Every time that I step into a newsroom, I remember what it was like to live off of that electricity in the air when I was at NBC News.  It was the human buzz of stressful inquiry as events incessantly unfolded before our journalistic eyes.

We’ve come to believe that this buzz is much diminished in the waning days of traditional journalism.  But I’m seeing some signs of life as I travel around the northeast this month.

Local TV (Americans’ number source for news) has long been criticized for considering their web presence as an afterthought.  At Washington D.C.’s Newschannel 8, they’re launching a new website in June that will merge their cable news channel with their local station.  And rather than having TV feed the web, the station manager, Bill Lord, told me that the web will feed TV.  It will be text plus video plus citizen journalism all in one place,” he said.  They’ll also be hiring 100 local bloggers.  “We’re flipping the model.”

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Animation is a very unique art form; it allows the filmmaker to control their story down to each individual frame. Each object, shadow, and line must be created and placed. The camera does not capture unintentional backgrounds, extra frames, or incidental light, there is only what the animator chooses to show.

The digital revolution in media production is dramatically changing the techniques, forms, content, and function of modern animation and is actively remixing it with other media forms so much that digitally-created animation is now nothing short of a new mode of cultural production and a totally unique form of motion-graphic storytelling of its own right.

The diversity of software tools available for creating moving images on a screen has contributed to the rise of a tremendous and diverse number of styles, techniques, and looks. The multitude of distribution channels further enforced the trend of convergence towards forms more suitable for display on multiple screen sizes and configurations.

As Manovich puts it in his review of Adobe’s AfterEffects, a popular suite for creating digital animations: “[A]s software remixes the techniques and working methods of various media they simulate, the result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with their own distinct logic. In the case of AfterEffects, the working method which it puts forward is neither animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography, even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new way to make moving image media. Similarly, the visual language of media produced with this and similar software is also different from the languages of moving images which existed previously (Manovich, 2006).”

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The signs of info-exhaustion are abundantly clear.  I’ve been flashing them red in my status updates after all.

Hanson Hosein I’m tired of being in a perpetual state of communication (says the digital media journalist guy via Twitter and Facebook). [7 comments, 6 people liked this]

Hanson Hosein How to restore “contemplative balance” in an info-saturated world. Love that notion, wish I were in town to attend: http://is.gd/4NbSK [my wife liked this]

I also joked on Twitter: I’m thinking of starting a Master of Communication in Analog Media.

Far too many people expressed interest, leading me to believe that all us tech-lovers secretly despair of our passion for all things digital.  I had mentioned as much during a Fireside Chat on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW, which led to this article in the upcoming issue of Seattle Magazine, “Sound Off: Examining the Value of Tuning Out” (in fine analog style, the columnist Karen Johnson, interviewed me in September, a fact-checker contacted me about my quotes in October, and the dead-tree December issue has yet to hit news stands).

And now I’m up late on a Sunday night — having finished grading assignments, and attempted the Sisyphean e-mail push uphill — writing this blog post.  Overwhelmed, overloaded perhaps, but forever propelled by anxiety.

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Not that long ago, media companies were easy to define. A media company could be a movie studio, television network, newspaper or magazine publisher, radio station or really any company that controlled a means of distributing content. But technology has brought about an enormous shift that many companies don’t yet recognize. Most companies are now enormously invested in media as a part of their everyday business, but few of them realize it.

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Just got a mail sent to the digital media working group at UW from Phillip Thurtle. Thought I’d post to the blog in case some students are not on that email list:

“Hello all,

I’m writing to see if any of you have used “the pool” to post your projects? http://pool.newmedia.umaine.edu/index.php

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Posted by Adriana

We have been having an intense email discussion on what constitutes media and what is Flip the Media as a concept. It all started with a Common Craft video about what is Twitter and whether or not it fits in the scope of this blog.

What do you think Flip the Media means?

(1) using the Flip camera

(2) turning media upside down

(3) Giving the “bird” to traditional media (i.e. ‘flipping them off’).

(4) Other

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Posted by Hanson Hanson:

This recent Ad Age article, “Media Force Sinks to 15 Year Low” provides good fodder both for the editorial theme of our films (traditional media in serious transition), and for why it’s important that we all learn how to tell multimedia stories.

But even that’s not enough — which is why each one of our groups of four has a “Producer” to concentrate on the business end of things, marketing the project even when it’s still a work-in-progress (hence this blog). There are two reasons for this: Read more…