I’ve been getting a bunch of e-mails/tweets asking about specific podcasts I’ve mentioned on the /Filmcast, so I thought I’d put together a brief post compiling them all. I listen to a lot of podcasts, not just for enjoyment, but because I think it’s important to figure out what makes shows work (or not work), and try to incorporate lessons learned into my own show(s).

I don’t listen to each of these every single week, but they’re all in the rotation to some extent on my iPhone. Links to reviews if I have them (otherwise I link to iTunes listing). In no particular order:

• Battleship Pretension
• KCRW’s The Business
• Now Playing
• Extra Hot Great
• The Bugle
• The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith
• Filmspotting
• Pop Culture Happy Hour
• Fresh Air
• Movie B.S.
• NPR’s Story of the Day
• NPR’s Sunday Puzzle
• On the Media
• TEDTalks
• Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me
• Real Time with Bill Maher
• Risk!
• This American Life
• Radiolab
• WTF with Marc Maron
• This Is My Next Podcast
• How Did This Get Made
• The Adam Carolla Show

I may be leaving out a few, but that’s the bulk of them. I realize there are a lot of excellent shows that aren’t on this list, but sometimes you have to make difficult decisions in order to survive the pop culture landscape.

There’s been some interesting debate recently about whether or not the concept of “the article” is still valuable in an age of Twitter and Facebook. Not too long ago, Jeff Jarvis published an article claiming that the article was a byproduct of journalism, as opposed to its teleological endpoint:

The bigger question all this raises is when and whether we need articles. Oh, we still do. Articles can make it easy to catch up on a complex story; they make for easier reading than a string of disjointed facts; they pull together strands of a story and add perspective. Articles are wonderful. But they are no longer necessary for every event. They were a necessary form for newspapers and news shows but not the free flow, the never-starting, never-ending stream of digital. Sometimes, a quick update is sufficient; other times a collection of videos can do the trick. Other times, articles are good.

Frédéric Filoux wasn’t having any of that, and he chimed in with a response:

The problem is not Jarvis’ views of journalism. He’s a talented provocateur who sometimes smokes his own exhaust. But punditry isn’t reporting or analysis. Still, his talks, books, multiple appearances and knack for self-promotion are quite influential with many young journalists. They shouldn’t be misled. It’s not because news organizations tend to spend less and less on original reporting or on expertise, that those assets ought to be declared unimportant. Also, it’s not because a growing proportion of journalists are actually unable to produce high value stories or articles that the genre is no longer needed. On these matters, Jarvis is reversing cause and effect.

Jeff Jarvis responded to Filoux, saying that Filoux “willfully misrepresen” him. And he makes some good points:

First, far from denigrating the article, I want to elevate it. When I say the article is a luxury, I argue that using ever-more-precious resources to create an article should be taken seriously and before writing and editing a story we must assure that it will add value. Do most articles do that today? No. Go through your paper in the morning and tell me how much real value is added and how much ink is spilled to tell you what you already know (whether that is facts you learned through Twitter, the web, TV, radio, et al or background that is reheated more often than a stale slice in a bad New York pizzeria).

Here’s a fantastic essay by Adam Nayman about the J.J. Abrams’ use of lens flare in Super 8 (via MattZollerSeitz):

Appropriately for something that makes it difficult to look directly at the screen, the meaning of this literally flashy technique can be a little bit tricky to discern. The artificial lens flare is a manufactured defect, a means of approximating the fallibility of human vision even when all or part of what’s being glimpsed by the camera eye has been created in a digital void—making it the perfect aesthetic signature for the CGI era. But Abrams, supposedly, is some kind of throwback analog figure: a commercial entertainer more interested in building his characters than blowing them up. How anyone could seriously make this assertion after seeing this transplanted television-auteur’s choices of feature film material (two mammoth studio franchises) is another good question, but we’ll go with it long enough to point out that the best thing about Super 8 is a scene that directly interrogates its director’s relationship to cinematic spectacle—a scene framed by, you guessed it, a lens flare.