Kermit and Miss Piggy offer their candid opinions about Fox News in this short clip from the press conference for the London premiere of The Muppets. The spokesmuppets were responding to accusations by Fox News that The Muppets film pushes a liberal agenda.

via Dangerous Minds

press conference video by LSQ.TV

KoPoint Wire is a new opinion and content-aggregating blog focusing on media, politics, sports, and technology. KoPoint founder Dan Patterson is starting off by hitting the road to cover the Republican presidential primaries.

In this video released today by the (North) Korean Central News Agency, North Koreans are shown taking part in a mass display of grief over the death of Kim Jong-il. According to the KCNA, the North Korean leader died of a heart attack on Saturday:

The whole country was shocked to hear the news that leader Kim Jong Il passed away of a sudden disease on train while making his indefatigable efforts for the prosperity of the country and its people’s happiness.

The sad news of the loss of the father of the nation was so unbelievable for the Korean people that they call his name again and again in chocking voices.

via io9

The Daily sent puppet newscasters Leslie Smokinhot and Lester Lester, Jr. to interview Occupy Wall Street protesters. The result is hilarious.

“Photojournalism Behind the Scenes” is a fascinating photoessay about the active role photojournalists sometimes play in the conflicts they document. Photographer Ruben Salvadori began studying the subject after witnessing the close interactions between photographers and rioters in Jerusalem.

For more on the issue see PlanetNext’s post about Salvodori’s photoessay.

This project aims to play with the creation and destruction of “drama” by breaking the taboo of the “invisible photographer”. By including him in the frame, it shows how the image-production process can generate similar photographs that are often over dramatized. In addition, the huge presence of the media turns the conflict into a show in which the photographer has his own role in choosing the dynamics and thus becomes an actor.

via PetaPixel & ISO 1200

photos by Ruben Salvadori

“Slow Breaking News” by designer Emily Roose is a series of breaking news stories from 2009 to 2010 rendered in time-consuming cross stitch embroidery (each panel took around 25 hours to complete). Roose created the series for her masters thesis at the New England School of Art and Design. Images of the cross stitched panels are available in Roose’s book documenting the studio phase of the project.

I think of the process of cross-stitching news stories as a kind of “test”, as in: does x, y or z news story pass the cross-stitch test? A year or two later, does the story still have enough relevance to not seem absurd archived in this permanent and time-consuming (~25 hrs each) medium?

via Quipsologies

Warco is a first person shooter game with a rather unusual twist–rather than a gun, the player wields a camera as a war correspondent (aka “warco”). The player will be tasked with documenting trouble spots around the world and editing the footage into news reels. The game is a collaboration between Australian game company Defiant Development, filmmaker Robert Connolly and journalist Tony Maniaty. The game is currently in development with no set release date.

Record dramatic images of war, save them in-game, then edit the results into a compelling frontline TV news story. Beam the results to global audiences on the web. No two WARCO stories will ever be alike. It’s an edge-of-seat gaming experience – and a powerful entry-level training tool for future combat reporters. WARCO is perfectly timed to take advantage of the convergence of games and movies, journalism and online communities, in a world undergoing massive social, geo-political and technological change.

via Ars Technica

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab recently got a peek of our “reading around the breakfast table” future imagined by The New York Times Company’s Research & Development Lab. Using Microsoft’s surface technology, this touchscreen kitchen table allows sharing of the morning news with your loved ones. More than that, it is “highly personal and highly social”, interacting with everyday objects and making sharing of news easy. Wonderful.

I put my phone down, I get these little red radials coming out of it. And now I’m presented with a list of those articles that have been shared with me. I can tap that last one that’s been left, and then it comes right back. I can take a look at that and see what’s been left for me. And that could have naturally spawned some sort of an alert on my phone, or on my laptop at work, in a couple of different ways.

And certainly we can have the table react to other objects, as well — you know, it is a table, first and foremost. So you might be eating your breakfast or having a cup of coffee. That gives us an opportunity to be a little playful with the ad experience, as well.

via Nieman Journalism Lab

Tim O’Brien created a brilliant illustration for the upcoming Gaddafi cover story on Time Magazine.

