Democratization of media, digital tools, media

Thursday, August 28, 2003

Jog Shuttle USB Device

It's not nearly as cool as the $45 aluminum, blue-backlit Powermate (the bright aluminum one would go very nicely with the faux-magnesium exterior of my wee laptop if anyone at Griffin Technology wants to send one my way, btw), but with 15 user-definable command buttons and a jog-shuttle, the $130 Contour Shuttle-Pro is must-have for serious video and photo editing - EnvyNews loves everything about it but the price.

posted at 9:36 am

Disney has pretty much completed the process of shutting down their hand-drawn 2D animation studio. Because of the sucess of films at Pixar, Disney seems to have decided that the future is in computer-rendered work.

Disney has lost it's ability to tell good stories and is now looking at a technology solution - "3D works great for Pixar and everyone assumes that Ice Age was done by us, so we'll be fine". The look of the movie never mattered in animation, it's always been the quality of the storytelling. You'd think the success of Iron Giant, Nick Park's work or Spirited Away (Disney must have missed the Oscars this year) would have proved that to Disney. Now Disney has guaranteed that their work will look the same as everyone else's, they're well on their way to re-becoming the pathetic mid-70's morass again that churned out bad G-rated live action stuff because "animation was dead".

A quote from Roger Ebert 's review of Iron Giant is telling:

The Iron Giant" is still another example of the freedom that filmmakers find in animation: This would have been a $100 million live-action special-effects movie, but it was made for a fraction of that cost because the metal man is drawn, not constructed.

It would be a sad day for Disney fans, if it wasn't for the amazing work coming out of small shops and overseas, where low cost digital production tools are the best thing that ever happened to hand-drawn animation.

posted at 8:13 am

Monday, August 11, 2003

"How to be a Journalist" - BBC Style

Staying on the Civic Journalism front for a bit longer, The BBC has organized a large set of on-line training for digital video and audio production, good stuff though a bit biased towards certain software packages. What the average civic journalist really needs though is one of those authoratative-sounding british journalist accents.

[via Hypergene Media Blog]

posted at 10:59 am

J.D. Lasica's Civic Journalism Oeuvre

J.D. Lasica is one of the leading thinkers on participatory journalism (what Mitch Radcliff calls "Civic Journalism:

Why do I use the qualifier "civic" and not "participatory"? Well, journalism has a context, which I think we've forgotten: Done right, journalism is a voice through which a society learns about itself and debates the options available to it. The contextual void created when we forgot this is the primary fount of entertainment journalism we see today.

The Online Journalism Review is posting a bunch of J.D.'s better articles:

From his site

� Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists
� Participatory Journalism Puts the Reader in the Driver's Seat
� What is Participatory Journalism?

OJR originally didn't package these well, but they've corrected this, so I've temporarily removed the articles from my site. (As I say below, my complaint is really with all online news outlets, which continue to make related material very difficult to find. In any event, that minor quibble about format shouldn't overshadow the thrust of the articles.)

An excerpt from the main article:

By night, Raven -- the name everyone uses for 47-year-old Harold Kionka -- works as a janitor, mopping the floors and cleaning the grease traps in TGIFriday's in Daytona Beach, Fla.
By day, he operates almost single-handedly a 24-hour Internet TV station, serving as owner, station manager, producer and on-air personality. Daytonabeach-live brings live coverage of events in the Florida resort town to as many as 17,000 viewers a day.

Raven and a handful of others are at the vanguard of a new breed of journalism: personal broadcasting. Using equipment that is now relatively inexpensive and simple to use, these video pioneers are claiming a stake in territory that was once the exclusive province of big media.

And the first sidebar:

The New Directions for News report says of this phenomenon: "Everyone on the Internet is a potential expert on some subject -- from Pez dispensers to digital photography techniques to wormholes -- and these participatory forms are great places to find and share not only obscure or rare information, but commentary that might be too controversial for mainstream media."
One of those niche publishers is Sheila Spencer Stover of Bunn, N.C., whose Indian name is Firehair Shining Spirit. She runs the Internet Native News and Issues List, a mailing list with 400 members, mostly native Americans. ...

"Our members talk about prison rights, religious freedom, the selling of spirituality, the repatriation of bones, the stockpiling of native artifacts in museums stolen out of grave sites, building on sacred lands, the reclaiming of languages, elder health, Alaskan natives afflicted by gas-sniffing, suicide on reservations, issues with Indian trust monies, the Pipestone project in Montana, where they want to build a theme park on sacred land -- we exchange news about anything and everything," she says.

Here's the series of articles I've written about new media as a force in empowering readers and citizen-journalists:

In this series:

�  Personal video journalism hits the Net

�  Participatory journalism puts the reader in the driver's seat

�  What is participatory journalism?

�  Niches of trust

�  Independents day

�  When webloggers commit journalism

�  Personal storytelling

�  Citizens as budding reporters and editors

posted at 10:58 am