August 2009 Archives

The last time I saw Ted Kennedy he was, in Tom Wolfe's phrase, "A man in full." It was Labor Day, 2007, on Cape Cod, and he was singing and laughing hugely through one of those parody songs that folks compose for friends' birthdays. He was great. He lit up the place.

He was free at last, I thought.

Award-winning editor Kit Rachlis has been appointed a 2009-2010 Senior Fellow of the USC Annenberg School for Communication’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP). As a Senior Fellow, he will help lead a series of discussions and projects in the area of “Arts, Politics & Society.”

Join Geoffrey Cowan, USC University Professor and director of the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy for an open forum with Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Topics include new models for news, economic literacy and entrepreneurship skills needed in the journalism profession, and the role of media in a democracy with a focus on coverage of the debate over health care reform. This forum is part of a series planned in conjunction with Dean Wilson’s Economic Literacy and Entrepreneurship (ELE) initiative. Lunch will be served. RSVP requested. To RSVP, write commlead@usc.edu.

BOSTON -- Watch that space: YouTube video news is here, tailored just for you, featuring news of your microlocal neighborhood, just for you.

If you haven’t seen it, YouTube News Near You is an automated microlocal news service, with software detecting a your location and matching it with video news stories from that neighborhood. Turn on, tune in, and drop out of the six o’clock local TV news.

So far the story selection is pretty limited. Think of YouTube's new local news service as 2009’s version of the “Camel News Caravan,” NBC’s 15-minute nightly newscast of the early 1950’s, hop scotching your neighborhood for headlines. But five decades ago, John Cameron Swayze soon gave way to Huntley and Brinkley, and modern NBC television news was born. YouTube news could evolve really quickly in the next few years, or the next few months, especially as YouTube signs up local television and newspaper newsrooms around the country as video-providing partners.