“I’m a contemporary artist, and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books, and some advertising, all with the same concept. And it’s about our fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture, and the importance of the image. Celebrity is born of photography.

So I’m going to start with how I started with this concept seven years ago, when Princess Diana died. There was sort of a standstill in Britain the day, or the moment of her death, and people decided to mourn her death in a sort of mass way. I was fascinated by this phenomenon. So I wondered: could one erase the image of Diana actually quite crudely and physically? So I got a gun and started to shoot at the image of Diana. But I couldn’t erase this from my memory, and certainly it was not being erased from the public psyche. Momentum was being built. The press wrote about her death in rather, I felt, pornographic ways, like which bit of artery left which bit of body, and how did she die in the back of the car. “

Anonymous boy in He-Man outfit from Monster Donut blog....Henry Jenkins says characters like He-Man and their associated toys and costumes are "in effect an authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters"

At Nieman Storyboard Andrea Pitzer talks with Henry Jenkins about his ideas on “Transmedia” and the future of journalism:

“In the case of entertainment, the question is how might gifted storytellers deepen our experiences by creating narratives that meaningfully extend across media platforms. In the case of journalism, the question may be, how might we cover news better if we can draw on the affordances of a range of different media in a more coordinated fashion—the immediacy of broadcasting, the reflectiveness of print, and the data base or interactive structures we associate with digital. The multimedia capacity of the IPad which allows for these different media forms to be brought together within a single app only makes the experimentation with transmedia news that much more urgent.”

Noting the digital experiments of the Annenberg School of Journalism site Neon Tommy, Jenkins also mentioned Nonny De La Pena’s work on immersive journalism, “journalism involving virtual worlds and simulations.” (See De La Pena’s MacArthur grant-funded project, “Gone Gitmo” on the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.) I’d add Wired’s use of charticles and a game to explore the micro and macro issues of Somali piracy as another interesting effort. Let us know if you see other examples of using traditional media elements in conjunction with truly interactive efforts.

For more on the Gone Gitmo Project check out the project blog and this Vanity Fair article, Click Here for Torture:

De la Peña says the idea behind Gone Gitmo was to create a virtual but accessible version of a place that was real but inaccessible to all but detainees, military personnel, and dedicated lawyers. One such lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Charlie Swift, who visited the prison regularly for five years, says, “I applaud their efforts. It’s very hard to explain to people what Guantánamo is like.” But, while the model gives a fairly accurate idea of what the prison looks like, a larger truth is lost. “The irony is it’s the lack of senses that is the real hell, not any particular thing that happens. That is the uniqueness of Guantánamo,” says Swift, who sued George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld over the camp’s military-tribunal system, which deprives detainees of many rights afforded prisoners in the U.S. (See “Taking on Guantánamo,” by Marie Brenner.) “You’re strapped down, can’t see or hear, can’t move, your muscles are cramping, and that’s it.”

If the people behind Gone Gitmo want a truly accurate model, Swift adds, “the rules should change every time.… Psychiatrists will tell you that if the game works perfectly, it’s dangerous for people to play.”

Although Glee produces a lot of innovation, some critics have criticized it for reinforcing stereotypes. Andy Denhart writes

Unconditional love is also what the show’s fans give it, embracing this progressive message—and the musical numbers—that Glee returns to episode after episode. But disappointingly, the breakout hit wallows in stereotypes and clichés, particularly ones that have to do with gender. Every opportunity Glee has, it turns its characters into what our society expects and demands from people based not on who they are as individuals, but what their genitalia looks like.

Although the term “gender” gets conflated with “sex,” it refers to the behavior we expect, and even demand, from people based on their biology. That socially constructed idea differs between cultures and societies, but we expect men to act masculine, which includes all of the associated clichés, such as being athletic, aggressive, or emotionally reserved. Likewise, women are expected to be emotional, concerned with their appearance, and maternal. Gender is arbitrary, and while our expectation that, for example, men should be athletic might have a connection to physiological attributes, there are so many exceptions that rules just don’t make sense.

Forcing gender roles upon people is damaging, but that’s what Glee does: it accepts society’s definitions and reinforces them.

This is a standard progressive critique of stereotypes and as such has a certain validity but it fails to acknowledge that often audience response runs outside the predicatble and the variety of video responses – which more concretely are audience uses of the program – show that audiences accept and transform the stereotypes in a range of ways.

The pay wall works for Murdoch’s wsj.com because users think it is essential for them to make money and many of them can write off their subscription fees either on their expense accounts or their income taxes. Some form of it may also work for The New York Times because it has unique national and political content and a brand that won’t quit.

It may also work in some local news markets that have the right combination of strong local content and brand, loyal Web savvy users with a little money to spend, and weak competition. More likely, though, it could be a lot more difficult and a lot less lucrative than appears on first blush.

Twitter ruffled a few more journalistic feathers this week when American Idol judge Paula Abdul became the latest household name to usurp the breaking news power of traditional media by making a big announcement on the social networking site.

“I think it’s kind of a watershed moment,” says Rob Silverstein, executive producer for Access Hollywood. “The biggest show in the history of television; one of the biggest stars of the show decides to leave via Twitter.”

Abdul’s scoop came on the heels of the July 27 announcement that Ben Silverman would be departing NBC. The news broke via the Twitter page of Silverman’s good friend Ryan Seacrest, who alerted his 2 million followers well ahead of an NBC press release.

“It’s the democratization of media,” says Brad Adgate, senior VP of research for Horizon Media. “This is just going to continue. You follow Paula [on Twitter], you knew she was leaving before it was announced.”

I’d say the Twitter response to the Iran elections was more relevant to the ‘democratization of the media’ than Abdul’s announcement.