Desire: The Drive & Death of Surrealism
[caption id="attachment_12621" align="alignright" width="250"] Philippe Soupault by Béatrice MousliFlammarion, 2010, 473 pgsPurchase at Amazon[/caption] Philippe Soupault is no longer a well-known writer on this side of the Atlantic, although his work was very well-known in the 1920s and 1930s, the period during which he co-founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton. In 1926 Soupault was ejected from t...
BREAKING NEWS: You Heard It Here First
All the President's Men is indisputably the all-time best film about journalism ever made in the history of the universe of films being made about journalism. (Take that, Citizen Kane.) It's not about journalism in the boring sense, but the golden snitch for every journalist: breaking the story. (And, some weird lobstery guy who, I understand, did a couple of dumb things as president.) If Hollywood is to be believ...
Let’s hope we’re not one
From Slate's The Big Money: The Magazine Isn't Dying: It's just the badly motivated ones that are going under. But a closer look at the types of magazines that have closed reveals a more nuanced and, in many respects, hopeful portrait of the magazine business. According to a list compiled by Advertising Age, titles that have shut down in the past year come from the shelter, technology, travel, luxury, and teen categ...
Hyperlocal AND hyperglobal?
The New York Times, in conjunction with the International Herald Tribune, now has a global edition. From the "about" page: Combining the international reporting of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, the Global Edition provides readers with a 24/7 flow of geopolitical, business, sports and fashion coverage from a distinctly global perspective. I think we're seeing the future of newspapers, right ...
Engagement, or echo chamber?
Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times: The Daily Me. When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that's the trend, God save us from ourselves. That's because there's pretty good evidence that we generally don't truly want good informatio...
The State of Arts Journalism
From Miller-McClune: Will Critique Work for Food Most newspapers continue to cover the world of culture using freelancers and (in the case of film and television) wire-service copy to supplement the remaining staff. A few, including the Los Angeles Times, have inaugurated blogs on their Web sites to get arts news out more quickly. On the other hand, entertainment news pages are increasingly filled with celebrity gos...
Good food doesn’t have to be fancy
From the New York Times: Food Magazines Begin to Consider Cooks' Budgets. As the high-end magazines try to survive a shaky 2009, it is out with the truffles, in with the button mushrooms. "There are ways in which we feel it should change," said Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food & Wine, published by American Express Publishing. "We don't, for example, do recipes that involve loads of foie gras and shavings o...
Does Professional Journalism Matter Anymore?
A couple of weeks ago, a plane landed on the Hudson River, just a stone's throw from where I was sitting at Space 38|39. I did not learn about it from CNN or MSNBC. I found out about the "Miracle on the Hudson" from Facebook, just minutes after it happened. My friend Peter's status read, "Did a plane really just land on the Hudson?" and I immediately went to work trying to find out what he was talking about. I w...
