Perceptric Forum

Muckrakers

Chris Gilbey — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:56:10 +1000

Some call them muckrakers, others call them investigative reporters....

Nieman Reports have an issue that is devoted to the subject... got some interesting insights there...

Here is some of the essay by Stuart Watson on TV....

Appointment TV is dead; video is more vibrant than ever. Over-the-air broadcasting is shrinking; journalism is not. What does all of this add up to for a struggling local TV investigative reporter, whose work is sporadic already? What comes to mind are the words “make it relevant.” Better figure out how to tell great stories and how to sell them hard, inside and outside the newsroom. Otherwise, what is a struggling breed will be headed toward extinction.

Traditional (analog) broadcasting in the United States has less than one year to live. On February 18, 2009 broadcasters will move their signals from the analog spectrum—the channels we’ve traveled through during our lifetimes—to the digital spectrum. It’s not like your favorite department store moving from downtown to the suburban shopping mall. It’s worse. Instead it’s like all the department stores moving away at the same time. I can hear us now: “Please join us in our new location. Pleeeeeease, for the love of God, join us in our new location,” because like these stores that are competing with online entities like Amazon and discount places like Wal-Mart and Costco as they’re also relocating, local TV news will be competing with online sites like washingtonpost.com (and its local equivalent) and with YouTube and Tivo in the midst of changing its location.

Free Documentaries

Chris Gilbey — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:41:07 +1000

Here is an interesting and great resource for when there is nothing to watch on cable!

FreeDocumentaries.Org has an enormous library of material that is riveting viewing!

They say that they honour all copyright laws, although I think that they may be pushing the whole idea of "its better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission" line.

Here is the trailer for one movie that they have in the library...

Real News

Chris Gilbey — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 21:20:04 +1100

The Home Page Daily site seems to be finding a really good balance of material now. Over the last couple of days every video that I have viewed there has been tremendous.

Of course this could just mean that there is an increasing level of professionalism in the content that is being made available. One of the videos that I discovered at HPD was this one from Real News.

Hot Political Video From Australia!

Chris Gilbey — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:58:16 +1100

R For Ron...

Chris Gilbey — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 15:51:00 +1100

Ironically I was just surfing around You Tube looking to see what references there were to V For Vendetta, the movie.... And up popped this absolute gem. It seems like the Ron Paul campaign has started to get seriously viral!

Redefining Movies

Chris Gilbey — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:12:01 +1100

I went and saw "Across The Universe" this afternoon.

What an incredible movie! This movie truly redefines the possibilities of the cinema

This movie is like an acid trip. It is so visually rich... the music production is outstanding... the songs: well, we are talking here about The Beatles, so how could you go wrong.

And the message comes across loud and clear: "All You Need Is Love".

This movie made me even more enthusiastic about the work I'm doing on the book. It just makes me feel that in the 60's we actually were on the right track...

The Shock Doctrine

Chris Gilbey — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:38:26 +1000

I have just started reading the new Naomi Klein book. What a tour de force this is!

The Shock Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

We all need to wake up and realize that that news as it happens on the front page of the newspaper each day has been re-defined. Some stories happened by accident. Most stories happen on purpose. And most of the latter kind took time, research, stage-management, etc to see the light of day. This is not about conspiracy theories. This is about marketing.

Politics is marketed just like any other product. And like products, brands and businesses, some visions are massive and take a long time to pull off. I urge you to read the book.

There is also a video promo for the book at YouTube which I have embedded here...

The Chaser - Alexander Downer

Chris Gilbey — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:57:34 +1000

The latest issue of The Chaser just finished.

And wow, did they do a hatchet job on Alexander Downer!

I can not imagine that something as confrontational would ever be done in the US. In the UK perhaps during the days of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore it would have happened. But probably not these days.

They portrayed Downer as if he were having a blow job from a guy while doing an interview. Absolutely amazing piece of satire. I hand it to The Chaser for this and am hoping that someone posts a copy of this piece on YouTube soon which I will embed here if I find it.

Political Cartoons

Chris Gilbey — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 10:17:21 +1000

Tom Tomorrow does the best political cartoons!

This one is a gem.

Accelerating Meme Transfer

Chris Gilbey — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 21:05:39 +1000

I am totally into Facebook.

I think that it has the potential to change things as much as Google has done. And after all, we are now really the Google generation, aren't we? A generation that is outside of age based demography and is more about memetics. A group of people who are always on....

But Facebook is beyond this again. And if you haven't tried it, you really should. There are definitely some annoying features - like the constant barrage of new apps. And that wears thin very fast.

But some of the applications are super cool. And really add value. One of them is the Facebook bookmarklet which you can add to your Firefox browser and kind of makes blogging redundant in some respects. It enables you with one click to add a reference to a web page/story to your facebook profile, which in turn means that all your friends get to see it, and that leads them to comment.... Much more viral than a blog which requires someone to actually come and visit you and your writing.

Then there is the Blog Friends application, and the more I see of it in action, the more I like it. I think it is still relatively small in terms of its distribution across the Face at present, but this application really has some serious potential. It presents a really fast access to your friends' blogs and their friends' blogs and means that you get a kind of randomized RSS feed of content, opinion and information that is really valuable...

I have been in touch with the CEO of Brain Bakery, the UK company that developed Blog Friends, and he seems like a really smart and visionary guy. I hope he and the company do well from Blog Friends. This sort of application, if applied to conventional news feeds, could be totally awesome.

Worth joining Facebook just to experience this stuff. Facebook and applications like the ones I have mentioned are going to absolutely change the face of media over the next few years.

We are at the beginning of the golden age of accelerated meme transfer.