Bollywood Actress' Skin is 'Whitened'

Elle magazine has stumbled into a race row after allegedly whitening the skin of a Bollywood actress on its cover.
Readers reacted with fury after it was suggested that the fashion magazine might have digitally ‘bleached’ the complexion of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, a former Miss World who has also starred in Bride & Prejudice and The Pink Panther 2. The 37-year-old appears on the cover of this month’s Indian edition of the magazine. However, her skin appears to be several shades lighter than her normal colour.
Inside the magazine, she is again pictured in a series of shots, all showing her with pale skin.

In September this year, black actress Gabourey Sidibe appeared on the cover of the U.S. magazine with a much paler complexion. On that occasion Elle claimed it had not altered the Precious star’s skin any more than that of the other models photographed alongside her.

Read more at the Daily Mail

Cable TV's Ratings Put Networks on Notice

Nielsen figures show the Big 4 and basic cable gained 1% in 2010 as overall viewing continues to rise to a record 34 hours a week. But the fall season has been less kind: Fox is down 15% and ABC is off 5%, offsetting smaller gains by CBS and NBC.

Few cable series outpace broadcast hits, but increasingly the strongest are beating many of their big-network rivals.

"These are eye-popping numbers you didn't see a few years ago," says Jon Marks, senior VP of research at Turner.

Conversely, CNN continued to plummet, down 34%. Hitless VH1 is off 31%, and Hallmark fell 24%. Even top-rated USA is down 4% from a stellar 2009, while Fox News fell 7%.

Read more at USA Today

Video Games Boost Brain Power

Daphne Bavelier is professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. She studies young people playing action video games. Having now conducted more than 20 studies on the topic, Bavelier says... Her studies show that video gamers show improved skills in vision, attention and certain aspects of cognition. And these skills are not just gaming skills, but real-world skills. They perform better than non-gamers on certain tests of attention, speed, accuracy, vision and multitasking, says Bavelier.

Vision, for example, is improved in gamers. Specifically, the kind of vision called "contrast sensitivity," that is, the ability to see subtle shades of gray. Gamers, Bavelier has also found, have better attention than non-gamers — they stay focused. They are able to detect, for example, new information coming at them faster. So as a result, they are more efficient.

Read more at NPR

10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011

In 2011, the focus on mobile will continue to grow with the launch of mobile- and iPad-only news products, but the greater focus for news media in 2011 will be on re-imagining its approach to the open social web. The focus will shift from searchable news to social and share-able news, as social media referrals close the gap on search traffic for more news organizations.

1. Leaks and Journalism: A New Kind of Media Entity
Even if WikiLeaks itself gets shut down, we’re going to see the rise of “leakification” in journalism, and more importantly we’ll see a number of new media entities, not just mirror sites, that will model themselves to serve whistle blowers — WikiLeaks copycats of sorts. Toward the end of this year, we already saw Openleaks, Brusselsleaks, and Tradeleaks.

2. More Media Mergers and Acquisitions
At the tail end of 2010, we saw the acquisition of TechCrunch by AOL and the Newsweek merger with The Daily Beast. In some ways, these moves have been a validation in the value of new media companies and blogs that have built an audience and a business.

3. Tablet-Only and Mobile-First News Companies
In 2010, as news consumption began to shift to mobile devices, we saw news organizations take mobile seriously. Aside from launching mobile apps across various mobile platforms, perhaps the most notable example is News Corp’s plan to launch The Daily, an iPad-only news organization that is set to launch early 2011.

4. Location-Based News Consumption
In 2011, with a continued shift toward mobile news consumption, we’re going to see news organizations implement location-based news features into their mobile apps. And of course if they do not, a startup will enter the market to create a solution to this problem or the likes of Foursquare or another company will begin to pull in geo-tagged content associated with locations as users check in.

5. Social vs. Search
Instead of focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), in 2011 we’ll see social media optimization become a priority at many news organizations, as they continue to see social close the gap on referrals to their sites. Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics and news industry analyst at Outsell, recently pointed out that social networks have become the fastest growing source of traffic referrals for many news sites.

6. The Death of the ‘Foreign Correspondent’
What we’ve known as the role of the foreign correspondent will largely cease to exist in 2011.

7. The Syndication Standard and the Ultimate Curators
Syndication models will be disrupted in 2011. As Clay Shirky recently predicted, more news outlets will get out of the business of re-running the same story on their site that appeared elsewhere. Though this is generally true, the approach to syndication will vary based on the outlet. The reality is that the content market has become highly fragmented, and if content is king, then niche is certainly queen.

8. Social Storytelling Becomes Reality
What if Facebook had a news landing page of the trending news content that users are discussing? Or if Twitter filtered its content to bring you the most relevant and curated tweets around news events?

9. News Organizations Get Smarter With Social Media
In 2011, we’re going to see more news organizations decentralize their social media strategy from one person to multiple editors and journalists, which will create an integrated and more streamlined approach. It won’t just be one editor updating or managing a news organization’s process, but instead news organizations will work toward a model in which each journalist serves as his or her own community manager.

10. The Rise of Interactive TV
In 2011, the accessibility to Internet TV will transform television as we know it in not only the way content is presented, but it will also disrupt the dominance traditional TV has had for years in capturing ad dollars. The problem of being able to have a conversation with others about a show you’re watching has existed for some time, and users have mostly reacted to the problem by hosting informal conversations via Facebook threads and Twitter hashtags. Companies like Twitter are recognizing the problem and finding ways to make the television experience interactive. That doesn’t mean that flat screens are going away; instead, they will only become interconnected to the web and its many content offerings.

Read more at Mashable