Hundreds of people marched from Pershing Square to City Hall on Saturday, some with masks, some with bandanas, and many with signs bearing slogans admonishing the government, corporations and the current financial climate.

“We are the 99%”
“It’s not a crisis it’s a scam”
“Audit the Fed”
“Rights for the people not for corporations”
“200k in grad school debt where is my bailout?”

The protesters have been camped out on the City Hall lawn since Saturday, in solidarity with the 3-week strong Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. If America is a democracy, why does 1 percent of the population control 40 percent of the wealth, and take 25 percent of the income, economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz asked in the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair.

By mid-September, a few dozen representatives of the 99 percent mobilized and began an occupation of Liberty Park near Wall Street. The protests doubled and tripled in size, topping the news last Saturday night with some 700 arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Saturday, October 1 was also Day 1 for Occupy LA and in dozens of other cities including Boston and Chicago, the peaceful, anti-establishment protests spread in a manner inspired by the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring. With City Hall Park filled with people of all ages and ethnicities in circles of political conversation, megaphone-led chanting, drums and hacky sacks anyone napping under the numbered trees might have thought they woke up in the ’70s.

The L.A. contingency is relatively well organized, having met with City Hall officials and communicated with LAPD in advance of the Saturday march, training dozens of volunteer security to keep protesters on the sidewalk, hosting workshops on how to engage with civic leaders on City Hall’s north lawn, and coordinating with unions and progressive leaders. A nightly general assembly (GA) can go as long as three hours as established protesers and newcomers alike consider and vote on policies and tactics by consensus. The few dozen tents on City Hall’s south lawn shifted back to the north lawn when requested and the entire operation moves to the sidewalks from 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. per LAPD orders.

On Monday, when a hundred or so marched around the financial district, making stops to protest outside Mellon and Chase Banks, two squad cars followed in tow, protecting the protesters from rush hour traffic. The officers had a begrudged look on their faces but they were doing the jobs.

“It’s been a very peaceful demonstration,” Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Mitzi Fierro told the LA Times Sunday. “They’re out there exercising their First Amendment right, so we’re going to allow them to continue as long it doesn’t become an unlawful assembly.”

“The Police are Part of the 99%” read another sign at the rally Saturday. Even Warren Buffet agrees that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes and with the economy still reeling after the taxpayer-funded $400 billion bailout of the financial industry and automakers, perhaps something’s got to give.

So far, there have been no arrests related to Occupy LA, however, the “love” expressed for LAPD in the chat room on the Occupy Los Angeles livestream is often tempered with caution. In New York, JPMorgan Chase recently donated a record $4.6 million to NYPD, leading many Occupy Wall Street protesters to cry that the police are owned by the banksters. And if that’s how the system works well the protests have only just begun.

Early cries of a corporate media blackout of Occupy Wall Street were all-but corroborated by NPR, whose Executive editor for news Dick Meyer was quoted in a September 26 blog post from ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos as saying, “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”

In hindsight, Meyer clearly missed the point. “What impresses me about media coverage of #occupywallstreet is how inattentive it is to a sleeping factor: the social media ignition moment,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted on September 27, referring to the exponential swelling of movements made possible by sharing across online networks.

Lack of media coverage hasn’t been an issue in Los Angeles, and certainly not since the 700 arrests in New York. The movement has issued a lengthy declaration and list of demands. But it seems as though there isn’t a clear endgame. Occupy Wall Street leverages the networked culture of the internet era, as Rosen alluded to, in hopes of expanding the conversation beyond right/left talking points and media quick hits. “It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped,” wrote Douglas Rushkoff on Wednesday.

All is peaceful at City Hall. But today is just Day 5 of Occupy LA and a hundred or so protesters are expected to campout on the sidewalk again. As the Occupy Wall Street movement goes global how big will it grow? How much will the city and the police tolerate?

Photos via Andy Sternberg’s flickr set.

While local TV news was the main source for staples such as weather, traffic and breaking news, the internet was the preferred resource for finding more specific information, according to the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project.

Local news and information is filtered best via community, perhaps even more so in the digital age. People continue to show faith in community, whether learning news via word-of-mouth at the supermarket or via local sources and neighbors on Facebook and Twitter. Fifty-five percent said they get their local news via word of mouth at least once a week compared to 74 percent for television, 51 percent for radio, 50 percent for the local newspaper, 47 percent for the Internet, and 9 percent for a printed community newsletter.

