Everyone’s a photographer now:

Angry People in Local Newspapers - Comic Relief Pupils Sent Home

ProbablyBadNews.com

I spent a year working for medium-sized community newspapers in the midwestern US. Maybe that’s why I like Angry People in Local Newspapers, Glum Councilors, and Probably Bad News (part of the Cheezburger empire), and Media Relations’ Funny Headlines, so much. Angry People in Local Newspapers especially hits home with me, because it was such a common assignment. Maybe the city wasn’t properly clearing snow, or maybe a nearby business put up some garish new signs; somehow, I was supposed to come out of the assignment with a publishable picture communicating local dissatisfaction with something difficult to photograph (or impossible to photograph, in the case of complaints about noise). Ironically, this Angry Citizen of the Week sort of story is one of the great powers of the local newspaper. Once a problem is made known in such a public way, the problem usually gets solved pretty quickly.

(via Metafilter here and here)

Google’s Android phone operating system hopes to become an open-source alternative to the likes of the iPhone and the Blackberry. Android’s rise in popularity hasn’t come without a few hitches. First, early phones ran all text input to the phone’s computer as a superuser. Writing “reboot” alone in a text message, for instance, would reboot the phone. Writing “rm -r” would completely erase everything on the phone.

Now, Engadget reports that users of Android users recently began complaining about not being able to focus the phone’s camera. Then one day, suddenly, everyone was able to focus again. Turns out it’s a date-related software glitch. Every 24.5 days, the phones will switch between being able to focus and not being able to focus. An Android developer confirmed the bug and suggests a patch will be available before Dec. 11, the next date when all of the cameraphones will stop focusing again.

I miss the days when I turned part of my lens to adjust the focus….

After a recent entry in the neverending debate on the death of journalism and how to save newspapers, Metafilter user fightorflight took a page from an old antispam email forward (which in turn might well be based off of sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein’s solution to fan mail) and developed this standard response letter. A shortened version:

Check as many as apply:

Your [idea] advocates a

	( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

	( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working
	    journalist
	( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council
	    meeting to do it
	( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
	( ) Print readers will not put up with it
	( ) Good journalists will not put up with it

[...]

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

	( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
	( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
	( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too
	    small to do real reporting
	( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to
	    account by two guys with a blog
	( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for
	    small sites

[...]

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

	( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none
	    have ever been shown practical
	( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few
	    readers are actually all that interested in, quite
	    honestly
	( ) Having a free online "printing press" doesn't turn you
	    into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
	( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
	( ) You are Jeff Jarvis

[...]

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

	( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
	( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person
	    for suggesting it.
	( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and
	    burn your house down!

- posted by fightorflight on Metafilter

Read on »

Although, I’ve got to say, it’s been real nice having printed newspapers and magazines on this trip back to the US. I’m not sitting at a computer for all of my news, I can read in the park or on a bus, and all the weird little stories that I didn’t know I was interested in somehow make it into my peripheral news consumption.

(via TheRumpus)

I’m so bad at spotting photoshop disasters, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying. I finally spotted one on my own yesterday, standing a couple stories tall on the side of an H & M clothing store in a fancy mall in Nanjing.

I occassionally get suckered in to clicking the links in Life.com’s weekly emails. Happened recently with a gallery of never-before-seen early pictures of Marilyn Monroe and a slideshow of pictures by Hugo Jaeger, one of Adolf Hitler’s personal photographers. The captions can be frustratingly lacking or they can contain gems like this one:

“The future,” Hitler once said to Jaeger, “belongs to color photography.”

This video reminds me of far too many conversations I’ve had….

(via the APAD list)

Auto-Tune the News #3 has just been released. While it’s not as good as #1 or #2 (above), it’s still worth a laugh. Best if you have an understanding, if not an appreciation, of the tropes of both contemporary pop music (especially Kanye West) and American television news and politics.

(I originally intended a mention of this to be part of a piece stewing on Creative Commons. “Auto-Tune the News” is the sort of creative reinterpretation that makes me understand and support the philosophy behind the Creative Commons movement. However, I don’t think CC will ever work for photography. It’s hard to imagine what a remixed photograph looks like…. That’ll have to wait a bit.)

screenshot of Is The Big Picture a bummer today?

One of the most recent Single Serving Sites that I’ve seen is “Is The Big Picture a bummer today?” Click on the link and you’ll get an answer to that question, which is talking about Boston.com’s The Big Picture site. Other notable Single Serving Sites: Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, Are We At War With Iran?, and Do Websites Need to Look Exactly the Same in Every Browser? (via Waxy.Org’s links)