New York Film Academy [Sponsor]

My thanks to The New York Film Academy for sponsoring the candler blog this week.

You might say the person who studies producing for film and television at the undergraduate or graduate school level is possessed of certain audaciousness. What kind of a person envisions running the whole show at that age?

To be a producer is a pinnacle experience, after all. Rarely does the producer become an actor, but many actors migrate to producing. At the New York Film Academy, the Producing Program (housed within the Film School) treats students as producers throughout their program. They start with a book, play, concept or treatment and walk it down the critical path of being produced: the pitch, treatment, script, talent search, budget and schedule, all the way through distribution and marketing.

Producers cannot be wallflowers, so it makes sense that those who choose this program arrive with a good deal of self-confidence. Experience in the industry is not an entrance requirement, but the desire to create breakthrough films and television programs is.

Tina Brown and Baba Shetty, this morning:

Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue.

I don’t read Newsweek, and have found their digital offerings thus far appalling.¹ However, this is major news in the media world. I expect this is the first of many similar announcements throughout 2013.

In our judgment, we have reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format. This was not the case just two years ago. It will increasingly be the case in the years ahead.

It’s a brave new world, I suppose.

Still, I give the all-digital Newsweek a year, maybe two at best.

Jeffrey Goldberg on his blog at The Atlantic:

The embarrassment is that political culture in America is such that we can’t have an adult conversation about the lessons of Benghazi, a conversation that would focus more on understanding al Qaeda affiliates in North Africa, on the limitations and imperfections of security, and on shortfalls in our intelligence gathering, than on who said what when in the Rose Garden.

Smart guy.

What the Golden Globes lack in gravitas they make up for in host choices. Next year’s show should be great.

This morning Boxee unveiled their followup to the Boxee Box: Boxee TV. It’s $99 and comes with an antenna built in, allowing you to watch live, over-the-air broadcasts.

But the real secret sauce is their “No Limits DVR,” a $14.99/month service that they describe like so:

Instead of storing your recording on a local hard-drive, Boxee TV uploads your recordings to the cloud. It means there are no limits to how much you can record and no limits to where you watch - on your laptop, tablet and, of course, your TV.

Upon launch in November, No Limits DVR will be available in eight markets and rolling out to more in 2013. We’ll see about that…this is the same company that, back in 2010, promised to add Hulu Plus to the Boxee Box in similar “sometime next year” fashion, a promise that remains unfulfilled.

But the price is right to compete.

Hog Bay Software just released a new app that’s been in public beta for some time:

FoldingText combines the best of what we’ve learned from WriteRoom and TaskPaper into a new tool for plain text productivity. The foundation is a plain text outliner that uses Markdown formatting. But that’s just the start.

I toyed with the beta a few times but never knew some of the awesome capabilities of FoldingText. The timers and to-do lists illustrated in the promotional video are pretty amazing. I may need to give this one another look.

FoldingText is on sale for $14.99 right now. If you use this link to buy it I’ll get a few pennies to help keep the lights on here at the candler blog. I thank you in advance.

Loren Brichter is most famous for creating Tweetie, the iPhone Twitter client that was so good the company actually bought it (and Loren). He went on to design Twitter’s official iPad and Mac apps.

But Twitter has moved past his work, and Loren has moved past Twitter. He’s back now, with a game.

Neat project (and now book) from Ishac Bertran: 55 poems written entirely from code. From the abstract:

Code is the language used to communicate with computers. It has its own rules (syntax) and meaning (semantics). Like literature writers or poets, coders also have their own style that include - strategies for optimizing the code being read by a computer, and facilitating its understanding through visual organization and comments for other coders.

Be sure to read Bertran’s interview with The Creators Project.

Nicholas D. Kristof’s column in this Sunday’s New York Times went live online today. In it he recounts the recent health struggles of his Harvard roommate, Scott Androes, who is battling prostate cancer without insurance:

We all make mistakes, and a humane government tries to compensate for our misjudgments. That’s why highways have guardrails, why drivers must wear seat belts, why police officers pull over speeders, why we have fire codes. In other modern countries, Scott would have been insured, and his cancer would have been much more likely to be detected in time for effective treatment.

Is that a nanny state? No, it’s a civilized one.

(via Stephen Hackett.)

Jason Del Rey at Ad Age follows the money on a claim that Microsoft will spend between $1.5 and $1.8 billion on its Windows 8 ad campaign, a figure cited as fact by TechCrunch and The Verge:

The outlet cited for that estimate? Forbes. Which is kinda, sorta true.

A post on Forbes.com by Dave Einstein does indeed say that Microsoft “will roll out with a marketing campaign estimated at $1.5 to $1.8 billion.” But Mr. Einstein isn’t a Forbes journalist; he’s a freelancer hired by data-storage company – and Forbes advertiser – NetApp to write for NetApp’s blog on Forbes.com, part of Forbes’ BrandVoice (formerly AdVoice) program, for which advertisers pay to publish posts on the site.

Del Rey chalks this up to the “new, new world of media,” but I’d say this is simply a journalistic failure on all accounts. Einstein’s piece does appear under the Forbes banner, a dicy game for Forbes’ editorial wing. Of course, there is a nice little icon for BrandVoice with a helpful drop-down that states the following:

Forbes BrandVoice™ allows marketers to connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create content – and participate in the conversation – on the Forbes digital publishing platform. Each BrandVoice™ is written, edited and produced by the marketer.

The tiniest bit of elbow-grease from any one of the outlets that cited Einstein’s post would have revealed that Forbes did not break this news, which of course throws into question its veracity.

But anyway, I need to just fall in line with the new, new media, I guess, where anyone with a big enough check can fool bloggers into thinking an ad is actually news.