cable at Brave New Films

Thomas Mann on FORA.tv

2008-10-06T16:50:02Z

Author, commentator and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Thomas Mann explains why he's a fan of FORA.tv.

For more Thomas Mann on the 2008 Presidential election:

Financing American Elections: fora.tv

How Will the Candidates Govern? fora.tv

On John McCain, Sarah Palin and the RNC: fora.tv

Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. The author of numerous books on American government, and a contributor to major magazines and newspapers like Washington Post and New York Times, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mann has served as co-director (with Ornstein) of the Transition to Governing Project and senior counselor (with Ornstein) to the Continuity of Government Commission.

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Friday Film Nights, Interview with Time Warner Cable

2008-10-06T16:32:16Z

I was Interviewed, for a spot on the film series held at the orange county center for contemporary art, thrrough the eclectic company

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Ask Dr, Cosmo- Vol. 14

2008-09-26T22:33:01Z

Dr. Cosmo discusses a patient's concerns about elected representatives.

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Why I Cured the Cable Guy (Steve Hofstetter)

2008-10-06T16:40:28Z

Larry the Cable Guy and his manager told The New Yorker that Steve Hofstetter named his album "Cure for the Cable Guy" for a quick buck. Steve responds and explains why he really did it.

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Re: The Cure : Faith : Charlotte, NC 6.16.08

2008-07-13T22:37:05Z

Video Cam Direct Upload

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Fred Kaufman on the Food Network: It's all "Gastroporn"

2008-06-07T21:31:03Z

Complete video at: fora.tv

Author Fred Kaufman discusses the quirky production styles of popular cable chanel The Food Network, in an excerpt from his book, "A Short History of the American Stomach."

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A Short History of the American Stomach with Fred Kaufman.

Kaufman takes us on a raucous, witty and fact-filled exploration of America's complex and often bizarre relationship with food. From secret raw-milk covens in New York City to "gastroporn" addicts, Kaufman presents an irreverent take on all aspects of the foodie world.

A renowned chronicler of all things gastronomic, Kaufamn's infamous Harper's article, "Debbie Does Salad," which likened the Food Network's camera shots to pornography (he sat down and watched six hours of the network's programming with a porn industry veteran to get her thoughts), generated incredible buzz in the foodie world.

In his most recent article for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Kaufman turned his subversive gaze on the world of pet food - and hit the "most e-mailed" list.

In his latest work, Kaufman uncovers Puritan anorexia and bulimia and sheds a completely new light on this issue, as does his subversive take on cookbooks and diet books, his explorations into genetically modified food, and the digestive underpinnings of American imperialism - The Commonwealth Club of California

Frederick Kaufman has written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper's Magazine, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastronomica, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. He's been a freelancer for years, and published over one-hundred magazine articles, along with three books (Author, A Short History of the American Stomach). He's a contributing editor at Harper's, and teaches at the City University of New York and CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism.

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state of the music industry

2008-06-13T21:30:04Z

sick of bad music being marketed to you? theresident.net

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sticks and stones

2008-06-13T21:29:55Z

what's the worst thing you've ever been called? theresident.net

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Israeli Cable System Replaces CNN with Fox

2008-01-12T20:32:13Z

Breaking: A cable insider tells TVNewser HOT (the largest cable operator in Israel) took CNN off the air from both their digital and analog platforms at 11:30am local time (5:30amET) this morning. It was replaced with FOX News Channel.
Following...
>More: Earlier reports had indicated HOT would replace CNN with Al Jazeera English. The Cox News Service and The Jerusalem Post reported last week that the dropping of CNN is due to "financial considerations."
>More, More: FNC was already on HOT's digital platform, but is now on analog in CNN's former spot. An insider tells me this widens FNC's distribution in the region to about 200,000 subscribers.

And so it goes. Rupert Murdoch's takeover of world information distribution continues.

