Category Archives: Cool new stuff

Tiny Spark

Many of the world’s biggest problems seem insurmountable. That’s why it’s wonderful to learn of a solution that may alleviate one of them. News organizations — always being pestered to report “some good news for a change” — love stories … Continue reading

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Person Place Thing

Comes the other day a dispatch from our old friend Randy Cohen, the award-winning writer, humorist, and erstwhile columnist for the New York Times, for which rag he penned twelve years worth of The Ethicist. When last seen, Randy was … Continue reading

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To salvage history

The main protagonist of William Kennedy’s intricate new novel, Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, is Daniel Quinn, who finds himself in Cuba in 1957 on the eve of revolution. Quinn lands a job reporting for the Havana Post and decides … Continue reading

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The BBC does it again

Programme description: Unease on the world markets, rumours that a key anti-Taliban leader had been assassinated and New York buzzing with its primary elections for city mayor, September 10th 2001 seems like a relatively normal news day. But looked at … Continue reading

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More on Ambience

Last March I posted a story by NPR’s Robert Smith on the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York. Robert had made a bet with another reporter to see who could get more sound into a :45 spot. (He won.) … Continue reading

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Robert Smith deconstructed

Last week’s class tour of NPR’s New York bureau was an excellent behind-the-scenes glimpse into a network news operation. Brian McCabe showed us around, Manoli Wetherell gave us a look at Tech Center A, and Robert Smith told us how … Continue reading

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Radio off the page, on the dial

Fans of the New York Times Sunday Magazine column, The Ethicist, may have been as unhappy as I was to discover it’s under new management. For the past twelve years Randy Cohen had been answering reader questions on moral correctness … Continue reading

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Radio + Internet = ?

If you’re an IT person or (more likely) someone who just enjoys collecting acronyms, then you may already know that DNS stands for domain name system. It’s an important part of the Internet, the part that translates the web addresses … Continue reading

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Posted in Cool new stuff, Technology | 1 Comment

Tuning into BBC podcasts

Radio futurologist and blogger James Cridland has a link to a podcast tuner, courtesy of the BBC World Service’s Future Media department. The idea is that you tune the “radio dial” using your left/right arrows until you catch a snippet of a … Continue reading

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Prof. Sree Sreenivasan on Morning Edition

He’s talking about recent developments in the media landscape. Check it out: Big Announcements Keep ‘New Media’ Hopping

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