The Death of TV?

Well, not quite, alas, but certainly an interesting shift:

We think we know that the professional news media, especially newspapers, are obsolete, that the future is all about (excuse the expression) you—media created by amateurs. But such PowerPoint distillation tends to overlook the fact that mainstream media are not all simply shriveling and dying but in some instances actually evolving. And in evolution, there are always fascinating transitional iterations along the way. Such as newspapers’ suddenly proliferating forays into online video. (And now magazines: Time Inc. just announced a new “studio” to develop Web video.)

Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense.

What seems to be happening here is that blogs are eating newspapers' lunch, so the newspapers are eating TV's lunch. Sounds fair to me. (Via PaidContent.)

The Richard Stallman of Water

Heavy, man:

Late last year, I had a lunch meeting in New York City with the president of a foundation associated with a national protestant denomination. When the waiter came by to ask if we wanted a bottle of water, my lunch partner responded, “Tap water will be fine. I don’t drink bottled water.”

Don’t drink bottled water? I couldn’t remember the last time I heard someone say that – especially in New York City. I began to explore the issue with him and learned that he and many others in his church no longer drank Dasani (bottled by Coca-Cola) and other commercial bottled waters because they see the privatization of water resources as an intensely moral and political issue.

Obvious, when you think about it.