Read the rest of my post and check out the full survey at KCET’s The Public Note blog.

Her new book, Kill the Messenger examines the recent history of the media’s role and influence on cultural and political conflicts from the Holocaust, to the Rwandan genocide to WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring. It’s a five-part book illustrating the influence of media on society and the human condition under varying cultural and political climates. Media can make a big difference, the book resolves, from fomenting mass rage and genocide upon a wave of propaganda in Rwanda to creating and enabling a bridge to conflict resolution with the help of international NGOs in neighboring Burundi.

AS: Is there a primary theme in Kill the Messenger that alludes to a particular pattern that drives media toward influencing the public for better or worse?

MA: The overarching theme is that media can be used for good and bad… in the cases where you have this awful combination of extremists controlling the media and ethical journalism being silenced or diminished, you can have some really dire consequences.

In the worst case scenarios, when ethical responsible journalism is largely silenced and you end up with this hegemonic message that is of an ideological, specifically extremist nature, you can end up with genocide — Rwanda, the Holocaust, and what we saw in Bosnia. Of course it’s not just the media you have to have all these other circumstances into play… but if you look across history what you find is a lot of these conflicts start when extremists take the microphone.

On the other side, we saw some transformations in the Middle East that happened really fast this year. It looked like they happened fast but they’d been brewing for years. I argue that mass media and journalism have been bringing about political transformation for decades. We saw South Africa go from being an Apartheid state to a multiracial democracy. That wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have diligent, relentless journalism and journalists looking deeply at these issues and uncovering the abuses and showing the inequities that were occurring in South Africa.

Taiwan and Mexico happened at the same time — two single-party authoritarian rules fell [Mexico’s PRI and Taiwan’s KMT in 2000]. And it took decades. And a lot of trouble by a handful of small journalists — it wasn’t the mainstream establishment — that showed people how the system was inadequate and not just or fair.

The ways people silence journalism range from killing them and torturing them to limiting access to not employing journalists with something important to say. There are also financial constraints, with the internet and the way some information is freely dissemminated — in some cases inaccurately.

Read my complete Q&A with Maria Armoudian at KCET’s The Public Note.

A massive hurricane is swirling toward the eastern seaboard of the U.S. leaving 29 million people under a Hurricane warning on Friday night. Currently a category 2 storm, Hurricane Irene is forecast to straddle the coast before making landfall near New York City. Here in Southern California we don’t have many hurricane threats but then again it had been a while since the East Coast experienced a strong earthquake before this week. But in 1939 the only tropical storm to make landfall in California killed dozens at sea before coming ashore in Long Beach. 45 deaths were reported as a result of the flooding. And in 1858 a hurricane is said to have nearly made landfall off the San Diego coast, causing the 2011 equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars before turning back out to sea.

But in the 19th and even the 20th centuries we did not have the advanced warning and communications systems that we have today. Without even grazing land, Hurricane Irene is making history — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that today was the first time in the city’s history that mandatory evacuations had been ordered. About a quarter-million residents, primarily on the low-lying edges of Manhattan were urged to abandon their homes. New York’s subway system will be shut down Saturday at noon due to the threat of flooding.

It’s uncertain what kind of damage might result from up 20 hours of sustained tropical storm force winds (40-60 mph forecast), a storm surge up to six feet and a deluge of rain (anywhere from 6 to 15 inches) to top off a wet summer.

But one thing is for sure: Hurricane Irene is headed directly toward NYC. Unless it veers to the west. Or takes a more easterly track. In the post-Katrina era both the government and the public hope to avoid any catastrophic surprises.

NYC Evacuation Map

Google is hosting a central interface where anyone can view and mashup meteorological and government mapping data at crisislanding.appspot.com. FEMA announced a new text messaging service and an Android app today and is regularly publishing updates on local government emergency information sources available on Twitter and is recommending its Ready.gov preparedness guide. Mayor Bloomberg’s office is continuously tweeting updates as well. Maps of the evacuation zones and shelters have proliferated across the web even as the NYC.gov site buckled under heavy demand earlier today.

