Twittering

So I joined twitter, and already I think it is stupid. I can't figure out why I should do it or how it is any different than the status bar on facebook. Inane. All this junk just seems to me to be a trivial pursuit. Who knows, maybe I will change my tune and get hooked.

Family History in Journalism

My own connection to journalism has a little history to it, one that I have learned along the way. There is an award with my name on it, the Rockower Awards. Actually not my name but the name of my great-Grandfather Simon. The Simon Rockower Awards are the equivalent of the Pulitzer prize for Jewish Journalism. It is the award given by the American Jewish Press Association for excellence in Jewish journalism.

My other familial connection to journalism is my cousin Elsa Black and her husband Creed Black. Creed Black was the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, and before that an editor, president and chairman for a number of other paper. Elsa was on the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I asked Elsa and Creed to take a guest column on the blog about the good ol' days of the newspaper world. From Elsa:

"Anyway, Creed and I would be delighted to send some posts about journalism in the “olden days.” As a preview, I’ll tell you that when I left the newspaper business in late 1977, I still typed on a manual typewriter (we were just starting baby steps towards computerization) and copy went to the composing room via pneumatic tubes. Talk about life in the dinosaur age!! Anyway, as they used to write, “MTK”—“more to come."

Their post will appear later this semester.

Another one bites the dust

Alas, the once-bright Daily Star has been eclipsed. Lebanon's Daily Star is no more.

Somewhere between Alpha and Omega

A dear fellow named Johann Carolus started this business of the news rag. He created the first published newspaper, The Relation, or in its original German was titled the "Collection of all distinguished and commemorable news."

For those who don't subscribe to that antiquated thingee called a newspaper, the LA Times has an op-ed from Prof. Cowan and Prof. Westphal's wife on the future of the free press.

O Brave New World

"Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get."
-Mustapha Mond, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

"O brave new world," he repeated. "O brave new world that has such people in it. Let's start at once."
John quoting Shakespeare's The Tempest, Brave New World

This is a link to a distopian vision of the coming media war and death of the fourth estate. Beaming live from the Museum of Media History, it takes a look back from 2014 on the media war that transpires. Big thanks to Mrs. Amron, who sent this to me some 5 years ago, and was kind enough to dig it out of her email garbage box all these years later.

My new media blog

This is my new media blog for my Comm 599 class. It will deal with issues related to media and other assorted news and notes from the fourth estate. For any crossover readers from my other blog, they will recognize the template as the former style of my Levantine blog.

For starters, the opening post gets an interesting BBC article on the various disputes taking place in the Arab media over the various disputes taking place between the Arab governments on the situation in Gaza.