Time's and Newsweek's Survival Strategy After Recent Cutbacks

A snip from the Washington Post’s brief piece on how high-profile news magazines have changed along with journalism: Many of the recently laid-off staffers, Stengel says, “were people whose jobs really didn’t exist anymore.” Similar:ChoiceScript tutorial for making casual, phone-friendly, stats-driven storygames. Choice o… https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis…Academia‘People are rooting for the whale’: the strange American tradition of…

The Day the Newspaper Died

On October 10, 1765, an Annapolis printer changed his newspaper’s title to the Maryland Gazette, Expiring. Its motto: “In uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life again.” Later that month, the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal replaced his newspaper’s masthead with a death’s-head and framed his front page with a thick black border in the…

The DNA of detection

An informative tribute, from the BBC. It’s remarkable how many of the genre’s classic elements can be traced back to the feverishly fertile imagination of one man, Edgar Allan Poe. Once you start looking, the clues are everywhere. Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his gloomy gothic tales Born 200 years ago, on 19…

Presidential inaugurals: the form and the content

Educated Americans have a tendency to think that (i) intelligence can be directly assessed through the surrogate of compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar, and that (ii) compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar can be checked quickly and easily by glancing in Strunk and White’s brainless little pamphlet of 19th-century grammar…

New Media Journalism Professor Uncovers Source Code — And Source Cave — of Forerunner to Modern Computer Adventure Games

Here’s an excerpt from an article that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of the Seton Hill University alumni magazine, Forward. Page 1 | Page 2 Similar:Facebook Updates News Feed So Your Favorite Friends Rise to the TopNow, News Feed, at its most basic level,…BusinessFirst They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual UtopiaWhen…

Pre-golden Age: The Coolest Robots of Pre-Golden Age SF

Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don’t forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or “robots” (a term introduced in 1921) that might free…

At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants,…

Guarded Optimism for the Future of Reading

Naturally, as an English professor, I’ve got a vested interest in the future of reading. But you can’t have an intellectually healthy society without literacy. I had a high school physics teacher — Admiral Peebles (a retired nuclear submarine expert) who praised literacy as a core skill. “Give me students who can read and write,”…

End Times

Not if, but when. The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our…