Tag: journalism

entertainment

Press release: My new job

Becca

University Link Magazine released this press release today:

University Link Magazine is Proud to Name Rebecca Ford as Their New Managing Editor

USC Alum Rebecca Ford will start her run as managing editor when University Link Magazine hits big this September with its much-anticipated Back-to-School Issue.
June 18, 2010 – North Hollywood, CA (June 18, 2010) – University Link Magazine (ULM), a monthly glossy magazine written by college students and exclusively designed for college students, reveals their new editor, Rebecca Ford, who will begin her reign for ULM’s second year as a successful print publication. The magazine, available by subscription only at http://www.ulmagazine.com, is glossy, 80-pages, and features prominent entertainment figures on the cover.

After the departure of its previous editor in May, University Link Magazine brought on Ford, who was recently an entertainment editor for the online guide, Metromix, where she was responsible for planning future stories that covered over sixty cities throughout the United States.

“After working for online publications, I’m looking forward to becoming a part of the ULM team and creating an inspiring and informative print publication for college students,” Ford said.

Prior to her stint at Metromix, Ford was a stringer for Deadline Hollywood Daily, a Hollywood industry website linked to the LA Weekly. Before moving to Los Angeles to receive her Master’s in Print Journalism from USC, Ford graduated from Hawaii Pacific University with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Visual Communication. Ford is already bringing innovative ideas to further improve University Link Magazine in its second year running.

Other publication credits include: Deadline Hollywood Daily, The Los Angeles Times: The Guide, Metromix, High Country News, The Cinema Source, New Mexico Independent, The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, Socal.com, Radar Online, Ms. Magazine, East West Magazine, Trazzler.com and The Honolulu Weekly.

The magazine will have a print run of 25,000 copies which will go to students who subscribed on the http://www.ulmagazine.com website or through a sales representative on campus. New subscribers can take advantage of the magazine’s reduced annual rate of $20 for 10 issues.

About University Link Magazine

University Link Magazine, publishing ten editions annually from its offices in North Hollywood, CA, was created with the mission of becoming the premiere magazine written by college students, for college students. It simultaneously creates unique opportunities for the next generation of great writers and journalists, while providing its college-age audience with the most compelling, entertaining, informative and thoughtful stories available in any medium. The magazine is owned and published by University Link, Inc. of Los Angeles. University Link Magazine, 6180 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Suite 320, North Hollywood, CA 91606 USA. Phone: (877) 854-6501; Fax: 818-980-9021; Internet; http://www.ulmagazine.com; email: info@ulmagazine.com.

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See the press release

entertainment

Nikki Finke in The New Yorker

Becca

I stumbled upon this article yesterday… It’s clearly written by a guy who lives in New York, trying to write about Hollywood, but interesting enough.

Call Me

Why Hollywood fears Nikki Finke.

by Tad Friend October 12, 2009

“I don’t pretty it up,” says Finke, who sometimes writes ten posts a day on her Web site, Deadline Hollywood Daily.

On February 5th, Universal Studios and Imagine Entertainment threw a cocktail party for their film “Frost/Nixon,” hoping to stir up buzz for its Oscars prospects. The event, at Nobu Los Angeles, drew many of the town’s entertainment journalists—a contentious bunch. As the guests snacked on yellowtail sashimi, Sharon Waxman, who the previous week had launched an entertainment-business Web site called The Wrap, fell into conversation with a group that included Brian Grazer, Imagine’s co-chairman. Waxman covered Hollywood for the Times from 2003 to 2007; though her reporting occasioned a number of corrections, she is aggressively self-confident. Turning to Grazer, Waxman made a provocative remark about the reporting of her former close friend and now bitter rival Nikki Finke. “She’s always been nice to me,” Grazer replied, before moving away at warp speed. When Finke later demanded that Waxman explain this exchange—Finke seems to have a Google Alert that pings whenever her work is discussed—Waxman denied that she’d been disparaging, and claimed that Grazer had turned white at the mention of Finke’s name: “Fear in the hearts of giants!”

Finke is fifty-five, and a longtime entertainment-business reporter. She runs the Web site Deadline Hollywood Daily out of her apartment in west Los Angeles; in three and a half years she has made D.H.D. Hollywood’s most dreaded news source. Marrying tabloid instincts to a strong Puritan streak, Finke portrays many of the town’s leaders as jackasses who golf at exclusive preserves, elbow underlings aside to hog the spotlight, downsize those underlings while lining their own pockets, and generally besmirch the fabric of civilization. Jeff Zucker, the C.E.O. and president of NBC Universal, is “one of the most kiss-ass incompetents to run an entertainment company”; Charles and James Dolan, who own Cablevision, are a “clown parade”; and Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, is a “crazy old coot.”

See the rest at The New Yorker.

news

News 21 Goes Live

Becca

The website for the News 21 Fellowship  I’ve been involved with for the last ten weeks finally goes live tonight. The stories range from Evangelicals, to new citizens to Native Americans and how their votes will affect the upcoming election. Each story has multimedia elements, including slideshows, video and maps.

I spent some time talking to Native Americans in New Mexico, and discovered that a handful of activists have been working for nearly 20 years to get Native Americans registered to vote. Their efforts are finally paying off this year, with thousands of New Mexico Native Americans mobilized to have a real influence over the outcome of the state.

New Mexico is a beautiful state–with blue sky for days and stunning cliffs–but the poverty of the people was tough to see. Here are some photos, and please check out the site.

Please feel free to check out the general site here:

And my page here.

film

Criticism of the Critic

Becca

The LA Times had an interesting piece on film criticism in their paper today. They let their film critics write about any regrets they’ve ever had about a film they reviewed.

