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NEW YORK (AP) - Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be “like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons,” a new consumer survey suggests.
That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - “Alice in Wonderland” raced to a $430 million haul at the worldwide box office on Sunday, while Matt Damon’s new Iraq war conspiracy thriller “Green Zone” was one of the year’s first big flops.
Director Tim Burton’s 3D remake of “Alice” led the field for a second weekend after earning $138 million during the three days beginning on Friday, said distributor Walt Disney Co.

The national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has long been intimidated by the Murdoch press in the obsessive manner of the campaign waged against the BBC. Funded directly by governments, the ABC has none of the nominal independence afforded by a licence fee. Last year, HarperCollins, owned by Murdoch, was awarded a lucrative “partnership” with ABC Books.

In 1983, there were 50 major corporations dominating the world’s media. By 2002, this had been reduced to nine. Rupert Murdoch says that eventually there will be three, including his own. If we accept this, media and information control will be the same, and we all shall be citizens of a murdochracy.

The president, in Brooks’s reality, is a moderate progressive, trying to expand the government’s role in small ways while preserving the dynamism of free markets. (To the conservatives reading this: I’m not making this up. To the liberals: I’m not making this up.)

Easily the biggest news this season is Oprah’s announcement that she will officially step down from her syndicated chatfest after what will be 25 years on Sept. 9, 2011 to concentrate on her upcoming cable network OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, a joint venture with Discovery Communications. While the “Queen” of daytime’s actual involvement at OWN remains uncertain (Oprah claims she will not do another talker), much clearer is the opportunity created now for all other syndicators. It also was the right time for her to step away.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves put two groups on notice Tuesday that they will be paying the network more in the future than they have in the past.

Advertisers will pay more in the form of higher prices for commercials. And the network’s local TV affiliates will pay more too, in the form of substantial portions of the retransmission consent fees they receive from cable operators-or they will risk losing their network affiliations.

News release prepared by: Nellie Ryan, 785-532-6415, media@k-state.edu

Friday, March 12, 2010

K-STATE JOURNALISM EXPERT SAYS INTERNET CHANGING NEWS, NEWSPAPERS

MANHATTAN — News is changing in several ways and innovation is taking place at record-breaking speed, according to Angela Powers, director of the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University.

Powers researches influences on news content, media leadership and ethics, and media convergence.

“Some newspapers in the U.S. are laying off people, closing their doors,” she said. “Yet, other newspapers have an enthusiasm for new methods and techniques for gathering news and information that is completely changing the way they’re doing business.”

Part of that transformation has to do with the Internet, which has created massive interconnectedness, Powers said.

“Journalists are now routinely producing original content for the Internet and determining which medium is most appropriate, rather than simply covering a story for print or electronic media,” she said. (more…)

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company’s social network called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so. “I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz engineers in one of Google’s cafes,” engineer John Costigan wrote a day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. “He was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media response it generated.”

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Urban Decline: Detroit was once the epitome of an industrial boomtown. From 1900 to 1930, it was the fastest growing city in the world. Now, ravaged by recession and a plummeting population, the city is shrinking.

As recently as 1950, Detroit was a manufacturing mecca, bustling with 1.9 million residents and the energy of thousands of workers at a dozen auto companies, not to mention the industries, shops and stores that sprang up to service them.

Today, the population of the former Motor City is 800,000 and falling. Since the start of 2008, the greater metropolitan area has lost nearly a quarter of its manufacturing jobs, and the city suffers from a 50% unemployment rate.

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Two trading firms, one of them an established Wall Street player and the other a Midwest upstart, are each about to premiere a sophisticated new financial tool: a box-office futures exchange that would allow Hollywood studios and others to hedge against the box-office performance of movies, similar to the way farmers swap corn or wheat futures to protect themselves from crop failures.

MYFOXNY.COM - Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.

“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises,” the bill, A. 10129 , states in part.

(Reuters) - Panasonic Corp will launch its 3D televisions in the United States on Wednesday, and work with top U.S. electronics retailer Best Buy Co to promote the products, the Japanese electronics maker said.

(Reuters) - Sony and Samsung announced plans to introduce 3D televisions in coming months, betting they will become the next hot products in an increasingly crowded electronics industry.

Power from the engine and the rear motor hits the street through a seven-speed PDK gearbox. The front motor turns the front wheels through a fixed ratio. Juice for the motors is stored in a lithium-ion battery mounted behind the seats. No specs on the pack.

Porsche gave the car four modes. E-Drive is for tooling around under electricity alone, and you’ve got a range of 16 miles. Choose Hybrid Mode and you’re using gas and electricity as the circumstances dictate. Sport Hybrid mode tips the gas-electric equation in favor of performance, sending most of the power to the rear wheels and using torque vectoring to keep things under control. Flip the switch to Race Hybrid mode and everything is tuned to maximum performance. If the battery’s carrying enough juice, the motors provide a push-to-pass burst of energy at the touch of a button.

I’m currently embedded in MAG, the new PlayStation 3 shooter that puts up to 256 players on the same battlefield. And at first, the notion of running and gunning with so many other people is exhilarating. But after all these shots to the head, I feel like this most complex of shooters may only be navigable by younger players with the free time to learn how to handle a hundred human foes.

I’m 37, and I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600. Last year, at the peak of Modern Warfare 2 mania, I found myself in a hip Hollywood bar celebrating the birthday of an old college buddy. We’re all in our mid-thirties. As usual in a crowd of aging, buzzed geeks, the conversation veered toward videogames - specifically, the prowess of the young punks swarming the Call of Duty servers.

Contact: Diana Carlin, Department of Communication Studies, (785) 864-9875, dbcarlin@ku.edu

Pakistani musician to perform, meet with students during two-day visit to KU
http://www.news.ku.edu/2010/march/9/ahmad.shtml

LAWRENCE - Pakistani rock star, United Nations goodwill ambassador, physician and author Salman Ahmad will perform a concert and sign copies of his book “Rock and Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 11, at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The event is free and open to the public.

Ahmad, founder of South Asian rock band Junoon, which sold 30 million albums, is making his third appearance at the University of Kansas since 2002. He will speak to the University Scholars’ Rhetoric of the Nobel Prize class about his experiences performing at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 2006 and 2008. He also will meet with student groups during his two-day visit to campus.

His wife, Samina, who also is a physician, will present a brown bag talk at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, March 11, in the Sabatini Multicultural Resource Center on her work with women and children in South Asia. The event is free and open to the public.

“Rock and Roll Jihad” is an autobiographical look at one person’s attempt to use music to bridge cultural differences. Junoon performed a benefit concert for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in October 2001 in New York. The band’s first English language single, “No More,” was dedicated to the victims. Junoon created controversy among political and religious leaders for playing a concert in India and using a line from the Quran in one of their songs. A BBC/PBS/WideAngle documentary titled “The Rock Star and the Mullahs” chronicled the controversies.

The Ahmads’ visit is sponsored by the University Honors Program, International Programs, International Student Association, Pakistani Student Association and Emily Taylor Women’s Resource Center.

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