Adults, children, fish, and crows all share an affinity for shiny things. While fish and crows are happy with the simple gleam of a metal object, humans often have a more sophisticated palette for visual objects. My friends are often doe eyed over the latest technological gizmos. Children, once enraptured by a jingling set of keys, now become enthralled by the flashy hypnotic screens of an iPhone or tablet. Is the increase in consumption of shiny digital media by our children a problem?

There is certainly little doubt that humans are growing more visual across the board. We are exposed to more and more visual stimulations online and in digital technology. Our screen options are a lot like our shirt size: small, medium, or large. However we choose to digest this media is really up to us, but unless you’re like a Geico commercial and live under a rock, you’re exposed to some form of digital media.

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Sabrina Roach is Brown Paper Tickets’ Radio/New Media Doer. She has worked in community and public radio for the past 10 years at KBCS 91.3 Community Radio and KUOW 94.9 Puget Sound Public Radio in various capacities.

Prometheus Radio Project’s summer interns explain why the radio dial is so crowded, and how the FCC plans to make room.

We have two online community radio stations in the Seattle area: Hollow Earth Radio and Voice of Vashon. I’m consistently delighted to see how they engage their communities and generate creative, hyper-local media. They also invest in organizational and facility development. These are two particular stations I love, but surely not the only ones doing great things. Do you have an online community radio station you love? Post it in the comments.

Both online radio stations have been working on getting terrestrial signals for the past several years. Both have been hopeful in watching the progress of Low Power FM (LPFM), as it traveled from President Obama’s desk where the Local Community Radio Act was signed in January, to July when the FCC released a proposal to save channels for community radio, and opened a period of time when public comments would be accepted. Applications to apply for stations will be due as early as June 2012.

I recently viewed a map of the top 150 radio markets, which showed that some urban areas have room for new community radio stations. Seattle currently isn’t slated to get any LPFM frequencies, though advocates are pushing for more flexible technical rules that should allow a few stations to squeeze in.

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Since the Egyptian uprising began on January 25th, Flip The Media has been reporting on the role of social media, the Internet, and telecommunications in this historic moment. On Saturday, January 29, I had the chance to speak with Nathaniel Greenberg, a doctoral candidate at the UW currently living in Cairo.

When I spoke with him, the Internet had been down all day. Cell phone use had just returned but had been down for over 48 hours. Gunshots rang out the night before and the state news was advising civilians to form local brigades to protect themselves and their businesses from looting. Men from his neighborhood began gathering on the street with clubs, knives, broomsticks, bats, and other rudimentary weapons. Greenberg believes his neighborhood is one of the more stable ones, particularly because of the high concentration of ex-military members living there, but told me “there’s no authority right now.”

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Protests in Egypt exploded into violence yesterday as people took to the streets to denounce poor living conditions and the thirty-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak.

According to Al Jazeera, Egyptians began organizing protests through Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday morning. In an attempt to quell the unrest, the Egyptian government blocked Twitter around 6pm Tuesday night, but by then protests had begun in several Egyptian cities, including Cairo, Suez, and Alexandria, among others. A Facebook group garnered 80,000 members pledging to protest on January 25. Read more…

The Seattle Times has a couple of niche sports apps on the market right now and both are doing very well. As a newspaper guy, this is exciting. There is likely a future here for newspapers and plenty of money to be made. Identify a niche audience (that you already write for) and develop an app that caters to their interests. I’d pay lots of money for these Seattle Times apps, they are that good.

I have a journalism degree and daily newspaper experience, but I’m also a digital media nut and a huge Husky football fan. Imagine my euphoria when I first saw the Seattle Times was launching a Husky football app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Their Husky football blog is like the Bible to me, and an iPhone app sounded too good to be true.

But how useful would it be? Would I trust the content? How about the functionality? I didn’t want this to be a giant advertisement for the Seattle Times.  I wanted it to be all Huskies all the time. One season in, I’m happy to report this is purple and gold nirvana. It’s the most immersive, accessible and, of course, portable Husky football experience I have ever known. Thank you, Seattle Times!

OK, OK. Enough gushing.

I respect this app. It’s a big step for journalism and the newspaper industry in general. Readership is down across the country. Revenue is shrinking, and newspapers are struggling to reach new audiences in a digital age that crippled their business model long ago. Enter the niche app. This is a new dawn for newspapers.