I love film criticism. In a perfect world, I could see movies and write about them everyday (if it would pay the bills). But it is, in my opinion, one of the toughest jobs in writing because you put a part of yourself out there.

I took a reviewing class with Kenneth Turan while I was at USC. It was probably my favorite class of all. Since he is the best film critic at the Times, I expected Kenneth to be a man of intolerable ego, and harsh–well–criticism. What I found was a man confident in his craft, and kind with his teaching. I learned then that the people who are best at what they do don’t need to walk around with a puffed up chest or a thick set of armour.

His article today really makes clear the point and process of criticism. There should be no regret if you are true to your own feelings. Here’s a bit of his article. Find the whole piece here.

“To pretend either to like it or that I didn’t really have an opinion, to pretend in effect that I was someone else to save face and be one of the gang, was simply unacceptable. Criticism is a lonely job, and in the final analysis, either you’re a gang of one or you’re nothing at all.”

news, technology

Citizen Journalism- The future?

Becca

Because my current project has a lot of interaction with Huffington Post’s Off the Bus, I’ve had some time to think about this idea of citizen journalism. The theory that normal citizens who don’t practice journalism as their career can report on the news because of their access to events that reports can’t reach.

While I am still apprehensive about the term, there is no denying that some great stories have been discovered this way. Take Obama’s “bittergate.” This was reportorted to HuffPo by Mayhill Fowler, who has never been a professional writer. She’s got an MA, her husband is a lawyer, she’s an open Obama supporter and she’s raised some kids. But her ability to get a story that no one else got is amazing.

Just the other day, she got a shocking interview with Bill Clinton, who goes on a verbal tirade about a Vanity Fair reporter. While Mr. Clinton is known to have foot-in-mouth syndrome, maybe he was more open with Fowler because she doesn’t have the usual reporter aura about her. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that she got a great quote that many mainstream media sources picked up on.

So, there is a place for this type of truth-sharing. Granted, I don’t want my future job to dissapear before I’ve even got it, but I think we all benefit from this knowledge sharing platform. In this changing world of journalism, flexibility is the key. Time to go do my stretches.

news, technology

Did you know?

Becca

The other day at work, our tech guy showed us this video. It’s amazing that it can actually hold your attention for the entire time, based only on the fact that the facts are so interesting. We are living in a really interesting time. Things are changing so fast. I have often imagined what I’d do without the internet. I’d have a whole lot more free time, for one. But I would have a lot harder of a time trying to do what I want to do for the rest of my life. The world really is at our fingertips…

 

news

Festival of Books

Becca
Today I attended Los Angeles Times’ Festival of Books, an annual event where some of the best writers in the country gather to participate in panels and book signing on the UCLA campus. 

The event is free, and apparently about 140,000 people show up every year, according to their website. 

So I thought it would be a relaxing event, stroll around to a few speakers, buy a few books and get some free stuff. 

I was mistaken.

The attendees of this event are NOT kidding around. We discovered that you could order tickets for the panels ahead of time. We had not done this. THEY had.

There were serious lines for some of the events. Outside of the first panel I saw a line of about four people. That wasn’t so bad for an event about to start in ten minutes. But what I had yet to learn was that there were actually the stragglers. And in emergency-state-like fashion the volunteers almost let us in, then sent us back out, then told us to go in, then told us to wait because people with tickets deserved to get it. People with tickets held them up in the air, waving them around like they just don’t care. The tickets were golden. Golden tickets.

In the end, we got in. But clearly, we were way out of our league with these people.

The first panel was titled “Moments that Shaped America,” with Douglas Brinkley, Michael Eric Dyson, Edward Humes and Bruce Watson. All of these men had very interesting, thoughtful things to say. But Michael Eric Dyson just blew the crowd away. His cadence of speech is mesmerizing, and the thoughts he has to share profound. His words are a mix of part minister, part poet and part rapper. He is one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard, if not the best. In one answer, he quoted both Jay-Z and Martin Luther King, Jr. I am buying his book tomorrow.

The next panel we went to was “Campaign ‘08” with David Frum, Garrett M. Graff, Hugh Hewitt and Robert Scheer. Of course, Bob Scheer got a loud round of applause when introduced. The others—not so much. David Frum is a former speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush, and now a journalist. Graff is editor of Washingtonian Magazine, a professor at Georgetown, and founding editor of Fishbowl D.C. Hugh Hewitt is a radio talk show host, and executive editor of Townhall.com. Bob Scheer, fittingly sitting to the left of these other men, is the editor of Truthdig.

 

 

The debate brushed on several topics including Obama’s electability, McCain’s age and Hillary’s predicament. I found it very interesting to hear to opinions of Republicans on the current Democratic Party situation. Many said that Obama is a risk. But some also admitted that it will be very difficult for McCain to win this race.

 One main point the more conservative speakers made was that people located in liberal urban areas are stuck in a bubble, believing only their opinions to be the beliefs of the entire country. This was met with severe booing. But when a woman in front of me, thirty years my senior, started heckling the speakers, I was severely disappointed. Here is this woman refusing to even hear the other side out. Why is she even attending this debate?

 She was the perfect example of what these men were talking about: people who refuse to even entertain the thought of other viewpoints. Not whether those points of view are right or wrong, but that they do exist. This country is a mosaic of beliefs and opinions, and we’d all be better off if we could just see that for what it is.

 Hugh Hewitt, David Frum, Garrett M. Graff, and Robert Scheer

Hugh Hewitt, David Frum, Garrett M. Graff, and Robert Scheer.