Power outages will be widespread and cellular voice services may be shaky as they were following Tuesday’s almost entirely unexpected East Coast earthquake. SMS and mobile data services, however, are more likely to tough out the storm and it will be Twitter messages and photos and YouTube videos that will keep people updated in near-real time on their internet-enabled smartphones even after the power goes out (until, inevitably the battery dies on the phone).

Originally posted on KCET’s The Public Note blog.

I am now writing a weekly blog post on media in the digital age for KCET’s The Public Note and will also be contributing posts on local policy at 1st and Spring in addition to occasional posts for LAist.

The ongoing “phone hacking” scandal in the UK may seem like a distant and isolated issue considering how limited the reporting has been in the U.S. press but it’s possible that the media is shying away because it hits too close to home.

What’s come to light in the past month in Britain may be indicative of unethical — if not unlawful — behavior that’s become pervasive across all Western media in the digital age.

At the center of attention is News Corporation, owned by Rupert Murdoch. News Corp. executives will meet with board members in Los Angeles this week for the first time since the scandal, which had been brewing for years, finally broke.

Please click here to continue reading the full article at KCET.org. The following is a brief excerpt.

The fact that News Corp. (and its subsidiaries News Limited in Australia and News International in the UK) has extensive holdings across multiple media platforms suggests that its next moves represent an accountability moment.

In today’s information age it’s not so easy to fabricate stories without getting caught. But the media business is still dominated by the need to have a growing audience to sustain interest from advertisers. The picture emerging from the scandal in the UK is that media outlets will go to great lengths to break stories and attain new information — even illegally — and pay whatever price necessary to keep authorities, whistleblowers, and employees quiet.

Leveraging influence with authorities through payment or blackmail is verboten but it’s an issue that crosses seamlessly over to News Corp’s U.S. holdings, which include Fox News. Through his stable of newspapers, magazines, and broadcast holdings, Murdoch has “strenuously endorsed political candidates and causes and, at times, secured government favors that serve their business interests,” writes Frank Rich in New York which recently published a list of politicians on News Corp.’s payroll.

It’s possible that de-consolidation of the News Corp. empire could be good for both Murdoch and the future of private media and the public interest, as Nicholas Lemann recently suggested on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

But it may be best for independent journalists to carry on watching, reporting and holding all public figures and corporate media accountable for such transgressions.

Strong sales of new releases from the top ladies in song and multiple reissues of classic albums made the first half of 2011 the best 6 months for album sales since 2004, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The one percent increase in sales is little more than a tiny bright spot for an industry which has gone into a tailspin over the past decade. The major labels failed to capitalize on emerging digital distribution models early on and do not look to be in a position to recover any time soon.

155.5 million albums were sold over the first six months of 2011 compared to 153.9 million for the same period last year. Digital track sales are growing at a faster pace, up 10 percent to 660 million, according to CNET. Digital album sales are up 20 percent, according to the L.A. Times. Vinyl sales are up over 40 percent.

One thing is clear so far in 2011: female solo artists are owning the charts, with London’s Adele leading the way (her latest, “21” has sold more than 2.5 million units). The year’s 20 top-selling albums so far according to Billboard include the latest releases from Adele, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Pink (Greatest Hits), and Nicki Minaj (2010 release). And Beyoncé’s latest, “4,” debuted at No. 1 this week.

via Billboard.com.

Originally posted at LAist.

A Los Angeles-based startup with a mission to enable multimedia storytelling in communities worldwide that otherwise lack necessary resources and training was awarded a $200,000 grant by the Knight Foundation on Wednesday.

The Tiziano Project‘s Tiziano 360 project was one of 16 ideas to win a prestigious Knight News Challenge grant awarded to fund internationally relevant innovative media and digital news concepts.

Tiziano 360 is intended to help communities better tell their stories by building an accessible, HTML5-based multimedia storytelling platform. The next iteration of the project is based on 2010’s Kurdistan 360, for which Tiziano Project won an award at SXSW.

The Tiziano 360 project is described in the Knight press release:

Using visually dynamic, multimedia storytelling, the Tiziano Project provides communities with the equipment, training and web platform needed to report on stories that affect their residents’ lives. Tiziano will build an improved platform based on the award-winning project http://360.tizianoproject.org/kurdistan/. Using HTML5, the platform will display the work of professional and community journalists and will enable news organizations, community groups and individuals to easily manage digital content for mobile and tablet devices. The project will also build an interactive map to serve as a hub for projects developing similar sites in their communities and enable direct communication between these communities and their audiences.

