New Media

Among the places cyberspace can't reach: into a coal mine. The real-life drama near Huntington, Utah, where six miners are trapped underground and presumed dead, and where three of their fellow miners died in a rescue attempt, has been all but immune from the blogging and new media that often blanket modern tragedies. The parameters of the story lend themselves to what the new media typically do best - following news in hard-to-reach places in real time around the clock. But the chronicle of the accident that began early Aug. 6 seems as riven with uncertainty as the reports of epic mine disasters of the past.

NEW YORK -- Everything about Jaime Levy and her start-up Internet services company seems raw and new. She talks less like a CEO and more like a Greenwich Village diva. Her four employees work out of an old machine shop on West 25th Street. Her creative director alternates between designing World Wide Web sites and adding plaster to the walls.But at age 31, with seven years of experience in new media, Levy is among the oldest and most successful of the old guard in Silicon Alley, the name given to lower Manhattan's quirky, artsy alternative to the great valley of silicon out West.

New positionsSerio to manage sales at Admiral Fell InnAdmiral Fell Inn appointed Sherrolynn Serio as sales manager and Iwona Diaz as executive housekeeper.Serio, a Pasadena resident who was formerly with the BWI Marriott, will oversee corporate, group and association sales. Diaz will manage the inn's housekeeping staff and be responsible for quality control. Formerly an executive housekeeper with Hampton Inns, she has more than 20 years' experience in hotel housekeeping.Port City Press names Queen to media positionPort City Press appointed Kenneth E. Queen II as new media technical support representative for its new media services program.

SAN FRANCISCO -- After seven years of shrinking revenues, the advertising industry bounced back sharply in 1994 and is poised for growth, ad executives say.That new confidence is reflected in ads that are more creative and riskier than they have been in some time, according to Luis Bassat, chairman and chief creative director of Bassat, Ogilvy & Mather in Barcelona, Calif."

No longer content to offer merely an information pipeline, Bell Atlantic Corp. has forged an alliance with two other phone companies and a leading Hollywood talent agency to produce the programs that will flow through it.Philadelphia-based Bell Atlantic, the company that provides telephone service to most Marylanders, announced today that it will link up with NYNEX and and Pacific Telesis Group to create a "virtual network" covering six of the nation's top...

Beginning this fall, about 1,400 TV viewers in Orlando, Fla., will no longer have to watch the news in packages assembled by ABC's Peter Jennings or Cable News Network or their local TV station.Instead, when they turn on the set, they'll face a menu of choices: world news, national stories, local happenings, weather, sports, business, travel or entertainment.With a flick of the remote, they can scan the headlines, skip stories that bore them, see an entire press conference, hear extended weather forecasts, listen to stock market analysis or watch highlights of sports events -- but only the ones they want to see.The goal, say executives of media giant Time Warner, which is behind the Orlando experiment, is to create a news product that combines the impact of television with the convenience of a newspaper, where stories can be read in any order and at any time.

Washington -- IS LARRY King a journalist? Is Ted Koppel a talk-show host? Is there any difference between the two?Until recently, the answer to the first question was "no"; the answer to the second equally "no"; and to the third a resounding "yes."Mr. King was unmistakably the king of talk, but no one expects him to do a stand-upper on arms control from the State Department. Mr. Koppel was the journalist, who covered wars, politics and diplomacy for ABC News before the Ayatollah Khomeini launched the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and -- unwittingly -- the exceptional "Nightline."

A star of sorts was born in Hollywood yesterday as three of the nation's regional Bell telephone companies came together to bankroll a new media venture to produce and acquire programs for their video systems of the not-too-distant future.The $300 million newcomer, prosaically dubbed the Media Co. until a more suitable name can be found, is the progeny of Bell Atlantic Corp., Nynex and Pacific Telesis Group. Hollywood talent agent Michael Ovitz served as midwife for the deal, which will create a "virtual network" covering six of the nation's top seven media markets, including Baltimore- Washington.

Long before 1983 became 1984, it was clear that the dystopian future of George Orwell's novel would not come to pass in the industrialized West.There were plenty of places where Big Brother was watching, including the Soviet Union, but (as in contemporary Iran) their dictatorships were far more likely to stand in the way of modern technologies -- and particularly of communications technology -- than to exploit it.It was that fact as much as anything else that precipitated the failure and ultimate breakup of the Soviet Union.

Michael Ovitz, the Hollywood agent whose deals have repeatedly shaken up the worlds of entertainment and advertising, yesterday announced he is hiring a top AT&T executive to lead Creative Artists Agency into the new multimedia world.The executive, Robert Kavner, 50, will seek ways to tie CAA and its long list of movie and music superstars, writers and directors into the so-called information superhighway. That could include their involvement in anything from CD-ROM and movies-on-demand to computer information networks and video games.

