LOREN STEFFY: COVERING “THE TSUNAMI OF DEBT”
http://blogs.chron.com/lorensteffy/2006/06/the_tsunami_of.html

BROADCASTERS IN SERVICE TO AMERICA?

The Benton Foundation reported that last night the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) hosted the Service to America Awards Celebration. During the event, broadcasters announced that they deliver billions of dollars in community service. What they didn’t talk about is the quality of local news:

•The Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that Local TV news remains enormously profitable, generating pre-tax profit margins of 40-50% for many stations. However, stations are not investing in their product as audiences shrink. Instead, thin staffs are asked to produce more news shows and repurpose content online and for local radio.

• Roughly half of the local TV news hole not devoted to weather, traffic and sports is devoted to crime and accidents. 30% of morning news shows are devoted to weather and traffic.

• Stories about local institutions, government, infrastructure, education, etc are usually relegated to brief anchor reads in the middle of newscasts. As more stories are delivered as anchor reads, there is less time for analysis and opinion. The report says, “Local TV news is evolving toward more of a town crier approach, with little need or room for opinion, but also with less depth.”

MSNBC: FROM ABRAMS REPORT TO ABRAMS IN CHARGE

MSNBC Names Abrams General Manager

MSNBC named nine-year on-air veteran Dan Abrams as general manager the No. 3 ranked cable-news network. He replaces Rick Kaplan in the top job.

Via EJC: “Google researchers propose TV eavesdropping”

Google research scientists want your computer to watch television with you so it can deliver personalised internet content at the same time. In their paper Google researchers Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja propose using ambient-audio identification technology to capture TV sound with a laptop PC to identify the show that is the source of the sound and to use that information to immediately return personalised internet content to the PC. The scheme is described as “mass personalization.”

With such a system, Google could extend its online dominance into television, and presumably radio, by offering advertisers unparalleled insight into the mass media audience…”

http://www.merit.unu.edu/i&tweekly/index.php - Information Week via Merit-UNU

Media Guardian: PRESS FREEDOM UNDER ATTACK

“The offices of Zimbabwe’s Voice of the People (VOP) radio station have been destroyed by a fire bomb, its reporters have been beaten and jailed, its broadcasts jammed, and now its directors face government charges that could see them jailed. Yet all involved in this plucky shortwave station remain committed to continuing their broadcasts of independent reports into Zimbabwe. The station’s perseverance against the media repression of President Robert Mugabe’s government has won VOP the One World Media special award in London last week”

SUPER RICH MEDIA MOGUL DIES

(Reuters) - Canadian newspaper tycoon Ken Thomson, who helped transform his father’s print empire into one of the world’s biggest electronic publishers, has died. (He was 82, and his now Stamford Ct based empire was global.)

Thomson was Canada’s richest man and the ninth wealthiest in the world, according to Forbes magazine.”

FREE ALJAZEERA’S SAMI AL-HAJ

There has been a flurry of stories about three men who died at Guantanamo but what about the men still incarcerated there:

Reporters Without Borders yesterday reiterated its condemnation of the arbitrary detention of Sudanese assistant cameraman Sami Al-Haj of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera, who on Monday completed his fourth year in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

FOX NEWS ASKS:

Will Zarqawi’s death refocus media attention on the War on terror
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,199110,00.html