An unexpected contrast in media modes -- new and old -- came through dramatically this week.

On one hand -- stark, direct and unmediated -- there was the worldwide transmission, via the Bambuser.com website and its user named "baba-omer," of raw images and sounds (most effectively those...

Possibly the best word for it, and it's meant approvingly, is 'farrago.'

New York's Metropolitan Opera is currently wowing much of its faithful audience and, as hoped, enticing a newer public (which looked to me quite a younger one) with its decidedly multimedia -- and multi-sourced -- confection, The Enchanted...

This weekend brings a piquant moment for me -- a telling anniversary in the chronicles of information-management, as well as a horrifying memory in itself. At 4.10 p.m. Sunday afternoon, exactly 40 years ago, I witnessed soldiers shooting innocent civilians dead, an atrocity that officialdom instantly lied about -- and...

They lined up in familiar opposing ranks. On one side Rupert Murdoch, sounding crustier than ever now that he tweets... the Motion Picture Association of America (which of course includes Murdoch's 20th Century Fox studios)... and other traditional media conglomerates like NBC Universal.

On the...

Thank you, Digital Revolution. You've given us many benefits, to be sure, but now this. We are living, apparently, at the mercy of people with the manners of a chimpanzee and the tongue of a Sicilian fishwife.

Such is the assessment of Misha Glenny, a British compatriot and colleague of...

It was guaranteed to get full media attention, President Barack Obama's unprecedented trip to the Pentagon to personally announce the U.S. military's mid-term future.

Defense Department correspondents and commentators did not have to read between the lines much to pass on the twin message that our armed forces will...

The year ahead offers a few salient peaks of interest for the media consumer. But I'm not talking of the U.S. presidential election, which already has a lackluster feel.

For all the media bloviators' efforts to make it seem exciting, Iowa's Republicans unenthusiastically favored Mitt Romney by a slim...

This media year, which is closing with courtroom cameras covering Egypt's deposed President Hosni Mubarak on trial for killing his own citizens in the streets, opened with those streets astir with protests.

A lot certainly can happen in a year, and 2011 has been an especially vintage year for news,...

What is the most mendacious medium? We get an answer, in early word of a study to be published in next March's issue of the Journal of Business Ethics.

Did you know there was a Journal of Business Ethics? Well, there is -- published by the long-established publishing house...

This declining year has been the centennial of Marshall McLuhan's birth -- the man who was, if not the father or godfather, then at least our leading prophet of media-driven political and social change.

Oddly, or then again perhaps not, mainstream media sources have not done much to mark...

2011 looks like yet another bad year for journalists. Bad once again in the most down-to-earth terms -- getting killed.

One change this year, though, is in that grim league-table of countries revealing which ones are the worst for a journalist to work in, measured death-by-death.

America's proximate neighbor,...

Overseas capitals do serve to offer new perspectives. I was surprised during a fairly recent Paris trip to read in Le Monde its claim that Voltaire, a writer I greatly admired already, deserves the extra, and to me unexpected, accolade of "father of investigative journalism."

With the longest war in American history, and the third longest, now both in sight of ending, US media are scattered ... you might say confused and conflicted ... in assessing what happens next.

With the Bonn conference on Afghanistan's post-war recovery occupying international journalists' attention, extremists chose this week...

December's days are to dwindle down to year's-end, and I'm already into holiday time's mental excursions. They're taking me off-road a bit, into the byways of no-longer-mainstream media.

Staffers at the University of California Press have claimed over the past year or so some surprise at the success enjoyed by...

Journalists, even while generally exhibiting cynicism and world-weariness, can also be extremely sensitive. When they feel betrayed, they feel it extra-powerfully.

South Africa's media are among the most vibrant and adventurous in the world -- and if not out-and-out cynical all the time, they can without question be deeply skeptical...

Newsrooms everywhere are compiling their year-end lists. People of the year, movie of the year, gaffe of the year, all that sort of thing.

Here's my offering for story of the year, 2011. But it's hardly been noticed at all in western media -- and least of all in American...

The 'giving' part of Thanksgiving is, inevitably, what the charity industry's media experts focus on every November. Outsiders are sometimes astonished to learn that it's some 40% of all charitable giving that happens at the end of the year.

But this time many of our non-profits, especially those operating in...

The publishing industry has now fully readied itself for the holidays, we can be sure. And its offerings include -- as they have every season since the late, great Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Mary Karr's great, still-very-much-with-us The Liar's Club ramped up our national craze for memoirs some 16...

There was a simple trick, as ever, to the timing.

New York City's police sweep through the Occupy Wall Street encampment, cannily timed for 1:00 a.m., did successfully catch much of the media on their back foot (or even perhaps asleep).

Like a lot of news consumers, I first...