Daily Archives: January 12, 2007

Inside Iraq

Posted on by

From the extraordinary Inside Iraq Blog maintained by the McClatchy Baghdad Bureau…

A couple of weeks ago it was time for my wife to deliver a baby girl, in that day me, my wife, my mother and my wife’s mother headed to the hospital in karada area at about 7:30 am, its usually takes between 30 – 40 minutes with the normal traffic but in that day something happened!!!! A car bomb exploded almost half way to the hospital and the only way which led to the hospital was blocked for many hours, I could see my wife started getting very worried and I was too but I tried not to show her about my concerns, the traffic was not moving at all for a couple of hours and I was worried that my wife might start having delivery pain but thank god we made it after 4 hours and it was the longest hours in my life, after all I had a beautiful baby daughter that made me forget the long tiring day.

Shoot an arrogant messenger

Posted on by

James Button has a thoughtful and interesting interview with John Lloyd in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Lloyd has helped to found the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. Opened in November, it plans to analyse a profession he believes is too little studied. This is remarkable, given its power. Compare the amount it is studied with the scrutiny of politics or law. Part of the problem is that the media usually do a poor job of reflecting on themselves.

Lloyd, the institute’s director of journalism, plans to get journalists thinking and writing about what they do. How, for example, do they balance ethical priorities against the commercial demands of employers? How will the digital age change reporting? Lloyd knows of few centres anywhere trying to answer such questions (the University of Melbourne is believed to be planning a similar project). He thinks that, for journalism’s health, that has to change.

The idea for the institute came to him when he returned to London in 1996 after five years as Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times. Before that, he had worked in television, edited Time Out and the moderate-left magazine New Statesman, and was British Journalist of the Year in 1984. But an insight changed him from being merely in the media to a thinker about the media.

In Russia, people relied almost totally on new newspapers and television stations for political information. That was unsurprising: the all-powerful Soviet state had collapsed and parties and the non-government sector were still too frail to command the political stage.

But in Britain, with its long history of civic institutions, Lloyd observed the same phenomenon. On the Labour side, unions had lost power. The many local and patriotic organisations linked to the Conservatives had atrophied. Neither party retained a large membership base; almost no one attended political meetings.

Instead, the media had become “almost the monopoly carrier of political messages”. If politicians wanted to speak to the people, they had nowhere to go but to a camera or a reporter’s notebook. In Britain, Russia and elsewhere, the fields had effectively merged. Politics had become media…

Thanks to Adrian Monck for the link.

Don’t mention the Jews

Posted on by

Funny story from James Murphy’s review of the second volume of Gore Vidal’s autobiography:

The names continue to drop at a rate unknown outside the pages of Hello! magazine, and the end paper collage pictures the author’s apotheosis, surrounded by crowding celebrities, as it might have been attempted by Tiepolo. Some we have met before, some not. We get to know more of Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, and friends from the hotter media like Paul Newman and the chat show host Johnny Carson, but acting here as his own Boswell, Vidal offers much less anecdotal detail than he gave us before. Still, many of his stories are diverting and some are even memorable, such as the demand which the actor-director José Ferrer received from Hollywood studio executives to exclude all reference to Jews from a film he was making about the Dreyfus Affair…

The iPhone and the Mac

Posted on by

The New York Times sees parallels between the iPhone and the original Macintosh.

When the Macintosh computer — which was also designed by a small group shrouded in secrecy — was introduced in January 1984, it was received with the same kind of wild hyperbole that greeted the iPhone this week. But a year later, the shortcomings of the first-generation Macintosh cost Mr. Jobs his job at the company he founded nine years earlier with a high school friend, Stephen Wozniak.

In light of the iPhone’s closed appliance-style design, it is worth recounting the Mac’s early history because of the potential parallel pitfalls that Mr. Jobs and his company may face.

Despite its high price of $2,495, the Macintosh initially sold briskly. But Mr. Jobs’s early predictions of huge sales failed to materialize. (On Tuesday, in a similar fashion, he set an iPhone goal of 1 percent of the world’s cellular phone market by the end of 2008.)

The Mac’s stumble was in part because of pricing and in part because Mr. Jobs had intentionally restricted its expandability. Despite his assertion that a slow data connection would be enough, the gamble failed when Apple’s business stalled and Mr. Jobs was forced out of the company by the chief executive he had brought in, John Sculley.

In a similar fashion, Mr. Jobs is gambling that people will pay a premium ($499 or $599) for the iPhone and he appears to have sought to limit its expandability.

The device is not currently compatible with the faster 3G wireless data networks that are driving cellular revenues to sharp gains in the United States (although several Apple insiders said the phone could be upgraded to 3G with software if Apple later decides to enable that feature).

Moreover, Mr. Jobs also appears to be restricting the potential for third-party software developers to write applications for the new handset, like ring tones and word processors…

Perceptive.