Selected items of interest to the media community

• Are You Media Literate?

January 31, 2012: 

TJ Walker says in Forbes that today's media literate people need to embrace outlets outside of traditional print and broadcast.  It is not an innate gift, but a learned skill similar to multiplication tables or the alphabet.

A well-prepared, media literate person of the 21^st century needs to be able to blog, vlog, interview, be interviewed, podcast, webcast, telecommunicate and even host a multimedia press conferences. It doesn’t matter if you are a CEO, an entrepreneur, an artist, a clothing designer, a poet, a politician, or just a concerned citizen lobbying for a new stop sign in your community. You will not be successful and you will not have clout unless you can speak to a group of people larger than can fit in any one room—that means you have to reach people through the media.

Read the entire article at Forbes here.

• A New Ladies’ Home Journal, Written Mostly by Readers

January 21, 2012: 

Beginning with the March issue, LHJ  will allow readers to produce the majority of its articles. The  magazine is 128-year-old  and has an average paid circulation of 3.2 million. According to the New York Times, it  "would be the first major mass-market magazine to draw on user-generated content for most of its pages." For the entire article, go here.  Although we've all been waiting for this, we are surprised that Meredith is taking, what seems to be a big risk  with such a large piece of business.

• Stop Online Piracy Act Protests Black Out Websites

January 19, 2012: 

The Washington Post covered the "black-out" several websites held to protest two bills pending before Congress, Stop On-Line Piracy in the House and Protect Intellectual Property Act in the Senate.

This fight is over two similar bills: the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s Protect IP (intellectual property) Act. Both are meant to attack the problem of foreign Web sites that sell pirated or counterfeit goods. They would impose restrictions forcing U.S. companies to stop selling online ads to suspected pirates, processing payments for illegal online sales and refusing to list Web sites suspected of piracy in search-engine results.

The idea is to cut off the channels that deliver American customers, and their money, to potential pirates. But tech companies see the laws as a dangerous overreach, objecting because, they say, the laws would add burdensome costs and new rules that would destroy the freewheeling soul of the Internet.

The TED foundation has an interesting counter argument to the proposed legislation by Clay Shirky.  See the video here.