THE ‘GIVING’ PART of Thanksgiving is, inevitably, what the charity industry’s media experts focus on every November. Outsiders are sometimes astonished to learn that it’s some 40% of all charitable giving that happens at the end of the year. Continue reading “Post-holiday Persuasion to Get Us Giving” »
Publishing’s Renewed Holiday Push For Memoirs, an Enduring Genre
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY has now fully readied itself for the holidays, we can be sure. And its offerings include — as they have every season since the late, great Frank McCourt‘s Angela’s Ashes and the great, and still-very-much-with-us, Mary Karr‘s The Liar’s Club ramped up our national craze for memoirs some 16 years ago — yet more aggressively-promoted slices of first-person recollection. Continue reading “Publishing’s Renewed Holiday Push For Memoirs, an Enduring Genre” »
Bloomberg’s Media Plan for Evicting “Occupy” — and His Failure
THERE WAS A SIMPLE trick, as ever, to the timing.
New York City’s police sweep through the Occupy Wall Street encampment, cannily timed for 1:00am, did successfully catch much of the media on their back foot (or even perhaps asleep). Continue reading “Bloomberg’s Media Plan for Evicting “Occupy” — and His Failure” »
Crime Stories – Direct From The Coal Face
TO AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE is one mission of the media, as famously defined by the now almost anonymous columnist Finley Peter Dunne, while he paired that duty with comforting the afflicted. And we should also add, of course, telling truth to power.
Some in the media have been rightly exercised by a decision taken this week among the comfortable and powerful. Shareholders of the two companies involved voted overwhelmingly to agree. The infamous coal-mining firm Massey Energy will now be taken over by Alpha Natural Resources, for $7.1 billion. Continue reading “Crime Stories – Direct From The Coal Face” »
Image-Making: At a Deadly Price
WELL AT LEAST GAZA IS NOW on the media front-burner again. That was the conflicted reaction, simultaneously excited and horrified, of quite a few assignment-hardened Middle East observers that I maintain contact with.
Israeli Defense Force naval commandos rappelling onto the biggest of the six boats intent on ostentatiously “busting” Israel’s blockade against the Gaza Strip certainly changed the international attention-level for these periodic and symbolic maritime adventures (There have been nine of them, in fact, since August 2008.) Continue reading “Image-Making: At a Deadly Price” »