In May Tim created an equally amazing illustration for Time Magazine for their cover story on the capture of Bin Laden.

via Arrested Motion

The New York Observer recently reclaunched as a broadsheet after years in tabloid format. Congrats to Elizabeth Spiers and her team, it’s great classic newspaper look.

The lead story “O-Bummer! Hipsters O-Bandon Obama” features a wonderful illustration by Drew Friedman.

photo by Scott Beale

The Daily Dot is a new website that describes itself as “the hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web”, reporting on the top stories from the web’s communities, including reddit, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.

The Daily Dot gives a voice to the Web’s communities. We report on the most important and relevant topics from within, applying tried-and-true principles drawn from community journalism to the growing cultures of the Internet, and allow our audience to read the Dot across multiple platforms, where they live, online.

Just as the most valuable and informed reporting comes from publications invested in the communities they serve — towns, cities, and countries — our staff reports from within the Web localities we inhabit.

Web developer Phillip Mendonça-Vieira accidentally captured 12,000 screenshots of the New York Times homepage between September 2010 and July 2011, which he compiled into this fascinating time-lapse video.

Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It’s all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we’re no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis. Archive.org comes close, but there are too many gaps to my liking.

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

via Joshua Nguyen

The Onion has revolutionized fake news, confused and enraged readers, and in the late 1990s, included amongst its print subscribers a certain EDW Lynch. So it may be shocking to hear that The Onion has not yet received a Pulitzer Prize. Americans for Fairness in Awarding Journalism Prizes (AFAJP) aims to change that, with a righteously indignant PSA, sternly worded form letter, Facebook group, and a grassroots video uprising including such voices as Tom Hanks.

Americans for Fairness in Awarding Journalism Prizes, or AFAJP, is a nonprofit* watchdog group committed to exposing those who engage in improper journalism award giving. Established in 1944, AFAJP has since grown to 742 chapters nationwide, and now boasts a membership of over 15 million Americans.

On June 20, The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, celebrates its 1000th issue, and AFAJP intends to mobilize its entire apparatus to ensure that the Pulitzer Board stop its blatant discrimination against The Onion and honor its landmark achievement with the prize it so richly deserves.

NMA takes a look at the LulSec and their Hacking Rampages for the Lolz.

Out of the swamp that is 4 chan, two groups of hackers emerged. The first, anonymous, practised hacktivism, using DDoS attacks against numerous targets such as Iran, the Church of Scientology and Amazon.com.

Lulzsec, on the other hand, are pranksters happy just to take down random sites for lulz. Lulzsec has been on the rampage, taking down the CIA website to win a twitter flame war while picking another fight with 4chan despite past associations.

4chan users are out to take down Lulzsec any way they can. Will the hackers of Lulzsec be applying their computer skills elsewhere soon?

What’s Trending is a new weekly CBS News show hosted by Shira Lazar that takes a look at the top stories that are trending online. The latest episode featured actor Kevin Pollak and NY Times technology writer Nick Bilton.

Onion-Like Headlines in Real-Life collects links real world articles that sound like they are from The Onion.

via Anthony De Rosa

Page One: Inside The New York Times is a documentary by Andrew Rossi that takes a behind-the-scenes look a The New York Times. The film premiered at Sundance and is scheduled for release Summer 2011.

Andrew Rossi’s riveting documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, which had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, was acquired by Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media for theatrical release this June. In the tradition of great fly-on-the-wall documentaries, the film deftly gains unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom and the inner workings of the Media Desk. With the Internet surpassing print as our main news source and newspapers all over the country going bankrupt, PAGE ONE chronicles the transformation of the media industry at its time of greatest turmoil. Writers like Brian Stelter, Tim Arango and the salty but brilliant David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent, while their editors and publishers grapple with up-to-the-minute issues like controversial new sources and the implications of an online pay-wall. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism is thriving— PAGE ONE gives us an up-close look at the vibrant cross-cubicle debates and collaborations, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching that brings the most venerable newspaper in America to fruition each and every day.

The Final Edition has created a parody of The New York Times, showing what the final issue might look like.

via Gothamist

SocialFlow looks at how a single tweet by Keith Urbahn was responsible for spreading the news of Bin Laden’s death.

