Media Trends

“It’s never too late to go straight,” said David Munns, vice chairman of the music giant EMI Group, about Shawn Fanning.

from The New York Times: The United Church of Christ, one of the nation’s most liberal Christian denominations, accused CBS and NBC yesterday of rejecting a commercial it had produced about religious tolerance, which included an implication that other denominations did not welcome gays, because the networks feared hostile reactions from conservative political and religious […]

from New York Daily News: “Universal Music Group and cable provider EchoStar are making music together. In a first for a major record label, Universal Music is in talks with the satellite giant to start a music channel, sources told the Daily News. The yet unnamed MTV-challenger is set to launch early next year on […]

from Forbes: The number of kids armed with cell phones is surprisingly high. By the end of this year, half of all children between the age of 11 or 17 will have their own phone, according to the Yankee Group. They’re profitable consumers, too: Kids use more minutes on their cell plans and spend freely […]

Novelist Daniel Akst writing in The New York Times ponders the future of novel writing, given emerging prose-generating technology like Brutus.1–a program developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M. Hard as it is to imagine, another competing program, StoryBook, is capable of “end-to-end […]

from New York Times: The average circulation of the nation’s newspapers fell in the six months ended in September, as new federal restrictions on telemarketing and a more conservative approach by some publications to counting paid readership put further pressure on an already struggling industry. The losses were widespread, with two-thirds of papers reporting flat […]