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Category: Media

How The New York Times Works

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In a fascinating piece for Popular Mechanics, Reeves Wiedeman looks at how the New York Times gets made in 2015. It’s interesting how their graphics department has evolved in the past few years:

The Times employs approximately 1,300 journalists, a classification that now includes much more than writers, editors, and photographers. There are videographers and developer–journalists and graphic designers, who insist that you not call them graphic designers. Every section of the paper has been affected by the Internet, but the graphics department is hardly recognizable from the days not long ago when, to accompany a story about Borneo, for example, it would simply produce a small black-and-white map of Borneo. [Graphics editor] Duenes’s desk still produces traditional newspaper graphics, but it also now employs thirty-five people who have expertise in statistics, programming, cartography, 3D modeling, motion graphics, audio production, or video editing. At the department’s two long desks, designer Haeyoun Park combs through data on the racial breakdown of police forces—a story the graphics team reported without any instigation from print reporters—while nearby Matt Bloch is updating the paper’s digital hurricane tracker… A breaking-news event might require eight members of Duenes’s team, who are otherwise free to focus on the kind of in-depth reporting for which the Times‘ print reporters are generally known. Last August a graphics editor who had been tracking police data for four years discovered that the New York Police Department had more or less ended its controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which some critics had described as racial profiling. This was news to the reporters on the Metro desk, and the editor there assigned a story to go along with the graphics department’s analysis.

The story, and the graphic, ran on the front page.

I also particularly liked the stuff about their R & D Lab:

The R&D Lab opened nine years ago with the goal of looking three to five years into the future. (TheTimes declined to say how much it cost to build.) Marc Frons, the company’s CIO says he has no idea how people will interact with theTimes in ten years, “whether it’s on your wrist, or your forehead, or you take a pill, or it’s a holographic contact lens, or a head-up display in your vehicle—or on your mirror in your bathroom.” The lab explored E Ink before the Kindle even existed, was responsible for delivering the earliest versions of the paper’s mobile news alerts, and helped the Times become the first publisher with an application on Google Glass. One of the lab’s researchers recently designed a brooch programmed to light up whenever a topic is mentioned that matches something the wearer read about online that day. What good would that do, exactly? Boggie answers with enthusiasm, “We don’t know yet!”

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The Evolution of Music Online | Off Book

Related to the previous, the latest PBS Arts Off Book documentary short is about the massive changes that have occurred in the music industry in the last twenty years as a result of new technology and the Internet:

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PressPausePlay

The full-length documentary PressPausePlay is now available to watch on Vimeo. The film, which somehow manages to be simultaneously both inspiring and melancholic, looks at the effects of digital technology and the Internet on the creative economy. Worth watching if you have a spare hour (although depending on your attitude to these things it might make you smile in joyful validation or retreat to your bed for about a week to weep quietly to yourself:

PressPausePlay was made by creative agency House of Radon.

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Novum 11/11: The Making Of Cover

Yes, yet another “making of” video, but before you roll your eyes and click away, take a moment to watch this one. It shows the cover design for the latest issue of German graphic design magazine Novum. Designed by Paperlux, the tactile cover bends and folds in small triangles. I don’t know how it would work with a book cover (and I’m not sure I want to), but it’s pretty neat all the same:

(via Graphic Exchange)

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J.J. Abrams | Fresh Air

One last miscellaneous post before the weekend…

Filmmaker J.J. Abrams  talks about his new movie Super 8 and, perhaps most interestingly, his storytelling process with Terry Gross for NPR’s Fresh Air:

In a movie like “The Graduate,” Ben and Elaine had their first real date and they’re, you know, sitting at a restaurant eating in his convertible car and people are being very loud and they put the top up. And they’re having this conversation and you can’t hear it, but you’re watching it. So you get to sort of, you know, fill in the blanks and I think there is a sort of – almost a reflexive reaction that we have to fill the blanks in when there’s something of some substance and pieces are missing. You sort of fill it in.

I think there’s something about the unseen and the unknown that has real value in moments. But I do think that, you know, you can’t apply a magic box approach to everything. And if you go to see a movie or if you watch a show, you better have something of substance that you’re building to. The whole thing in itself can’t be a magic box.

NPR FRESH AIR: J.J. Abrams: The ‘Super’ Career Of A Movie-Crazed Kid

The full transcript is here.

