As America approaches the holiday season, its mass media often get onto a seasonal kick of reporting the fate, in that somewhat sanctimonious phrase, of “those less fortunate than ourselves” at home and abroad.     Continue reading “Time to Retire Media’s Hackneyed Label: “Natural Disaster”” »

THE NOVEMBER ISSUE OF VANITY FAIR carries an in-depth and mostly laudatory portrait of that legendary giant of an American writer, Tom Wolfe.    Continue reading “Tom Wolfe: Bringing Us the Real Marshall McLuhan” »

IT’S SAD AND DISPIRITING that a vital message is currently failing to fully get through – the message that healthy people can really easily help other, very sick people.

The healthy ones walk around with (almost universally) two kidneys, and they only need one. Donating a kidney while you’re still alive can readily save the life of someone who needs a transplant … and yet the national rate of ‘Live Donations’, as they’re called, falls desperately below what’s needed. Every year four thousand people waiting for a new kidney die without getting one.    Continue reading “Tight Audience-Targeting to Raise Kidney Awareness” »

JUST ABOUT EVERY COMMUNICATOR has to make a choice – “am I talking to a broad mass audience, or a specialized sector?” Some of us make it as an overall career choice – others as a tactical option when particular issues provoke us into highlighting them. Continue reading “Confronting Cancer, the Niche Media Market” »

I’M A SCOT BY ORIGIN. So in matters of culture the word “fringe” can mean only one thing. That would be Edinburgh, evoking in part the annual international festival there, but even more its huge and much livelier attendant program of fringe events.

In fact, the attendant has now vastly overtaken the one-time principal player, and it is Edinburgh’s Fringe that qualifies these days as the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,000 shows taking place over three weeks.   Continue reading “Pain and Laughs in a New York ‘Metafictional’ Offering” »