The video of South Carolina officer Michael Slager shooting unarmed, 50-year-old Walter Scott is both chilling and appalling, but I will leave all the social think pieces to people better equipped to comment on the tragic event.
I was, however, curious what the conversation on Twitter looked like from 30,000 feet, so I asked USC Annenberg professor Matthew LeVeque and his team at the Strategic Public Relations Social Data Desk to pull what they could from “the firehose” (the unfiltered pipeline of real-time tweets). …
Why charging people per story is doomed to fail and could actually make things worse.
One of the ideas tossed around a terrified and desperate newsroom is charging readers per article, similar to micropayments found in free iOS or Android apps. Or when you login to iTunes and buy individual Taylor Swift songs for your workout playlist (I don’t judge).
When someone is resistant to the idea (like me), people like to point out that both David Carr and Walter Isaacson wrote extensively in favor of the “iTunes for news” business model. How can anyone disagree with the former managing editor of TIME and the best media writer of his generation?
When news trickled to Twitter about a possible deal between The New York Times and Facebook to host the paper’s news content directly on everyone’s favorite depository of pregnancy announcements and listicles, reaction wavered between hysterical and something akin to a 140-character eulogy. Media pundits and prognosticators have been predicting the death of the traditional journalism model for awhile. That’s nothing new. But the sheer surprise that media outfits would trade the only leverage many have left — eyeballs — seems perplexing until it doesn’t.
If you are truly worried about your job in the post-Facebook era, you are correct…
by Will Federman
Thursday’s Oscar nominations forced people to confront an uncomfortable truth about the movies we watch — excessive white maleness. USC Annenberg’s Dr. Stacy L. Smith talks to me about it.
Not long after the Twitterverse had a good chuckle over “Dick Poop,” another hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, began to light up mobile devices. But unlike scatological humor, there’s nothing funny about the lack of diversity in media and, understandably, the conversation struck a different tone on social media.
It started as a rather innocuous tweet about the need for a hashtag, but resonated with people tired of Hollywood’s typical whitewashing. …
Will Federman
Managing Editor at @TheTylt. Proud @USCAnnenberg alum. Pop culture connoisseur. Horror junkie. I write the occasional media think piece.
