The nominees for the 2010 Oscars were recently announced, and DVD pirates have already managed to release most of the films to the web. In an annual analysis of how many Oscar-nominated films are illegally available on the internet, Andy Baio of Waxy found that piracy was not as rampant as it has been in years past. With a month remaining before the awards ceremony, fewer screeners and DVD-quality files have been leaked, and camcorder and telesync releases have dropped, too. Baio doesn’t offer a definitive answer to why piracy is dropping, but will continue to update his analysis as more of the films are leaked.

Source: Waxy 

Image by DeusXFlorida, licensed under Creative Commons.

From Cute Yummy Time to Advances in Potato Chemistry and Technology, 2009 was a great year for odd book titles. The Bookseller pays homage to many of these strange, quirky, or off-color titles in its annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year award. The magazine recently released its “Very Longlist” of 49 of the strangest book titles of 2009, including Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich, Is the Rectum a Grave?, Peek-a-Poo: What's in Your Diaper?, and Venus Does Adonis While Apollo Shags a Tree.

(Thanks to nominee, The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin.)

Source: The Bookseller

In this beautiful piece of media criticism, British journalist Charlie Brooker pulls together the most annoying and inane clichés in broadcast television reporting. From the annoying vox-pop commentary to the meaningless animated charts, Brooker shows how TV news is able to show a lot, without saying anything.

(Thanks, The Awl.)

The architecture magazine Dwell always strives for aesthetic heights with its often dour and stark photographs of beautiful, expensive homes. The blog Unhappy Hipsters pokes some good-natured fun at Dwell’s photos by writing pithy captions that turn each photograph into a story with just a few words. According to the blog’s tagline, “It’s lonely in the modern world.” It’s also pretty funny.

Source: Unhappy Hipsters 

Ciné Institute is the only film school in Haiti. It was founded in 2008 on Haiti’s southern coast and serves Hatian youth. The school was flattened by the earthquake. The gear that survived has been put to good use. Here’s a compilation of (sometimes graphic) footage shot by the students of Ciné Institute:

(Thanks, Global Voices.)

Astute readers have been writing in to ask about the status of Frank Killick, the 24-year-old Haitian-American featured in our January-February issue who had never set foot in Haiti when he was deported to Port-au-Prince after being convicted of a minor crime in Florida.

We don't have an answer yet. However, Amy Bracken, who profiled Killick, has been reporting from Haiti for PRI’s The World. The experiences she’s been relaying from Port-au-Prince are unlike any others I’ve heard and worth a listen. Here’s an excerpt from a recent dispatch:

The only act of violence that I saw was at a cemetery when a man was furious that the man burying his daughter wasn’t paying enough attention to burying his daughter and he was all over the place burying other people as well and that got a little bit sketchy and I was actually at a nearby funeral and members of that funeral ran over to try to break up the fight. Which I think shows that tensions are high but there is also a strong effort on the part of a lot of people to keep things calm.

Source: The World

Both CBS and CNN sent about 50 staffers to Haiti in the wake of the recent earthquake. Fox sent 25. ABC, NPR, newspapers, websites, and other media outlets all sent their own reporters and photographers, too. Meanwhile, nurses and search-and-rescue teams were stranded in the United States—ready and waiting to help the Haitian relief effort—unable to get there because of transportation bottlenecks. Once in the country, reporters need to find places to stay, supplies for their reportage, and places to eat. Based on admittedly anecdotal evidence, Noam Scheiber writes in the New Republic that these media personalities inevitably raise the price of goods, occupy valuable places to stay, and take resources away from the Haitian relief effort.

And the journalism that has emerged from the army of media that has descended upon Haiti has been largely redundant. To curb the deluge of media personalities, Scheiber suggests the creation of a “disaster pool” of reporters, who would share their reportage with all the major networks. Just as with White House coverage, where a single interview is often used by many news outlets, smaller teams of reporters could be sent to disaster-stricken areas to cover the story for multiple networks. The news is still broadcast throughout the world, and more resources go where they’re really needed.  

Source: The New Republic 

Image by Nehrams2020, licensed under Creative Commons.