“The Weather, SO Hot Right Now”
FJP: Very sweaty.
Hurrah!
We’d like to think that these three girls helped make this happen.
The Church of England has sold all of its shares in News Corp. because it fears Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has failed to learn lessons from the phone-hacking scandal.
Check out this interactive map and watch as four companies devour what’s left of local TV!
Finally, comprehensive online television news archive by Internet Archive
Yesterday, the folks at Internet Archive launched a robust online collection of more than 340,000 TV news programs from the past three years. The service, aptly called, TV News Search Borrow is awesome for a number of reasons.
First, it is easy to find relevant news coverage on a specific topic. The search digs through caption information provided by the networks and ranks your results. This is a huge improvement over the tools currently out there for video producers to find news coverage.
Why the Internet Is About to Replace TV as the Most Important Source of News
The headline conclusion of Pew’s latest monster survey of the media landscape was the demise of TV news. “There are now signs that television news is increasingly vulnerable,” the authors wrote, “as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers.”
But the larger story is the rise of the Web, which has surpassed newspapers and radio to become the second most popular source of news for Americans, after TV.
Read more. [Image: Pew]
White Men, Everyone Else: Gender and Ethnic Diversity on Cable News
Media Matters spent the month of April reviewing evening guests on cable news. The results, unfortunately, don’t surprise: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC “overwhelmingly host male and white guests.”
Read through for the details as the watchdog group breaks down the numbers for each network. We learn, for instance, that “Out of 1,677 total guests, CNN had the largest proportion of men — 76 percent — during the month of April;” and “Fox News had the largest proportion of white guests — 83 percent.”
Hat tip to Chris Hayes, whose show is the most diverse in cable evening news. And getting there isn’t very difficult. “We just would look at the board and say, ‘We already have too many white men. We can’t have more,’” Hayes told Ann Friedman at the Columbia Journalism Review back in March. “Really, that was it.”
Images: Diversity On Evening Cable News, via Media Matters. Select to embiggen.
While that’s unsurprising on the one hand, on the other it’s its own kind of WHOA HUGE NEWS finding. Conventional wisdom – and even our everyday experience of the web – might suggest that emotion and overall WHOAness would trump other considerations. This is the operational logic of a site like Buzzfeed, whose brand is driven by little else beyond the WHOA. And Twitter, in particular, has a flattening effect: Our rolling, rollicking sources of news all roll and rollick within the same 140-character-high little boxes. On Twitter, puny little @megangarber gets the same physical real estate as @WSJ, @NYTimes, and@BarackObama. (And if puny little @megangarber posts a lot of tweets, she’d get, actually, morephysical real estate than the established institutions.)
Gender Balance in News
Open Gender Tracking Project is a software program that collects digital content from news sources and analyzes gender balance within news organizations. The project was created by Irene Ros and Adam Hyland of Bocoup and Nathan Matias of the MIT Center for Civic Media.
The program collects data on who is writing the articles and who the articles are written about. It also measures audience response data directly associated with specific articles (like how many times a post is shared in social media). The goal of the program is to make news sources aware of content diversity (or lack thereof) so organizations can work toward maintaining a balanced set of voices.
For the most part, women are currently being underrepresented in digital media.
Tell Congress: Keep the Internet WEIRD — and SAVE NET NEUTRALITY