Movie piracy: an inside job

NY Times: Hollywood Faces Online Piracy, but It Looks Like an Inside Job.

Granger warns of magazine trends

IWantMedia has an interview with David Granger, editor in chief of Esquire. He says magazines are dividing into two camps: those that publish "substantial" stories, and those that "exist primarily with images and captions."

How four magazines decide what books you buy

Slate: How Four Magazines You've Probably Never Read Help Determine What Books You Buy. A "motley" group of underpaid, anonymous reviewers at Publishers Weekly and other trades wield significant influence in the book industry, writes Adelle Waldman.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Million TiVo March

Variety: TiVo, the reigning brand leader in the nascent digital video recording market, announced plans Friday to cut its retail price to just under $200 in an effort to spur holiday sales and stave off an inevitable price war with cable operators starting to roll out their own cut-price DVR combo boxes.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

A sad day in Texas

This is a sad, sad day in Texas, as the national GOP and Tom DeLay try for their biggest power grab since -- well, since Tom DeLay forced the House to impeach Bill Clinton. If the Dems think the courts will step in to stop this obscene redistricting, they're dreaming.

CNET, Bruce Sterling launching blogs

PaidContent.org: CNET's News.com includes some new weblogs in the site's new redesign, including six topical blogs. Here's my friend Jai Singh on some of the new changes over there. Also, Fast Company recently launched a blog. And Wired magazine will be launching some blogs at this url -- http://blog.wired.com/ (not active yet) -- including one by Bruce Sterling. Fantastic.

Reporter + Photo Phone = Moblog

Speaking of E-Media Tidbits, Steve Outing has this today:

... Louie Villalobos of The Sun in Yuma, Arizona, has been writing and photographing for a "moblog" when he is out and about covering a portion of the Arizona border with Mexico. Called The Border: Where Two Worlds Meet, the blog includes photos taken by Villalobos along with a brief description for each. The items most often cover drug smuggling and immigration news. Recent photos have included a truckload of marijuana seized by federal agents, and a citizens group guarding a group of illegal immigrants. ...

PressThink blog from Jay Rosen

Just learned from E-Media Tidbits, via Jeff Jarvis, that Jay Rosen, chair of the journalism department at New York University, has begun a weblog called PressThink. Good stuff, and I've added Jay to my blogroll.

Court delays California recall election

Breaking news from the Washington Post:

LOS ANGELES -- Three weeks before voters are scheduled to go to the polls in California's historic recall, a federal appeals court today postponed the Oct. 7 election, ruling that the use of older punch-card ballot machines would disenfranchise poor and minority voters.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the American Civil Liberties Union that the use of punch cards in six urban counties would subject voters there to a greater likelihood that the ballots would be misread or discarded ...

Sorry, but I don't buy it. The same system was in place nine months ago when Gray Davis was re-elected. All of a sudden, it's too primitive to be used in a recall vote? (I've got my punch-card absentee ballot sitting on my dining room table.) This is heavy-handed judicial interference. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court's heavy-handed involvement in the 2000 presidential election means the justices may not be able to weigh in on this case on its merits, due to the political repercussions.

It's a sad day when I'm basically in agreement with Rush Limbaugh: Liberals: Minority Voters Too Stupid to Vote.

AP story via SF Chron: Californians react with relief, frustration to recall ruling.

AP story via San Jose Merc: California Recall and the Supreme Court.

E&P looks to enhance web presence

Boy, talk about spinning the news: Editor & Publisher says it will "expand its print coverage" by converting from a weekly to a monthly publication come January. The 120-year-old magazine also says it will "significantly enhance" its website. We'll see.

Fox News: Journalists need to take sides

From Romenesko today:

USA Today: CNN war correspondent Christiane Amanpour said on Tina Brown's CNBC show last week: "I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled (its Iraq war coverage). I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."

Fox News' response: "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

Here's a great indication of the mindset over at Fox News. You're either a foot soldier for Bush or a terrorist sympathizer. No room for anything in between -- like honest journalism.

Chronicling an administration's distortions

The folks at MoveOn.org have launched a public education site called Misleader: a daily chronicle of bush administration distortion. They'll also be mailing out a daily Mis-Lead for anyone who signs up. Excerpt:

Sixteen untrue words in the President's State of the Union message helped push American into war with Iraq. It's now clear that the remaining 5397 words in the speech were just as misleading. For example:

On the Economy:
"We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and other generations."

The truth: Factoring in the cost of reconstruction in Iraq and other laws that are set to be enacted, the federal budget deficit is close to $5 trillion over the next 10 years. The President's latest request to make his tax cuts permanent would add another nearly $1.6 trillion to the federal debt through 2013. That's $41,300 for every man, woman and child.

And they've just run this full-page ad in the New York Times (pdf). Excerpt:

ON EDUCATION: George Bush: "[W]e achieved historic education reform -- which must now be carried out in every school and in every classroom."

The Truth: Bush cut $8 billion from the promised funds for education.

Bravo. Given the mainstream media's overall failure to chronicle this administration's ongoing and deepening pattern of deception, leave it to a grassroots Internet organization to do the heavy lifting.

Arnold leads in media coverage

Here's a snapshot of the most popular candidates in the California recall election from a media perspective. For the third week in a row, Arnold Schwarzenegger takes the lead in the race for coverage.

Factiva, Dow Jones and Reuters are tracking the media's coverage of recall candidates. Here's how the most high-profile candidates fared from a print media perspective during the week ending Sept. 14, 2003:

Arnold Schwarzenegger: 584 media mentions
Gray Davis: 568 media mentions
Cruz Bustamante: 393 media mentions
Tom McClintock: 268 media mentions
Arianna Huffington: 111 media mentions
Gary Coleman: 24 media mentions
Larry Flynt: 24 media mentions
Mary "Mary Carey" Cook: 22 media mentions
Leo Gallagher: 0 media mentions

Sorry, Leo.

CSS funkiness -- any solutions?

I took a couple of hours during the weekend to tweak some of my blog's CSS. I use MovableType, and yet as much as I like it, I find some of the templates, such as the Stylesheet template, a bit befuddling.

Somewhere along the line, some of the archived pages have begun rendering in a funky way in some browsers, and I can't figure out what's wrong.

Safari is still getting its legs, but on my Apple Powerbook (Titanium G4), running OS X 10.2.6 and Safari 1.0, the Amusing and Blogging categories render with a major glitch: the right nav is not at the right at all but below the main blog. The same thing happens with the May 2003 archives -- but not the other monthly archives.

On my Powerbook running IE 5.5, it's a smaller problem: the right nav bumps up against the main blog box (for eg, the word BLOGOSPHERE straddles the box, when it should be 10 to 20 pixels farther right).

I haven't checked the blog in Mozilla, Netscape or Opera. I suppose one has to live with these sorts of things when relying heavily on the new flavor of CSS. But if anyone has an idea of what might fix this, please drop me a line. (I previously wrote about this problem back in May.) I can post the source code, if that would help.