I could already find the information and stories featured in this app on my iPhone using mobile Safari. But I don’t always want to tap dance through various bookmarks and zoom in to the content I want to read. The app puts it all in one place. It costs $2.99 for a one-time download, but I would pay $2.99 a month for this. I’m not the only one, either. Managing Editor Heidi de Laubenfels told Lost Remote the app reached “20 percent of our total expected sales in the first two days and continues to do quite well.” The Times’ latest app, one for the Husky men’s basketball season, currently ranks on the iTunes list for top paid sports apps.

My question initially was whether or not I would trust a similar app released by a non-objective news source. The UW Athletic Department did just this, releasing a Coach Sark app not long after the Seattle Times released its football app. The content, not surprisingly, was not as deep. The interface was wonky, and it wasn’t objective in the slightest. Not even the fact that proceeds from the $2.99 purchase went to charity could rescue this app from the bottom of the league standings.

Time and trust are in limited supply these days. The Seattle Times is an organization I trust and provides me with content I believe in. Newspapers everywhere should take notice of this endeavor. Find a market—foodies, concertgoers, American Idol-lovers—and meet them where they are. Smartphones are growing exponentially and apps such as this are, hopefully, a sign of things to come.

I love free stuff, but this is the kind of content I want and will pay for. Are you listening, newspaper executives? I would pay for this. I would pay monthly. And I would pay a lot more than $2.99.

The Politico newsroom inside News Channel 8

Every time that I step into a newsroom, I remember what it was like to live off of that electricity in the air when I was at NBC News.  It was the human buzz of stressful inquiry as events incessantly unfolded before our journalistic eyes.

We’ve come to believe that this buzz is much diminished in the waning days of traditional journalism.  But I’m seeing some signs of life as I travel around the northeast this month.

Local TV (Americans’ number source for news) has long been criticized for considering their web presence as an afterthought.  At Washington D.C.’s Newschannel 8, they’re launching a new website in June that will merge their cable news channel with their local station.  And rather than having TV feed the web, the station manager, Bill Lord, told me that the web will feed TV.  It will be text plus video plus citizen journalism all in one place,” he said.  They’ll also be hiring 100 local bloggers.  “We’re flipping the model.”

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Animation is a very unique art form; it allows the filmmaker to control their story down to each individual frame. Each object, shadow, and line must be created and placed. The camera does not capture unintentional backgrounds, extra frames, or incidental light, there is only what the animator chooses to show.

The digital revolution in media production is dramatically changing the techniques, forms, content, and function of modern animation and is actively remixing it with other media forms so much that digitally-created animation is now nothing short of a new mode of cultural production and a totally unique form of motion-graphic storytelling of its own right.

The diversity of software tools available for creating moving images on a screen has contributed to the rise of a tremendous and diverse number of styles, techniques, and looks. The multitude of distribution channels further enforced the trend of convergence towards forms more suitable for display on multiple screen sizes and configurations.

As Manovich puts it in his review of Adobe’s AfterEffects, a popular suite for creating digital animations: “[A]s software remixes the techniques and working methods of various media they simulate, the result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with their own distinct logic. In the case of AfterEffects, the working method which it puts forward is neither animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography, even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new way to make moving image media. Similarly, the visual language of media produced with this and similar software is also different from the languages of moving images which existed previously (Manovich, 2006).”

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The signs of info-exhaustion are abundantly clear.  I’ve been flashing them red in my status updates after all.

Hanson Hosein I’m tired of being in a perpetual state of communication (says the digital media journalist guy via Twitter and Facebook). [7 comments, 6 people liked this]

Hanson Hosein How to restore “contemplative balance” in an info-saturated world. Love that notion, wish I were in town to attend: http://is.gd/4NbSK [my wife liked this]

Graphic by Kim Rosen

I also joked on Twitter: I’m thinking of starting a Master of Communication in Analog Media.

Far too many people expressed interest, leading me to believe that all us tech-lovers secretly despair of our passion for all things digital.  I had mentioned as much during a Fireside Chat on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW, which led to this article in the upcoming issue of Seattle Magazine, “Sound Off: Examining the Value of Tuning Out” (in fine analog style, the columnist Karen Johnson, interviewed me in September, a fact-checker contacted me about my quotes in October, and the dead-tree December issue has yet to hit news stands).

And now I’m up late on a Sunday night — having finished grading assignments, and attempted the Sisyphean e-mail push uphill — writing this blog post.  Overwhelmed, overloaded perhaps, but forever propelled by anxiety.

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