentalists:
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — The front-page newspaper story featured a list of Uganda’s 100 “top” homosexuals, with a bright yellow banner across it that read: “Hang Them.” Alongside their photos were the men’s names and addresses.
In the days since it was published, at least four gay Ugandans on the list have been attacked and many others are in hiding, according to rights activist Julian Onziema. One person named in the story had stones thrown at his house by neighbors.
A lawmaker in this conservative African country introduced a bill a year ago that would have imposed the death penalty for some homosexual acts and life in prison for others. An international uproar ensued, and the bill was quietly shelved.
But gays in Uganda say they have faced…
The Washington Post’s Plans To Blow The Lid Off U.S. Intelligence
The Washington papers show no love for each other… here the Washington Times accuses its more fabled neighbor the Post of getting in the way of national intelligence, showing this memo:
Daily Star Pulled From Airports Over Volcano Ash Splash
Daily Star headline
John Plunkett writing in the Guardian:
Copies of today’s Daily Star have been removed from airport newsagent shelves today over fears that its splash, headlined “Terror as plane hits ash cloud” with an image of a 747 with engines ablaze, could cause panic among travellers.
Richard Desmond’s red top was removed from shops at Gatwick and Manchester airports after today’s edition was published, with a front-page story claiming to feature “dramatic pictures as jets get OK to defy volcano”.
However, the image used in the splash was taken from a TV reconstruction of an incident 28 years ago in which a BA 747’s engines were knocked out by a volcanic ash cloud. The documentary, previously broadcast on the National Geographic channel, is to be shown on Channel Five tonight…
[continues in the Guardian]
Don’t Pick Your Nose On The Subway: Rupert Murdoch Might Be Looking
AnimalNY via Jason Shelowitz
It’s no secret that Rupert Murdoch wants his Wall Street Journal to usurp rival newspaper the New York Times as the top read for the elites in New York City. Whether or not stories like this one will do the trick is doubtful, but I guess it might give Gothamist a run for its money, were the latter ever to start a print edition…
Last week, Jason Shelowitz, 30, a Chelsea-based painter and freelance graphic designer, started hanging very realistic facsimiles of MTA service advisories in subway cars and train stations around the city. The goal: to call New Yorkers out for their inappropriate or disgusting behavior, and to make them laugh i the process. “Keep your hands to yourself, perv,” one sign says. Another: “Keep your finger out of your nose. Please.” The posters bear the stamp of the MEA: Metropolitan Etiquette Authority.
Shelowitz created more than 300 posters, which he will finish…
British Newspaper Played Key Role In Demise Of Copenhagen Climate Conference
Was this responsible behavior by the Guardian? Comments welcome below!
The Copenhagen conference was destroyed from the start by the leak of the “Danish draft” negotiating text to The Guardian, the Indian environment minister said this weekend in a warning that the breakdown of international trust would continue to undermine climate talks this year.
In an interview with The Guardian ahead of a new round of meetings, Jairam Ramesh shed new light on last December’s fraught summit and highlighted the continuing gulf between rich nations and the Basic block of emerging economies — Brazil, South Africa, India and China.
Dismissing Britain’s attempt to blame China for the disappointment of Copenhagen, the Indian minister said the outcome was determined by a failed “ambush”, targeted at the leaders of emerging economies, by the host nation Denmark. This attempted to switch a new negotiating text for the existing UN texts.
“The Danish draft was circulated at the beginning of…
Murdoch Says NY Times Publishes ‘Anything Obama Wants’
Is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? I mean come on, Rupert, it’s not as if your newspapers and TV networks (Fox News Channel fuhchrissakes) don’t have a very obvious bias. From TheWrap.com:
News Corp. Chairman-CEO Rupert Murdoch described himself as “maybe a radical” Tuesday night and accused the New York Times of being too close to the Obama administration.
“I have great respect for the Times, except it does have very clearly an agenda,” Murdoch said in an interview at the National Press Club in Washington with Marvin Kalb. “You can see it very clearly in the way they choose their stories, what they put on Page 1 — anything that Mr. Obama wants.”
Murdoch, whose Wall Street Journal soon will start to more directly compete with the Times by publishing a sections that covers New York also denied he has a personal tiff with Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.,…
Internet Overtakes Print In News Consumption
“The Internet” is finally beating “newspapers” as a primary source for news among Americans. If you think this means that the way people learn about the world is drastically changing, think again — among primary news sources, television is still King. From Ars Technica:
The Internet has surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
National and local TV stations still dominate the news cycle for most Americans, but the Internet now stands third in the list, ahead of national and local newspapers.
Additionally, the majority of news consumers say they use two to five websites per day to get their fix—a number we think sounds about right—but a surprisingly high number (21 percent) rely on that one favorite site to get everything they need.
How Low Can The New York Times Go?
Charlie Suisman’s invaluable Manhattan Users Guide alerted me to a story in the New York Times that I missed while out of the country. Charlie sums it up better than I can:
Just when you think about the Times that maybe there’s a dance in the old dame yet, they go and do something simply inexplicable, even despicable. On New Year’s Day, the Times gave a platform to climate change denier Denis Dutton, who conflates Nostradamus, ‘evil aliens’, and global warming in his editorial. Any more of that crap and the Times, after its eventual demise, won’t even be missed as fish wrap.
Here’s the beginning of the Times Op/Ed:
Christchurch, New Zealand
IT seems so distant, 1999. Bill Clinton had survived impeachment, his popularity hardly dented, Sept. 11 was just another date and music fans were enjoying a young singer named Britney Spears.
But there was a particular unease in the air. The so-called Y2K problem, the inability…
Rupert Murdoch and the Art of War
As the distributors of the classic Robert Greenwald documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism, we’re always happy to see the liberal media giving Mr. Murdoch yet another battering, but I have to say that I’m starting to wonder if they won’t be lining up for jobs with him soon, as the last newspaper tycoon standing. The latest assault, in New York Magazine:
This month, with the announcement that The Wall Street Journal would be expanding the scope of its coverage out of New York, Rupert Murdoch opens his most direct assault yet against his longstanding foe, the New York Times. But the Times launched a preemptive strike when its media critic, David Carr, casted [sic] aspersions on the Journal’s journalistic integrity a year into its ownership by Murdoch’s News Corporation. Carr reported on how its news pages have tilted rightward, much as one might expect from the owner of Fox News and the New…
Dave Eggers, Newspaper Publisher?
David Ulin for the Los Angeles Times:
The novelist’s grand print experiment — $16 a copy — hits S.F. streets and beyond this week. It’s a one-shot deal, but he hopes it will remind people of the form’s potential and viability.
Reporting from San Francisco – Dave Eggers doesn’t look like a newspaper baron. At 39, wearing a baseball cap and hiking boots, the author — whose most recent project is the screenplay for “Where the Wild Things Are” — appears more an older brother to the interns who work feverishly in the Mission District offices of McSweeney’s, the independent publisher Eggers founded with the proceeds from his bestselling 2000 memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”
In addition to books and a monthly magazine, McSweeney’s publishes a literary journal, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the new issue of which is set to appear here today in a form that confounds every trend in publishing:…