The Campaign to Give Jack Cafferty a Show: Broken Government

2008-06-16T03:33:27Z

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Authors@Google: Jeff Cohen

2008-06-07T09:32:29Z

Jeff Cohen visits Google's Santa Monica, CA, office to speak about his book, "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." This event took place as part of the Authors@Google series.

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Chris Anderson with Will Hearst - The New Media

2008-06-07T09:34:50Z

Complete video at: fora.tv

"Wired" editor and "The Long Tail" author Chris Anderson talks with publisher Will Hearst about how user-created content is changing the landscape of mass media.

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The Long Time Tail

You know something is up when an audience member is taking cell phone photos of the presenter's slides for instant transmittal to a business partner.

Chris Anderson does have killer slides, full of exuberant detail, defining the exact shape of the still emerging opportunity space for finding and selling formerly infindable and unsellable items of every imaginable description. The 25 million music tracks in the world. All the TV ever broadcast. Every single amateur video. All that is old, arcane, micro-niche, against-the-grain, undefinable, or remote is suddenly as accessible as the top of the pops.

"The power law is the shape of our age," Anderson asserted, showing the classic ski-jump curve of popularity - a few things sell in vast quantity, while a great many things sell in small quantity. It's the natural product of variety, inequality, and network effect sifting, which amplifies the inequality.

"Everything is measurable now," said Anderson, comparing charts of sales over time of a hit music album with a niche album. The hit declined steeply, the niche album kept its legs. The "long tail" of innumerable tiny-sellers is populated by old hits as well as new and old niche items. That's the time dimension. For the first time in history, archives have a business model. Old stuff is more profitable because the acquisition cost is lower and customer satisfaction is higher. Infinite-inventory Netflix occupies the sweet spot for movie distribution, while Blockbuster is saddled with the tyranny of the new.

Anderson explained that we are leaving an age where distribution was ruled by channel scarcity - 3 TV networks, only so many movie theater screens, limited shelf space for books. "Those scarcity effects make a bottleneck that distorts the market and distorts our culture. Infinite shelf space changes everything." Books are freed up by print-on-demand (already a large and profitable service at Amazon), movies freed by cheap DVDs, old broadcast TV by classics collections, new videos by Google Videos and YouTube online. Even the newest game machines are now designed to be able to emulate their earlier incarnations, so you can play the original "Super Mario Bros." if so inclined - and many are. "I'm an editor of a Conde-Nast magazine [Wired] AND I'm a blogger," said Anderson. In other words, he works both in the fading world of "pre-filters" and the emerging world of "post-filters." Pre-filtering is ruled by editors, A&R guys ("artist and repetoire," the talent-finders in the music biz), studio execs, and capital-B Buyers. Post-filtering is driven by readers, recommenders, word of mouth, and buyers.

Will Hearst joined Anderson on the stage and noted that social networking software has automated word of mouth, and that's what has "unchoked the long tail of sheer obscure quantity in the vast backlog of old movies, for example." Anderson agreed, "The marketing power of customer recommendations is the main driver for Netflix, and it is zero-cost marketing."

"By democratizing the tools of distribution, we're seeing a Renaissance in culture. We're starting to find out just how rich our society is in terms of creativity," Anderson said. But isn't there a danger, he was asked from the audience, of our culture falling apart with all this super-empowered diversity? Anderson agreed that we collect strongly and narrowly around our passions now, rather than just weakly and widely around broadcast hits, but the net gain of overall creativity is the main effect, and a positive one.

Questions remain, though. "Digital rights is the elephant in the room of freeing the long tail." Clearing copyright on old material is a profoundly wedged process at present, with no solution in sight. Will Hearst fretted that we may be becoming an "opinionocracy," swayed by TV bloviators and online bloggers, losing the grounding of objective reporting. Anderson observed that maybe the two-party system is a pre-long-tail scarcity effect that suppresses the diversity we're now embracing. Much of how we run our culture has yet to catch up with the long tail - Stewart Brand, The Long Now Foundation

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New Fox 1/2 Hour News Hours Produces Old Results

2008-07-09T17:30:12Z

Same ol same ol.

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