Author Archives: Kevin M. Lerner
What’s an article about newspapers dying without anything new to say?
I finally read Michael Sokolove’s Times Magazine article about the impending death of the Inky and the Daily News in Philadelphia. And it made me wonder: if I feel like I’ve read everything in this article at least a dozen times before, does it mean: I’ve become an expert in the dying media, or… This […]
Journalism and baseball: stats and stories
Mark Buehrle of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game last week, and it strikes me (pun mostly intended) that the perfect game is the perfect convergence of two of the ways that you can understand and enjoy baseball (for those who do so): statistics and stories. It’s also a good way to understand […]
Magazines and their Web sites
FishbowlNY reported yesterday that Conde Nast will be restructuring its men.style.com site, which is the online home of both Details and GQ magazines (and once, the late Men’s Vogue). This is probably good news for the world of magazine Web sites, but why did it take until 2009 for a major magazine company to get […]
Media and mediation
I had a brief exchange on Twitter last night with Mark Hamilton (@gmarkham) that began with my query: Can a medium be a medium if it’s not mediated? Is Twitter a medium? Should we theorize a difference between mediated and unmediated media? My thought was that we should keep in mind a clear difference between […]
My personal movie critic
I tweeted a few weeks ago about the New York Observer firing my favorite movie critic, Andrew Sarris, and a week ago, the NY Times ran an article calling him a “survivor of film criticism’s heroic age.” But I hardly care about Sarris championing auteur theory or about his rivalry with Pauline Kael (even though […]
Similar thoughts from Clay Shirky, who is smarter than I am
I had this article by Clay Shirky up in my browser while writing that last post, but hadn’t yet read it. I think it touches on some of the same idea of “value” as my previous post, though Shirky calls it “leverage.”
"The View from Nowhere," intellectual property, and something called "value"
I hate to cite Mediaite, both because I dislike the word, and also because it’s de rigeur these days to either criticize or mock Dan Abrams and his site. But here goes. This story exemplifies something I started thinking about last night while listening to Jeff Jarvis’s Media Talk USA. In the Mediaite story, Rachel […]
A more reasoned look at j-schools
C.W. Anderson posted a version of a talk he gave recently on the future of j-schools. While I don’t necessarily agree with every point, this is a person I could have a reasonable discussion with–unlike the boobery of the kill-j-school-now crowd. A brief excerpt of his argument: A paradox of the current media moment is […]
Two web comments about J-schools (one an editor’s choice!)
I haven’t been blogging much on my own blog, but in the last few months, I’ve come across two articles/blog posts on other sites that got my dander up enough for me to comment. Herewith, those two responses. First one was a response to an article on New York Magazine’s Daily Intel site. The article, […]
This article has never appeared in print
The NY Times has started, in the last week or so, to note when an article on nytimes.com has appeared in print. It gives the date, the section, and the page number. I don’t know what prompted this change, or what good it does, unless you’re trying to put together a bibliography for an academic […]
Press Criticism 