A full hour before the formal announcement of Bin-Laden’s death, Keith Urbahn posted his speculation on the emergency presidential address. Little did he know that this Tweet would trigger an avalanche of reactions, Retweets and conversations that would beat mainstream media as well as the White House announcement.

Nick Bilton posted a screenshot showing how the original front page of the New York Times appeared before they literally stopped the presses to switch out to the new front page with the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s killing.

via Nick Bilton

Betaworks and The New York Times R&D Lab have released News.me, a new news aggregator for the iPad.

News.me is a different kind of social news experience that shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but what they are reading as well. Have some friends with impeccable taste in music? Find out about new artists from the same places they do. Curious what Steven Johnson or Nicholas Kristof has been reading lately? Browse through their streams and find out. Everyone curates their Twitter experience to reflect their own unique set of interests, and with News.me you can see their curated view of the world. News.me offers a seamless interface for immersive reading, and uses science to find the most relevant content in every user’s stream.

via NY Times Bits Blog

Robonaut 2 or R2 for short is the next generation dexterous robot, developed through a Space Act Agreement by NASA and General Motors.

It’s ironic that the first humanoid robot in space is nicknamed R2, as its golden face and gangly limbs are more reminiscent of C-3PO than Star Wars‘ less person-shaped droid R2-D2. The awesome mission patch above celebrates Robonaut 2′s recent historic journey to the International Space Station, one small step for personified robot-kind, entering space on February 24th, 2011. Someone check with Issac Asimov’s estate and see if they are nervous.

R2 was cargo on the most recent shuttle mission (Shuttle Discovery’s swan song). Delivery was successful, someone was home at ISS on the first attempt. President Obama joked with the crew that they needed to let R2 out of the box he was shipped in. But it turns out that getting the robot out of its box was not as simple as expected. See this unboxing video:

A little astronaut mischief, not willing to wait until Christmas morning. So now the golden man-shaped machine is on ISS and has been to put work. And what exactly does that work entail? R2 is not yet going on spacewalks or welding hulls or anything, so far its role is mostly educational:

…its primary job for now is teaching engineers how dexterous robots behave in space, the hope is that through upgrades and advancements, it could one day venture outside the station to help spacewalkers make repairs or additions to the station or perform scientific work.

R2′s not only being helpful in space, but also on teh internets: answering lots of questions on Twitter (@AstroRobonaut) and on its own Facebook page. Here’s a great overview about Robonaut’s development, capabilities, future, and what it took to get R2 ready for the trip to the ISS:

Want more details? There’s an interactive multimedia site from NASA with plenty of videos, images and some kind of fancy “3-D Virtuality” tour. In lower-fi, there’s a 6-slide, PowerPoint-style presentation about Robonaut 2, showing the system in development dating back to 1998. There’s also NASARobonaut’s YouTube channel, where you will find the ACTUAL unpacking & assembly video for R2:

But let’s not get too hung up on these human-shaped robots, because Spidernaut is coming…

…or maybe she’s naut. That photo dates from 2006 and there doesn’t seem to be any new news on Spidernaut since. So she might be a non-starter. We will keep multiple eyes on it, and let you know.

Each weekday Eric Wedum chooses a story from a major news publication and creates an amusing, literal illustration based on the headline without actually reading the story, which he then posts to F*ck Yeah Headlines.

Speaking during an interview with Leicester Square TV, Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz confirmed that he is currently writing an Arrested Development movie script. He also said he hopes to shoot and release the film before the end of the year. That said IMDB lists the film’s release as 2012. At least they list it. Hurwitz told Digital Spy similar news.

The conversation seemed to confirm that everyone from the series cast would be in the film. And he revealed that the rumor that Michael Cera didn’t want to do the film (because he’s become such big a movie star) was propagated by the cast (including Cera), until he started to get hate mail from fans.

Here’s another great interview clip about the show’s origins and development

And a final word from Will Arnett (aka Gob Bluth) about the movie, and how he should be bigger on the DVD box.

Leicester Square TV’s YouTube channel has several more clips from these interviews.