Category: Media (Page 5 of 8)

Via Jason Kottke, an analysis of the evolving design of The Economist (the print version).

It’s worth noting that the physical redesign carried some subtle but not insignificant touches from Economist.com into print. (The Web site relaunched in fall 2000, the color version in spring 2001). Not that it was admitted as such, of course, but for an example, take a look at the blue boxes, which debuted online first.

I do love Ecotype and always wished we could use it online. The Economist.com logo, which was designed before the Ecotype revision, used a bolded version of a display typeface that more closely resembles Ecotype than its predecessor.

The use of Officina as a headline font, on the other hand, is too proletarian for my tastes relative to the rest of The Economist; the font is everywhere these days and makes the headlines feel generic. A more customized version would have been more appropriate. It is better than the old Frutiger typeface, though.

While I worked for Economist.com I went from having a passing interest to being a devout reader, and now that I don’t work there anymore, I never miss an issue. I don’t doubt that the current magazine design has something to do with my continued enjoyment.

Metacritic gives The Passion of the Christ a fairly favorable once-over, starting with Roger Ebert’s insistent (if properly tempered) applause for the film’s accomplishment. I, however, far prefer the pull quotes on Rotten Tomatoes.

—”The Passion of the Christ is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it.”

—”It’s as if Gibson is measuring God’s love by the amount of blood he shows on the screen.”

Even Ebert notes that the film deserves an NC-17 for violence and the MPAA wimped out.

Of course, as with any movie, the book is much better.

The best part about Tori Spelling’s wedding registries availability online is not the snarky gossip commentary but the unblinking message board posts from all of Donna’s old “90210” buddies. Brenda Walsh: “Brenda Walsh: ‘Donna, You stole my boyfriend again!'”

I love the New York Times. Been reading it since high school, get it at home, peruse every single section almost every day. I’m enough of a newsie to appreciate much of the paper, and enough of a liberal to agree with most of its hard-line liberal viewpoints.

Despite this, I’m noticing the Times’s leftist slant more and more in articles that should be even-handedly reporting the news. I want unbiased information, and the Times won’t give it to me.

To wit: today’s coverage of the Ohio same-sex marriage ban. The Times article on the subject got me all riled up this morning, and I wanted to post a link to some news coverage with my commentary. But when I read the same news from a different source, I found my anger lessened, to the point where I almost lost interest in the subject.

This is all due to the New York Times’s hard-line stance on liberal subjects. I’m pro-gay rights, I think Ohio is stupid to ban same-sex unions, and I don’t like the maneuver. But I don’t want my newspaper screaming fire and brimstone about a doomsday decision, especially when other news sources are unafraid to report just the news. I feel like I’ve been lobbied, and I don’t like it.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the Times article:

“The Ohio Legislature gave final approval on Tuesday to one of the most sweeping bans on same-sex unions in the country, galvanized by court rulings in Canada and Massachusetts that have declared gay marriage to be legal.

“The Ohio measure, which also would bar state agencies from giving benefits to both gay and heterosexual domestic partners, would make Ohio the 38th state to prohibit the recognition of same-sex unions. Gov. Bob Taft, a Republican, planned to sign it in the coming week, his office said.

“In approving the measure, the Republican-controlled Legislature rejected concerns raised by some of the state’s largest corporations and colleges, including Ohio State University, that the ban would hurt the state’s business image and undermine their ability to recruit skilled workers.”

For comparison, here is the beginning of the Associated Press piece on the same subject:

“Gov. Bob Taft is expected to sign one of the country’s strictest same-sex marriage bans following Tuesday’s House approval of minor changes to the bill.

“The House voted 72-22 in favor of accepting the Senate changes and sending the legislation to Taft.

“The bill stipulates that same-sex marriages would be “against the strong public policy of the state.”

“The bill also prohibits state employees from getting marital benefits spelled out in state law for their unmarried partners, whether homosexual or heterosexual.

“Thirty-seven states have passed laws recognizing only marriages between men and women. Gay rights groups consider Ohio’s legislation particularly restrictive because of the benefits ban.”

