“On Broadway, Timon and Pumbaa have entertained audiences for years with their Brooklyn accents. But in China, the famous meerkat-warthog duo not only speak Chinese, but they also do so with a distinct beifang, or northern, twang.”
Category: AUDIENCE
How NPR Unlocked A Ton Of Data About How Its Listeners Listen
“The largest age group listening to NPR One is 25- to 34-year-olds, according to NPR, with 40 percent of listeners under 35. More than a third of users who answered NPR surveys said they never or only occasionally listen to broadcast radio.”
What’s Truly *New* About The Internet
Virginia Heffernan: “Speed and expansiveness, to start. On expanse: The population of our ether – users of cell tech and wifi – is now just about coextensive with the population of the earth. This is fathomless by most minds. And speed: The illusion of near-absolute compression of time and space on the Internet is an illusion so beguiling we are virtually powerless to refuse it as real, except for short periods and with great mental or spiritual focus.”
Romania Tries Crowdfunding To Keep Brancusi Sculpture In Country
“Wisdom of the Earth is a 50cm (20in) tall sculpture carved from limestone in a primitive modernist style. … Dating to 1907 or 1908, it is one of just a few Brâncuşi works remaining in his homeland. The government has pledged €5m towards the €11m price, much lower than its estimated value of €15m-20m, and is seeking the rest from private contributions by 30 September.”
Is 2016 The Year Jazz Came Back?
“Welcome to the strange jazz resurgence of the new millennium. Jazz is definitely hot again … yet all of this is happening outside of the jazz world. This is a peculiar turn of events.”
Video Is Not Going To Supplant Text, Regardless Of What Facebook Says
As she was predicting that, in five years, the social networking behemoth would probably be “video, video, video,” Facebook exec Nicola Mendelsohn said last week that video “conveys so much more information in a much quicker period.” As Michael Hiltzik explains, “This is, of course, exactly wrong.”
Hearing A Rock Concert Inside A Volcano (And Getting Airlifted Out By The Icelandic Coast Guard)
“As we waited we were assured that it has been 4,000 years since Thrihnukagigur’s last eruption, and that the guides were ‘pretty certain’ we’d continue to be safe from any fiery deluge at least through Moreno’s final bow.”
New Tate Modern Breaks Attendance Records
“Tate said there had been 143,000 visits since the revamped and expanded modern art gallery opened on Friday. On Saturday alone there were more than 54,000 visits – around double the usual visitor number and the highest ever attendance for a single day.”
This Week In Audience: Is Text Slipping Away As We Go More Video?
Looking for diverse audiences? Here’s where they are… But orchestras are still struggling to be relevant… Turns out attention might be a muscle we have to use or we lose it… FaceBook wonders if it will be all-video in five years… And libraries get into loaning e-books.
There May Be No Accounting For Taste, But The Internet Will Try, Nevertheless
Louis Menand: “The science of preferences dates back to the origins of the advertising and public-relations industries, but the Internet has provided it with a vast new field of operations. Compared with television, which basically had advertisers throwing tomatoes at barns labelled, for example, ‘Women eighteen to thirty-four,’ the Internet is a precision instrument.”