For showrunners, the risks and rewards of replying to Twitter users are magnified: replying could create a sense of a personal relationship with their followers, but getting into long conversations with fans (especially antagonistic fans) could spark controversy.
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Basic cable might turn out to be the best thing to ever happen to Conan O'Brien.
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CBS's The Good Wife doesn't shy away from the challenges its protagonist faces in negotiating her adult life, something more than we tend to expect to see on television, where story lines often trade in emotionally false dichotomies.
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Ten (or more) media industry stories you might have missed recently.
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Nike tries to give LeBron James a chance to address his off-season controversy in a new 90-second ad while re-establishing the commodity of sports stardom.
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Precursor to what would now be called a "sports entertainer," the athletic Carpentier came into his own as wrestling expanded its influence on North American pop culture through television and film.
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What is the meaning of political bodies in a hypermediated world? If five hundred thousand of my best friends show up and the New York Times doesn't know how to read us, has Sanity occurred? A report from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
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A first-hand account of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's gathering on the National Mall.
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By disrupting the everyday with a yearly tradition which unite a show's cast, Halloween episodes can use the holiday's blurring of fantasy and reality to speak to questions of character.
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Despite its reputation as a wonky and bewildering issue, net neutrality actually boils down to a pretty simple principle of openness and nondiscrimination. It’s important to point out, then, that a lot of those who are talking about “net neutrality” these days aren’t actually talking about this.
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For all the interest in using foreign media to immerse oneself in a "foreign" nationality, perhaps what a lot of us want/need is simply a background, faint, weak, unobtrusive ambience.
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IR 11 is wildly interdisciplinary, tied together largely by research topic, leading to a number of fascinating connections, disjunctures, and challenges.
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Ten (or more) media industry stories you might have missed recently.
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Are lifestyle brands the new record labels? A new recording studio owned by Converse is offering musicians the opportunity to record their music for free, further reducing the need for artists to work with traditional record labels. There are, of course, some strings attached.
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The ACTA retreat is indicative of a larger crisis in how media policy works today. Specifically: we have no idea how media policy works today.
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Over the summer, we launched a location-aware iPhone app we called Bike Box. The goal in developing this project was to use smartphone technology to enhance rather than replace a user’s experience of physical space.
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