John Hockenberry, a former NBC Dateline correspondent, writes a fascinating article in the January/February 2008 issue of MIT’s Technology Review in which he talks about how the US news media actively chooses to go with emotion-centred news stories (that appeal to as many people as possible) as opposed to more relevant, hard-hitting, and (dare I say) real news stories.

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

It’s a long article, though, so if you want a quicker version, read what Jacqui Cheng has to say about it over at Ars Technica. Both are great to read, by the way.

Peter Sciretta from /Film has compiled a list of the ten highest revenue generating Hollywood film directors. Obviously, Steven Spielberg tops the list and, if you want a list of the next ten, check the comments.

Interestingly, as Sciretta points out, six of the top ten have been involved in trilogies, three others have been involved in big franchises, and the only one who hasn’t done either is in the process of directing his first sequel. Oh, and they’re all white men, of course.

HP has always targeted the consumer market through its Pavilion line of laptops. In the tablet PC space, it has done this with its TX1000 tablet PC. Earlier today, HP announced an upgrade to that much-loved tablet PC with the TX2000.

This one has an active digitizer, touch capabilities, a glossy widescreen (1280×800), the AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core processor, and NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 graphics card. The best part: compared to the recent Dell offering, it’s not that expensive which means it’ll appeal to students in particular and the consumer market in general.

Tiffany Boggs has the first review up on Tablet PC Review.

I tried to reason through the pricing of Dell’s XT tablet PC (pretty diagrams and all) a few weeks ago and, earlier today, Loren Heiny posted an blog entry in which he gives Dell some advice on what to do next. While I love the suggestions that he’s made [1], the things he’s mentioned — SSD, WiFi or EVDO, and Windows Live Writer — don’t add any real value to this tablet as far as corporate tablet PC users are concerned. This is because (a) corporate users don’t need SSDs; (b) if they needed mobile Internet connectivity, they either already have it or they’ll go with whatever the rest of the company is using; and (c) bundling Live Writer, while really cool, is probably not all that valuable to corporations or corporate users.

Still, his overall point is valid: if it wants to seriously target non-corporate users, Dell should give more value for the amount that it’s charging for the XT — whether that’s through bundling more into the system, as Heiny suggested, or by simply lowering the price.

By the way, the first reviews of the XT are starting to come in. The most comprehensive, so far, comes from Nathan Novak. His review is spread over four blog posts, by the way, all of which are linked from his final article.

[1] Particularly “Make an online/blogger special unit that people will love, blog about, chat up, and recommend.” :)

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