(via The Cultural Gutter)

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Evgeny Morozov: The Internet in Society

In this RSA Animate video, Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, takes a critical look at the role of the internet in global politics:

(via Kirstin Butler)

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Illustrating Influence

As part of a series of interviews on WNYC about Brooke Gladstone’s new book The Influencing Machine, illustrator Josh Neufeld talks about working on the project with Brian Lehrer:

Also in this segment, Gladstone discusses science fiction and political bias in the media.

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Under the Influence

Here’s the neat animated short for the new nonfiction comic book The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, co-host of NPR’s weekly radio show On the Media, and illustrated by Josh Neufeld:

The book apparently looks at the history of the media and argues against the idea that media is external force outside of our control.

The Influencing Machine is published by W.W. Norton.

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Making Businessweek

Here’s a neat (if slightly irreverent) time-lapse video showing Businessweek magazine being put together over the course of a week:

And Bonus points to the @bizweeksgraphics team for using French Disko by Stereolab as the soundtrack.

(via Kottke)

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Mad Women | The Age of Persuasion

Terry O’Reilly’s radio show Age of Persuasion is always a fascinating half-hour of social history regardless of whether you are interested in advertising or not.

In this recent episode, O’Reilly looks at the great women of the advertising world, including the first advertising woman ever, the woman who created the first images of wives as “Happy Homemakers”, the woman who revolutionized the retail business, and the female creative director who inspired the “I Love New York” campaign.

 

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Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

James Fallows, veteran journalist and author of Breaking the News, has a lengthy article in The Atlantic on Gawker and the effect of digital media on journalism:

One by one, the buffers between what people want and what the media can afford to deliver have been stripped away. Broadcast TV was deregulated, and cable and satellite TV arose in a wholly post-regulation era. As newspapers fell during the rise of the Internet, and fell faster because of the 2008 recession, the regional papers fell hardest. The survivors, from The New York Times to the National Enquirer, will be what British newspapers have long been: nationwide in distribution, and differentiated by politics and class. The destruction of the “bundled” business model for newspapers, which allowed ads in the Auto section to underwrite a bureau in Baghdad; the rise of increasingly targeted and niche-ified information sources and advertising vehicles; and the consequent pressure on almost any mass offering except for sports—all of these are steps toward a perfected market for information of all sorts, including news. With each passing month, people can get more of what they want and less of what someone else thinks they should have.

Every news organization recognizes this shift… The Atlantic is now profitable in part because traffic on our Web site is so strong. Everyone involved in the site understands the tricks and trade-offs that can increase clicks and raise the chances of a breakout “viral” Web success. Kittens, slide shows, videos, Sarah Palin—these are a few. For us and for other publications, they are complications. For Gawker, they’re all that is.

According to Fallows, however, the disruption is also creating new, positive opportunities:

Economic history is working against “legacy” news organizations like the BBC, The New York Times, NPR, and most magazines you could name. But historical forces don’t play out on a set schedule, and can be delayed for a very long time. Economic history is also working against museums, small private colleges, and the farm-dappled French countryside, but none of them has to disappear next week. Even as it necessarily evolves, our news system will be better the longer it includes institutions whose culture and ambitions reach back to the pre-Gawker era, and it would be harder and costlier to try to re-create them after they have failed than to keep them on life support until their owners find a way to fit their values and standards into the imperatives of the new systems.

But the new culture also creates positive opportunities—as, it’s worth saying again, every previous disruption has… At no stage in the evolution of our press could anyone be sure which approaches would support life, and which would flicker out. Through my own career I have seen enough publications and programs start—and succeed, and fail—to know how hard it is to foresee their course in advance. Therefore I am biased in favor of almost any new project, since it might prove to be the next New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, NPR, or Wired that helps us understand our world.

If you are interested in journalism and news media, the whole article is definitely worth your time.

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Hitchcock and the History of Movie Trailers

If you are still stewing over last night’s lacklustre Oscars (or even if your not), take a listen to Terry O’Reilly’s entertaining history of movie trailers for The Age of Persuasion. He kicks it off with this genius trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:

And, for it’s worth, movie trailers were originally created to get people OUT of theatres, not into them. Brilliant.

Listen to The Age of Persuasion podcast:

CBC RADIO: AOP GOES TO THE MOVIES

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