Killer Look at Investigative Reporting:

So I neglected to mention it but last's week's episode of On The Media is a must listen. The team from WNYC devoted the whole hour to the future of investigative reporting featuring heavyweights like Seymour Hersch and Lowell Bergman weighing in on the topic.

Now if "The Future of Investigative Reporting" leaves you cold, then stop reading. If it raises your eyebrows (or your loins), listen. Immediately.

Lewis Lapham Quarterly:

Did you know former Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham has his own quarterly magazine? I did not. Called (duh) Lapham's Quarterly, each issue has a large theme (war, money, love) and looks at it through the lens of history (speeches, poems, orations, psalms etc.). It's motto...

"Finding the present in the past, the past in the present."

At 60$ per subscription, it's on the edge of my price range but perhaps reviewing it for Magazineer will net me an issue or two. (via Your Call Radio)

Some Thoughts on Porn:

Rob Long's always entertaining radio commentary Martini Shot has this brilliant insight about pornography a few weeks ago....

Pornography is a bellweather. People in search of dirty pictures blaze a trail of technology, which people in search of less dicey things – like Chinese guys lipsynching, people putting Mentos into Diet Coke, my funny cat, here we are at Carlsbad caverns, whatever -- follow, a year or two later. So if the pornography business is always a few steps ahead of the rest of the entertainment industry -- in distribution and business model -- why not check in with it and see what's up? What's up are online revenues, to almost $3 billion. What's down are DVD sales, by at least 15 percent. What's up are individual brands -- porn stars like Jenna Jameson creating their own branded content and what's down are production costs, a consequence of the fragmented, tighter margin business. In other words, what's going on in the pornography business is what's going to be going on in the rest of the entertainment industry in two years: costs pushed down; online distribution; individual brands eclipsing studio brands, like Tom Cruise buying MGM; smaller, more decentralized production and distribution. Everything, really, that you might expect.

When (iPod) Love is Not Enough:

So when you see an article titled "iPod: I love you, you're perfect, now change", is your first instinct to self-induce an epileptic seizure? Because mine is.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the twitching wildly on the floor. I read this piece (by the often perceptive Farhad Manjoo) and was quite impressed. Posing as a review (really a sideways poking at but who's counting?) of Steven Levy's new book "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness" Farhad wings in one layered observations after another, pointing out his own biases yet maintain a rigid curiousity.

Witness:

So you come to Levy's book with justified fear that this is going to be a valentine, one whose depth of feeling threatens to turn embarrassing. There's not only the hagiographic title but also the book cover, which mimics the look of the iPod, and the flow of the text itself: In order to "spiritually link my book to its subject," Levy has written a collection of free-standing pieces, allowing every copy to have a different -- that is, "Shuffled" -- arrangement. By the time you learn this, you're quite prepared for Levy to divulge that he's also named his kids Mini and Nano, so far does his iPod lust seem to go. You want to tell him to take his Shuffle and get a room.

And on himself...

Neither of these problems frustrate the iPod-loving hordes very much, and Levy doesn't address them in his book. I suspect a more widespread issue, though, has to do with the way the iPod seems to work against listening to new music, which has become my chief complaint about the machine. Like many others in the so-called iPod generation, years of surfing the Web have reduced my attention span to not much more time than the length of a typical YouTube clip; consequently, my iPod, stocked with 4,124 songs, routinely turns me into a hyperactive freak show. If you have an iPod, I'm sure you know what I mean. You put on something that you've been wanting to listen to all day. Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" album, say. But you're three-quarters of the way through the first track, and even though you're really digging it, something about the scratchiness of Williams' voice reminds of something else entirely -- the Carter Family. And, hey, don't you have a copy of "Wildwood Flower" on here? Why, yes, you do. So you switch. But of course, putting on the Carter Family is going to remind you of Johnny Cash. And you have the feeling that you must, just this minute, play Cash's version of "In My Life" now. So you switch again. But you're a minute into Johnny and you start to wonder about the Beatles' original version of the track...

This is a great piece about a subject I could never hear about again and be delighted. Well done, Mr. Manjoo. Now please, use whatever influence you have to get Mr. Jobs on iPod: The Next Generation.

Frank and the Fraggles:

I'm sorry to have to be the one to record this but Fraggle Rock, one of the greats of 80s children's television is being developed for the big screen by, eh, Ahmet Zappa.

Third child of Frank Zappa, ex-husband of Selma Blair, author of children's book. Sure, I see it.

(via Fishbowl LA)

YouHeard about YouTube?

So Google has bought YouTube for $1.6 billon. Yes, billion. The founders had this to say about it..

Susan Mernit did a nice wrap up of the chatter.

(via Waxy.org)

Extra! Extra! Good News! Bad News!

Wired reports that while readership for print newspapers keeps dropping, online readership rose dramatically

The average number of monthly visitors to U.S. newspaper websites rose by nearly a third in the first half of 2006, a study released on Wednesday said, though print readership at some larger papers fell.

The study, released by the Newspaper Association of America, underscores the internet's importance to papers beset by falling circulation and advertising revenue in their print editions. (via Arts Journal)

Elmore Leonard 2.0:

Author Elmore Leonard, who turns 81 this fall, is both blogging and podcasting, plus cranking out a novel every 2-3 year (which he writes in longhand) and shepparding many of his old books onto film and television. His blog may be little more than a collection of press clippings, run by his indefatigable researcher Gregg Sutter (Leonard claims not to own a computer) but still, I'd like to have this kind of energy at that stage of my writing career.

Holy Mother of Homer!

A real life Simpsons intro. They said it couldn't be done. Lord, the day has come (via Waxy.org).

Spin SF:

So rumors abound that Spin magazine might move to San Francisco, a weird geographic time reversal from when Spin's arch rival Rolling Stone, split San Francisco, the city of its birth, and moved to New York in 1976. Spin's having a hard go of it and may be for sale. Hartle Media, publishers of local rag 7x7 Magazine, have expressed interest.

What's this mean for people in my line of work? Remember that Simpsons episode when the family is at a giant bookstore and Bart teases the clerks by saying "I hear there's an adjunct professor job opening." San Francisco is lousy with underemployed journalists. I'm guessing Spin already has inquiries even though they haven't advanced a single step towards California.