Category: Mainstream Media

Spellcasting: B.e.h.i.n.d. T.h.e. S.c.e.n.e.s.

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With Tim Child (Creator) and Hugo Myatt (Treguard): Some of the teams were tremendous. We had a splendid team of girls who achieved a rare victory by completing their particular themed quest. The one they put under the helmet was a bit of a strider; they guided her towards a door, and she bumped straight into the blue screen. She let out an expletive we didn’t think she’d know at that age. Another team who stayed in a hotel overnight ended up having a punchup. One of them came in the next morning with a lovely black eye, which took

The long and winding road to the end of The Beatles

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From Rolling Stone, one to read with your coffee. They had so much material to record, and so much distaste for each other, that they were recording in three studios, sometimes 12 hours a day. Each of the Beatles treated the others as his supporting musicians – which made for some spectacular performances and some explosive studio moments: Lennon storming out on the tedium of recording McCartney’s “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”; Ringo quitting the group for almost two weeks after Paul berated his drumming on “Back in the U.S.S.R.”; Harrison bringing in his friend, guitarist Eric Clapton, just to win rightful consideration

Why did ‘Time’ never figure out the Internet?

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It won’t be the first ‘older’ media company that won’t make the jump, and it won’t be the last. But there are lessons in Joshua Macht’s look at Time magazine: When the digital era arrived, the inevitable fragmentation of media made it virtually impossible for Time to hold onto its massive audience, but the enterprise never seemed to get that fact. Instead, it tried to bulk up on pageviews, open up its archive (which has since gone behind a wall) and go with the bigger-is-better approach. But in a world where CNN’s 40 million unique visitors is small compared to

Reading every review of every number one album

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Oooh, I could spend a lot of time on ‘Then Play Long‘, where Marcello Carlin and Lena Friesen “review every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it.” Here’s part of their look at Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours‘ There is no knowingness or irony on this record. Everything is direct, unambiguous. And so, despite just one week at number one, Britain has kept by it, or kept it by its side; in the intervening years it has to date racked up 489 weeks on our album chart, its most recent appearance being as recently as last month. I

John Naughton on one possible new direction for the BBC

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So here’s what the BBC should be doing next: orchestrating the creation of a new kind of unwalled online garden, one which gathers together all of the nation’s cultural heritage in digitised form, together with: the metadata which enables things to be discovered; open access for all; and and permissive licences that allow citizens of Britain — and the world — to access, enjoy, consume, learn from and remix the great things that this society and its people have given to the world. Looking on as someone who pays the licence fee, but outside of the BBC family, this makes a lot

It’s April 1st, and there’s a 3D release of ‘Bat Out Of Hell’

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Fact or fool? Almost 40 years since it’s release in 1977, the seminal album is still 4th in the biggest selling charts, having sold more than 45 million copies and continues to sell around 200,000 copies each year. Bat Out Of Hell is Meat Loaf’s second album and the one that propelled him to global fame. His first collaboration with composer Jim Steinman, this operatic masterpiece enthralled audiences on its release with its vocal theatrics and groundbreaking videos… The album will be repackaged with a Collector’s Edition 3D cover.