by Dave Duarte. On Sunday 1st May 2011, Barack Obama announced that Osama Bin-Laden had been killed. The strike against his compound in Pakistan was not televised, but it was tweeted. The thing is, Al-Qaida was already looking irrelevant after the “Arab Spring” – the social-media enabled revolutions that occurred throughout the Middle-East in early 2011.
Tag archives: Media
Memeburn set to launch two new sites, awards
Matthew Buckland has grown his marketing and publishing businesses, Creative Spark and Memeburn.com, to 12 full-time staff members in little more than a year. At the moment he complains about the pace of growth – as in not quite fast enough – and, to inject further fuel into his budding media empire, he is announcing the launch of a series of new burn.com websites.
The press muses amusingly
April 1 in the media world is a bit like casual day at school. Everybody pitches but no-one is really there. That’s because we are all browsing to ‘Net to see which scores got settled, who threw the best punch without anybody really realising that’s what it was, and who should we copy next year this time around.
While electronic media grows, print falls behind
The South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) has released its latest data on the local media environment for January-December 2010. No news was construed as good news for print – on average, newspapers and magazine seemed to hold steady – while electronic media continued its growth path as more people are listening to radio, watching TV or surfing the Internet.
Magazine summit no crystal ball on media future
Journalism and marketing will continue to move ever closer, with the wall once separating them being steadily dismantled. By publishers. And that’s a good thing. Read on.
Seeking to answer questions around magazine strategy in the information age, publishers from across the country gathered at the Cape Town International Convention Centre for the first annual SAPPI MPASA (Magazine Publishers Association of South Africa) Media Summit. A prelude to the day’s main draw, the PICA awards (the magazine publishing industry’s annual award show), the summit was meant to explore what the magazine landscape will look like five years from now. There seemed to be few answers.
9/11 Remembered
“This happens to all nations, be comforted together.”
Listener talking on air following September 11 attacks, Umhlobo Wenene Fm, September 2001. As reported in media.toolbox, the predecessor of MarkLives.
Reasons for ANC media clampdown becoming clearer
To see why the ANC wants to clamp down on media freedom and effectively squash investigative journalism through its Protection of Information Bill, the proposed state-funded media appeals tribunal and a number of other legislative efforts, you simply had to open up a newspaper over the past week.
EXCLUSIVE: SA business school looks beyond eBook hype with new research project
The University of Stellenbosch Business School has teamed up with online retailer Kalahari.net to investigate the impact and value of making content available in eBook format to academic institutions. The project aims to ensure that South African academic institutions base future decisions around the adoption of eBooks as a viable alternative to printed text on fact rather than hype.
World cup: newspaper editors innovate amid circulation decline
The 2010 FIFA World Cup has been the biggest South African news story so far this year. The tournament dominated media coverage over several months, both in the build-up to and during the actual event. Newspapers sat between a rock and a hard place during the world cup, as television ruled with its live broadcasts and online was first with live commentary, opinion and blow-by blow recounts.
When tweeting an opinion is a fireable offence, media loses
The debate sparked by CNN’s firing of Nasr can be found all over the web with some big-name journalists venturing an opinion. Lucky for them, they don’t work for CNN. Many journalism schools still don’t encourage students to form or express opinions. It’s because journalists need to be objective, not takes sides, thus offering the complete story to readers so they can form their own opinion rather than have yours crammed down their throat.