Vice Media

History Founded in 1994 as Voice of Montreal by Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi, and Gavin McInnes, a magazine focused on alternative music and culture in Canada Name was changed to Vice in 1996, then moved to NYC in 1999 Since then, Vice Media has expanded into a range of digital content, with topics ranging from […]

Citizenfour and the Attack on Paris

The attack on Paris on November 13th re-ignited a fierce debate on whether or not the government should surveil citizens for their own protection. This, of course, comes after the public revelation in 2013 that the US government had secretly been employing sweeping surveillance measures on its own citizens, ostensibly for our own protection. Thanks […]

#Mizzou

In light of the recent protests going on at the University of Missouri, I figured it’d be a good idea to take a look at how some news sites and social media sites are handling the protests. First, there’s the #MizzouHungerStrike hashtag, propagated throughout Twitter after graduate student and activist Jonathan Butler began a hunger […]

The Economic State of Journalism

As we all know, modern journalism is in a quasi-state of decay. That is, traditional print media, in trying to keep up with fancy digital media, is quickly making moves to transition into the digital domain, yet is still falling behind. Digital media, meanwhile, seems unable to support itself on its own, as issues with […]

Livetweeting The Republican Debate

So our assignment in-class last week was to live tweet the Republican candidate debate within 45 minutes. It was actually a bit more difficult than I anticipated, given that I had to quickly synthesize whatever a candidate said and then make a 140-character tweet about it. This is how I started: What's up guys, gonna […]

Data Journalism

Data journalism is basically journalism written with math instead of letters. It’s the collection and analysis of raw data to create or reinforce a narrative. Usually, data journalists turn this information into infographics for easy audience consumption; plus, it’s often the most tangible way of reporting the analysis of the data they have collected in […]

Video in the News Media

It’s one thing to read about an event happening in a newspaper; it’s another thing entirely to watch it happen. That’s what video allows us to do: experience the news as if we were actually there. It’s the same principle as when we put pictures in print media; it gives us a better idea of […]

Copyright Criminals

So, the main issue in the documentary Copyright Criminals seems to be that artists have a problem with the concept of sampling. Sampling is when a musician uses a piece of another artist’s work in order to create an entirely new song. For example, one of the most famous drum beats of all rap and hip-hop history […]

Piracy, Property and Copyright

When I was growing up, there were two methods of getting new music. First, we could buy it legally from the iTunes Store, which was launched in 2003, when I was in third grade. Of course, if you’re a third grader, you have to ask your parents for permission to buy music, and if the […]