Mediaboss Marketing

Hal McClure, who covered two Arab-Israeli wars after turning a passion for travel and the written word into a career as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, has died in California. He was 92.

McClure died Sunday at a Laguna Hills hospital following surgery to relieve a blood clot on his brain from a recent fall, according to his sister, Virginia McClure.

McClure spent 21 years overseas for the AP beginning in the mid-1950s.

He said he knew he wanted to be a reporter after joining a journalism club at San Fernando High School in Los Angeles. But his career was put on hold by a stint in the Air Force, where he served as a pilot and flight instructor.

"When he got out of the service, his goal was to get a newspaper job and get married," said Stan Walsh, a longtime friend.

McClure did both, in short order. He landed a job as a general assignment reporter at a small newspaper in Central California and wed his sweetheart, Dorothy. It was a marriage that lasted nearly five decades, until her death several years ago.

After a few itinerant years at various papers across California, the AP in Los Angeles offered McClure a job covering Hollywood. He accepted, with the hope of eventually getting a foreign posting.

During his stint on the entertainment beat, he was one of the first reporters on the scene of a car crash that took an eye from Sammy Davis Jr.

His first foreign assignment took him to Singapore, and afterward he was appointed correspondent in Malaysia. One of the big stories he covered at the time was the 1961 disappearance _ still unresolved _ of Michael Rockefeller, son of New York governor and presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller.

McClure covered the search in New Guinea, where the 23-year-old was studying tribal cultures.

Here is the original post:
Ex-AP foreign correspondent Hal McClure dies

THERE IS a new information nervous system in the world today. Its name, in a word: the Internet.

The Internet, according to Press Attache Bettina Malone of the United States Embassy in Manila, is a most important platform for free expression, telling stories, encouraging public discourse, and for exchange of ideas and entrepreneurship.

In her remarks at the opening today of the forum Taking Stock, Taking Control: Freedom of Expression Online, that PCIJ organized with assistance from the US Embassy Press Office, Malone cited the role of citizen journalists in the May 2013 elections.

Citizen journalism is about citizens telling stories about their communities stories that can be brought to the attention of those who make the decision, she said.

We have a new nervous system in the world, she said, but also cited the need to expand Internet access and engagement with greater numbers of the population. What about the ordinary citizens? are they aware of their freedom of expression?

Malone said the US Embassy had first thought about supporting a public forum for citizen journalists to mark the observance of World Press Freedom Day last May 3. The Embassy later agreed to support the PCIJs pitch for a post-election activity that would tackle the role of social media in the May 2013 elections.

Freedom of expression and an open exchange of ideas are the ideas behind the conduct of the forum, she said. Citizen journalists must help keep the freest press in Asia, free, Malone said.

Read this article:
A ‘new global nervous system’? They also call it The Net

Dhoni keeps mum on IPL spot fixing, skips 5 questions in conference

Mumbai: Indian skipper MS Dhoni today kept mum on all questions related to IPL fixing saga and Vindoo Dara Singh in a press conference here.

The CSK captain kept on smiling when journalists from various media houses asked him about the situation of team at this moment (after IPL fixing case) but captain did not speak even a single word.

A press conference was organised to answer the questions related to Indian cricket and Champions trophy.

The conference manager gave instructions to the journalists to ask questions only related to the upcoming Champions trophy.

Reporter repeatedly asked Dhoni about his reaction to the fixing controversy as skipper of Indian cricket team but he skipped.

"Dhoni is very quick in answering questions but his refusal hints there is something wrong," says cricket expert Vinod Kambali.

Earlier, on the eve of the final also, it was announced that there would be a joint press conference by the captains of both the teams (CSK and Mumbai Indians) but it was altered at the last minute and instead the teams' coaches addressed the media.

The arrest of Vindoo Dara Singh, who was spotted with Dhoni's wife Sakshi during more than one match in the IPL, had put spot-fixing shadow on Chennai Super Kings. Even team owner Gurunath Meiyappan had been arrested.

