American folk music singer, the legendary Pete Seeger, sings an ode to newspapermen.
Link via Vadiraj Hombal
Archive for the 'YouTube Videos' Category
‘Newspaper men meet such interesting people’
28 September 2009The quest for the first blogger on planet earth
17 September 2009
Was it Dave Weiner? Ranjit Bhatnagar? Montaigne?
Julius Caesar, perhaps?
Scott Rosenberg, author of say everything, says the qeust for the first blogger is, in the end, an infinite recursion; each candidate a pointer to one before. And the search is as futile as searching for the first poet, first playwright, first novelist, or even the first human being.
“Blogging evolved, just like human beings have evolved. And the question is not who was the first blogger, but how did we get here.”
‘If the reader is second to advertiser, you’ve lost’
15 September 2009
At the Toronto international film festival, documentary film maker Michael Moore drops some pearls on the state of newspapers:
“In Europe, Japan and other countries, for many—most—of their newspapers, the primary source of funding is circulation, advertising second. In our country [the United States] advertising is the primary source of funding, circulation second.
“Any time you say the people who read your paper are secondary to the business community, you have lost and eventually you are not going to survive. In Europe, they know that in order to keep circulation up, they have to put out a damn good newspaper, something that people read, and they better not cut too many reporters because people are not going to read.”
Also read: How not to ask the right questions (an ongoing series)
Loans at low interest rates for photographers
6 September 2009
It takes some chutzpah for a bank to utter the word “integrity” in the august company of AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) does so, but surprisingly uses the stout shoulders of the paparazzi to tell the world that it has it.
This September: Anna Wintour’s India connection
28 August 2009
Meryl Streep essayed her role in the Oscar-nominated film The Devil Wears Prada.
In the documentary The September Issue, which releases in New York today, Anna Wintour plays Anna Wintour.
The legendary editor of the Baghwad Gita of the $300billion fashion industry, Vogue, takes off her trademark goggles and allows director R.J. Cutler to scrutinise the inner workings of the magazine for its September 2007 issue.
And revealing, in the process, an “Anna who is like Madonna“:
“…a woman who is opportunistically charming but who mostly seems to exist in splendid isolation, issuing sometimes-devastating pronouncements with a chilly insouciance that would make Marie Antoinette jealous.”
Wintour, daughter of the British journalist Charles Wintour, has an India connection going back 36 years. Her unauthorised biographer Jerry Oppenheimer writes that while growing up in London, Anna had a major passion for men—attractive, older achievers.
“She had many boyfriends. She was once literally chased around the house by Indian statesman V.K. Krishna Menon (in picture, left),” her father Charles says of his Cambridge classmate.
But Oppenheimer writes that papa Wintour “never stated whether he thought the fatal heart attack suffered at the age of 77 in 1974 (by the “red” Indian) was brought on by his supposed hot pursuit of his comely daughter”.
Also read: Inside Vogue’s queendom
Read the New York Times review: The cameras zoom in on fashion’s empress
But why are we only testing water-boarding?
23 May 2009
Christopher Hitchens tried it almost a year ago and lasted all of a few seconds.
Now, right-wing radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller has done so again, fared no better, and come to the same conclusion: Yes, waterboarding is torture.
Sure, in the context of the debate in the United States over the interrogation techniques adopted by the previous Goerge W. Bush administration, all this “experiential journalism” makes for a fine spectacle, but how about going hungry for a few days (like in sub-Saharan Africa), facing a few bombs (Iraq, Afghanistan),living with the Taliban (Pakistan), living without a roof (everywhere), etc, to drive the point home?
Read the Alternet article: Radio host gets waterboarded
POTUS would like you to switch off your phone
14 May 2009
What happens when the mobile phone rings at a White House press briefing?
This is what Robert Gibbs would tell you in a circular sort of way.
“[As the press secretary to the President of the United States] I made the determination that the illumination of the sound was distracting to the briefing.”