The Times piece doesn’t look too inflammatory until it is compared to the less biased AP feed. Compare “bar state agencies from giving benefits” to “prohibits state employees from getting marital benefits spelled out in state law.” Read the two articles in full to see the difference.

What does this say about the Times? Is it a less reliable news source because of its political leanings? Not necessarily, but it reinforces the notion that one should look to more than one news outlet before forming an opinion on a subject. It’s a shame, really, that the Times isn’t a clean forum for such discourse.

Similarly: Emptyage’s observations of guilty-pleasure sensationalism at Fox News.

“I think when the movie died in the box office, I remember feeling somewhat relieved. Yes, I played this bizarre dork, but at least no one will ever see it.” —actor Dan Schneider, who couldn’t have been more wrong, recollecting filming “Better Off Dead”

Dale Peck gets five splashy pages in the Sunday Times Magazine this week. Great photos, too.

You’re curious, right? Aghast yet mesmerized. You want to read more. If so, Dale Peck has done his job. … The question arises: Why should we care what Dale Peck thinks? The short answer is, He’s interesting.

The New York Times’ front page headlines looked different to me this morning, and sure enough, they are.

In place of a miscellany of headline typefaces that have accumulated in its columns over the last century, the newspaper is settling on a single family, Cheltenham, in roman and italic versions and various light and bold weights.

Action is being taken today in the Middle East by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front–or, as they call themselves in their signage, the MILF.

A summary article on the NASA explorer Galileo, Magnifico! is a perfect example of why The Economist is the most insightful, wise, witty and acerbic publication in the English language.

After a shaky start, the craft has been one of NASA’s most successful enterprises, and an example of what America’s space agency does best—pushing back the frontiers of understanding, both literally and metaphorically, rather than keeping underemployed astronauts in low Earth orbit, and occasionally killing them.

Oh, and the sub-headings in the article are all lines from “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

A few years ago I won a TiVo, then sold it on eBay when I decided I didn’t want to pay the monthly fee. I wasn’t enough of a television wacher at the time to justify it.

Three years on, my television-commercial-producing wife and I watch a fair amount of television, and a DVR would make our lives much easier. But we weren’t about to pay $300 for a new TiVo box. Amy spent a decent amount of time ribbing me for selling something so good without considering the long-term ramifications.

The silver lining in our TiVo-less apartment is that Time Warner Cable is a remarkably savvy company, and as a result, we got our first DVR cable box Saturday. The future is now: the “clicker” has now evolved into a programmable system with a 50-gig hard drive and one-click recording.

I spent the weekend appreciating the novelty of the DVR system, hitting the instant-replay button countless times on George Steinbrenner saying “Oh!” in his latest Visa ad. But the true promises of the system were exposed Sunday night, when Amy got called to work and missed the “Sex and the City” finale.

It occurred to me that at last I could set the TV to tape a show without any aggravation (after years of not learning how to program my VCR). And indeed, it couldn’t have been easier:

1. Hit the Guide button like I do every day to check the listings.
2. Zoom to the listing for “Sex and the City”—by station, time, title, or theme—and press the Select button as though I were jumping to view it right now.
3. Press the Select button again on “record this show.” Done.

I watched the show live (even paused it at one point), and the missus watched it on the DVR when she came home. Bingo bango.

I’m sure this sounds like basic stuff to anyone comfortable with a VCR, but the quantum leap here is in the simplification. For once, technology actually makes a process shorter. No more seeking out the right sub-menus to enter start date, end date, time, and channel. No more setting the digital cable box to jump to the channel that matches the VCR. No more looking for the right videotape wound to the right spot. Terrific.

The DVR itself creates some trade-offs with the cable service. The menus and channel switching are slow, and TWC has a new menu font that’s not as easy to read as the old system’s. The remote is huge.

The additional features, though, far outweigh the drawbacks. In addition to its DVR functionality, the box has two tuners, so it’s an automatic watch-and-record box. The cable box has picture-in-picture. The sound and picture quality seem a little more crisp, too; I remember griping about the jpeg-style pixelization of my first digital cable box.

The DVR cable box costs $7 more than a standard digital cable system. After two days, I can already tell that it’s money well spent.