ICC Champions Trophy 2013, also known as 'Mini World Cup' is set to start from June 6, 2013 in England.

Go here to read the rest:
Dhoni keeps mum on IPL spot fixing, skips 5 questions in PC

Australian country music star Keith Urban has officially announced the release date for his new album, Fuse. The music will be released on September 10, right in the middle of his U.S. Light the Fuse tour. The tour begins in June with dates in Nashville, Tennessee and ends in December in Louisville, Kentucky.

In addition to his music, Urban gained exposure recently as a judge on the network TV karaoke competition American Idol. It has recently been reported that his co-judges Nicki Minaj and Randy Jackson will not be returning for the next season of Idol. Speculation is still surrounding Urbans possible return to the show, but it seems the country star is just as much in the dark as Idol fans are.

According to an Associated Press report, Urban stated this week that he has no official information on whether he will return to American Idol. He stated he is pretty much in the same boat as everybody, and is watching Idol rumors.

Read more from the original source:
Keith Urban: New Album, No Word on American Idol

Zach Maher

Getting started can be difficult. When your name draws a blank, its unlikely that anyone will buy what youre selling. Luckily, the attention that worthy unknowns need in order to get noticed has a price. And for fifty years, publishers with books to sell and authors with a name to make have announced their arrival with an appearance in The New York Review: though not, at least initially, under a byline.

In the Reviews twenty-ninth issue, dated October 22, 1964, the third of more than thirty books written by the historian Howard Zinn was advertised on page 13. Zinn was a professor at Boston University when Beacon Press published SNCC: The New Abolitionists in 1964, and not completely unknown: five years earlier, his doctoral dissertation on Fiorello LaGuardia had won a prestigious award from the American Historical Association. But Howard Zinns examination of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and their revolutionary spirit (whose implications, the ads copy promises, we have only begun to realize,) drew the attention of general readers, sympathetic and otherwise. Four months after the books ad appeared and in the same pages, Laura Carper considered SNCC: The New Abolitionists in an omnibus review focused on race relations.

The poet Seamus Heaney has contributed, among other pieces, a memoriam of Robert Lowell and an article on Thomas Flanagan to the Review. And when Heaneys acclaimed translation of Beowulf was published in 1999, a passage was excerpted in the NYRB with insightful critical and exegetic notes from the author. But the first time his name appeared, in a single-column ad that ran in the October 8, 1968 issue of the Review, Heaney, or more precisely his publisher, Oxford University Press, was a paying advertiser. An impressive and sensitive collection, this is the first volume of poems by a young poet who has already won an appreciative audience in his native Ireland, read the copy for his book Death of Naturalist. Almost thirty years later, the Nobel Prize committee would justify their selection of Heaney as laureate with less subdued praise for his works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.

The move Howard Zinn and Seamus Heaney made from the Reviews advertising margins to its editorial substance wasnt unique. Renata Adler, Cormac McCarthy, and Anne Carson: before these names could dependably draw a crowd, marketers and copy-writers introduced them to readers of the Review.

A Year in the Dark (Random House) and Toward a Radical Middle (Random House), the first two books written by The New Yorker staffwriter, critic, journalist, and novelist Renata Adler, were advertised in the March 12, 1970 issue of the Review. Their titles appeared beneath a dramatic author photo (a novelty in a publication that, for several years, was almost exclusively illustrated by David Levine and Grandville.) Adlers name would move onto a New York Review byline in 1980, when she published her famously critical review of the film critic Pauline Kael; and then in 2013, NYRB Classics returned Adlers two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, to print.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy is famously publicity averse. Nevertheless, in the October 8, 1968 issue of the Review, the camera-shy southwesterner, flush with the success of his first novel, swallowed his pride and lent his likeness to Random Houses advertisements for his second, Outer Dark. I saw you blush! Oprah would accuse McCarthy, years later, when he joined her book club to chat about his novel The Road. In 1968, the author does no such thing: he grins toothily, like a rockabilly star, his hair slicked up into a modest pompadour.

Read the original:
"And Now a Word from Our Sponsors"