Learn more about Tiziano Project in the video below:

Originally posted at LAist on June 22, 2011

Originally posted at LAist on June 22, 2011. Photos by Jeremiah Garcia for KCRW.

In the middle of a tour that included a show before tens of thousands of fans at Bonnaroo, My Morning Jacket set one night aside to give back to KCRW. Toward the end of the set, frontman Jim James noted how lucky both the crowd and the band were to have a station like KCRW, which continues to break new bands at a time when most indie and alternative radio stations have vanished from the airwaves.

And the 250 people in the crowd, some of whom won tickets from the station and others who purchased $125 tickets (all proceeds benefitting KCRW, the Santa Monica-based NPR-affiliated public radio station) knew they were lucky to be there too.

My Morning Jacket performed 15 songs in a nearly two-hour set on the soundstage at the famed Village Recorder studios, site of historic recording sessions including The Rolling Stones’ “Angie” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” The sound was fantastic, and MMJ delivered its dynamic sound without a hitch in a stripped-down stage setup, devoid of the mesmerizing backdrop and halo of lights present at other shows on the band’s current tour.

The renovated performance space was adorned with chandeliers that were used in “A Miracle on 34th Street” a fact that James pointed out more than once, though it was difficult to make out his mumbling from the crowd, many of whom were buzzing on complimentary beer, wine and bourbon.

The Village (also known as Village Studios or Village Recorder) itself was a veritable museum: the walls lined with gold and platinum records from the likes of Bob Dylan, Supertramp and Pink Floyd. Originally built as a Masonic temple in the 1920s, it was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Los Angeles center for Transcendental Meditation in the ’60’s. It’s still an active recording studio for musicians as well as movie and television soundtracks.

My Morning Jacket’s set at The Village was recorded and will be broadcast on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic on July 15th.

My Morning Jacket performs tonight at Pantages Theater in Hollywood. The show is sold out. MMJ has a history of partnering with charities and donating $1 per ticket to a local charity. The Pantages show benefits My Friend’s Place.

SETLIST:
My Morning Jacket at The Village Studios, West L.A., June 21, 2011

Victory Dance
Circuital
The Day is Coming
Wonderful (The Way I Feel)
Outta My System
Holdin’ on to Black Metal
First Light
You Wanna Freak Out
Slow Slow Tune
Movin’ Away
Wordless Chorus
Smokin” From Shootin”
Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt.2
One Big Holiday
I Will Sing

Between absorbing the latest trends as discussed by multiple panels we managed to interview a few executives from top online media companies.

In the video below, Ooyala’s Vice President of Biz Dev, Chris Wong, explains the importance of streaming video solutions providers, why most companies require DRM (digital rights management) to control copyright, and ponders the meteoric rise of Netflix and the potential impact of its competitors.

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Click here to view on YouTube.

The Flaming Lips is coming to town this summer for two special nights at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Bouncing in on a tagline from the single “Do You Realize” — “Every One You Know Some Day Will Die” — the Lips’ wildly entertaining psycho-pop shenanigans will attempt to bury you on June 14th and 15th.

And there’s a bonus: On the 14th the band will play its [mainstream] breakthrough 1999 release “The Soft Bulletin” in its entirety and the following night will perform Pink Floyd’s breathtaking 1973 album “Dark Side of the Moon” from front to back.

Tickets for the performances go on sale this Friday at 2 p.m. (2-night package for $80) and Saturday at 2 p.m. (single nights at $40) and will sell out quickly. Hollywood Forever is a bring your own blanket, wine, and picnic kind of place. But be sure to leave no trace, for there are zombies.

The concert takes place on the cemetery’s Fairbanks Lawn. Gates are at 7 p.m., wickedly brilliant guitarist and songwriter Marnie Stern opens.

The Flaming Lips tweeted evidence this week that a live version of “The Soft Bulletin” is forthcoming, allegedly with bonus tracks.

In the last week of 2009 the band digitally released “The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon.” The Flaming Lips’ 12th studio album (since 1986), “Embryonic,” was released in October 2009.