You know it's going to be a difficult day when you wake up with "Guantanamera, Guajira Guantanamera, Guantanamera, Guajira Guantanamera" going around and around in your head and it won't stop. You know that probably you should not tackle health care reform today, though brainlessness has not stopped other people from weighing in on it. Here are mobs of flannel-mouthed robots denouncing Socialist Gummint Takeover as Medicare goes rolling along rather tidily, and the private schemes resemble railroads of the early 19th century, when each line decided its own gauge and each stationmaster decided what time it is. Anyone who has tried to coax authorization for payment from Federated Amalgamated Health knows that, for incomprehensible standards and voluminous rules and implacable bureaucrats, the health insurance industry carries on where the Italian postal service left off. The goons who go to town hall meetings and shout down the congressmen are museum pieces.

The newsroom of The Diamondback, the student paper at the University of Maryland, College Park, retains the feel of an old-school city room. Framed front pages line the walls and bound volumes of yellowing issues collect dust on tables. Daily meetings are oriented toward producing the next morning's newspaper. The staff members know it might be the last newspaper they ever work for. As the industry sheds jobs by the thousands and papers close or go digital-only, there is a rethinking of journalism education.

Raymond Fielding chronicled the last great convulsion between old and new media a half-century ago. It ended in the only modern extinction of a major type of news media. He does not believe what's going on now between print and the Internet will end like that. (Insert huge hopeful sigh from print journalist here.) Fielding wrote The American Newsreel: 1911-1967, which laid out the rise and fall of a now-forgotten form that delivered news to the masses in moving pictures and sound in movie theaters through the first half of the 20th century.

AIDS virus could be eliminated in a decade The virus that causes AIDS could theoretically be eliminated in a decade, if all people living in countries with high infection rates are regularly tested and treated, according to a new mathematical model. It is an intriguing solution to end the AIDS epidemic. But it is based on assumptions rather than data and is riddled with logistical problems. The research was published online last week in the medical journal, The Lancet. "It's quite a startling result," said Charlie Gilks, an AIDS treatment expert at the World Health Organization and one of the paper's authors.

It didn't rank up there with Alan Greenspan's famed caution about "irrational exuberance" a decade ago, before the dot-com bubble burst and wiped out trillions in paper wealth, but Nick Denton's warning the other day caused people to take notice. Denton is a new-media mogul -- an Oxford-educated former financial journalist who's become fabulously wealthy off his collection of popular blogs. The Sunday Times of London estimated his wealth last year at about $290 million. His New York-based Gawker Media operates several of the most busily browsed Web logs, whose daily readership would rank among the top newspapers in the country.

New technology is not automatically making for more democracy - nor is it pushing old media elites into the background, as many analysts have predicted. While longtime giants of American media, such as Time Warner and NBC, are successfully adapting to the digital landscape, citizen journalists and bloggers are emulating old media "gatekeeper" ways by restricting access to other new voices once they get established online. Those are among the findings of the State of the News Media 2008 report issued today by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organization based in Washington.

As one who writes for a living, I find it gratifying that almost two-thirds of the public say they support the writers strike. The TV and movie writers, represented by the Writers Guild of America, walked out in early November. The move by the 12,000-member union shut down the production of more than a dozen sitcoms and almost all late-night entertainment shows. Recent polls by Pepperdine University, Fox News, SurveyUSA and the show business newspaper Variety showed widespread public support for the writers.

An alien with an infectious form of tuberculosis shows that border control is not merely an economic or national security issue. It's a medical emergency bringing new meaning to the phrase "yearning to breathe free." Francisco Santos, 17, an alien of undetermined status, walked into the emergency room of the Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Ga., last Friday with symptoms of what was diagnosed as a case of active, contagious tuberculosis. At first, Mr. Santos, who listed his birthplace as Mexico, refused treatment and threatened to walk out and head back to his home country.

Among the places cyberspace can't reach: into a coal mine. The real-life drama near Huntington, Utah, where six miners are trapped underground and presumed dead, and where three of their fellow miners died in a rescue attempt, has been all but immune from the blogging and new media that often blanket modern tragedies. The parameters of the story lend themselves to what the new media typically do best - following news in hard-to-reach places in real time around the clock. But the chronicle of the accident that began early Aug. 6 seems as riven with uncertainty as the reports of epic mine disasters of the past.

New -- Artists' Gallery in the American City Building, 10227 Wincopin circle, Columbia, will show Explorations, an all-member show focused on the artists' pursuit of new media, style, subject matter and perspectives, from Monday through Aug. 24. A reception is planned from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Aug. 3. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, and by appointment. 410-740-8349.