Digital Media

Johnny Carson is getting an upgrade for the YouTube era. Carson Entertainment Group, which owns the archive of the late-night host's 30 years on "The Tonight Show," is set to announce Wednesday that it has digitized all 3,300 hours of existing footage from the program and created a searchable online database for producers and researchers. The library will initially be available just for professional clip-licensing purposes, but the company also plans to release 50 full-format shows on DVD and post a rotating series of historic clips for public viewing on http://www.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration took aim Monday at what it called "digital guns for hire," unveiling new sanctions against Syria and Iran for using the Internet, social media and other technology to track and target dissidents. The governments of those countries and some telecommunications companies working with them have used technology to "facilitate grave human rights abuses," the administration said. "These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them," President Obama said in announcing the sanctions at a speech at the U.S.

The light bulb moment for Chris Kantrowitz came in the form of a broken disc drive. Sitting on a bus as it was rolling across Turkey on a concert tour in summer 2009, the 37-year-old Los Angeles entrepreneur watched singer-songwriter Lenny Kravitz fire up a disc drive where he had stored a song he had been recording. To their horror, the drive was dead. "I started asking other musicians how they kept copies of their work," Kantrowitz recalled. "They were all on these old tapes and disc drives.

Robert R. Beezer, a federal judge on the nation's busiest court for the last 28 years and author of landmark decisions on judicial authority, digital media sharing and capital punishment, has died of lung cancer. He was 83. Beezer's death Friday at a Seattle hospital was the sixth among U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judges in little more than a year, dealing yet another blow to the overwhelmed bench that hears cases from nine Western states and two Pacific territories. Four of the 9th Circuit's 29 authorized active judgeships are vacant due to partisan wrangling in the U.S. Senate over nominees of President Obama, and Beezer's death now drops to 18 the number of semi-retired senior judges who help shoulder caseloads twice that of the other 12 federal appeals courts.

In the voice-over introducing his video "Kony 2012," Jason Russell tells a worldwide audience, "The game has new rules. " The human rights activist's words seem fulfilled by the phenomenal response to his video about the murderous African warlord Joseph Kony: More than 58 million views had been recorded just four days after its YouTube release Monday. But the response to the video also confirmed that every digital media sensation also invites a large, if not equal, reaction, with the Kony production provoking hundreds of video retorts, uncounted Tumblr posts, countless journalism critiques and millions of comments on Facebook and Twitter.

The classical music industry loves Nikita Pacheco. They don't know the 29-year-old graphic artist personally. But she represents their future and they're striking every note in their new digital media handbooks to please her. To many, digital media is the sound of salvation for classical music. To others, it's another power chord crushing the soul of the art form itself. Take the "tweet-cert" held by the Pacific Symphony last month at its summer home, Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

Peter Adderton, the wireless industry executive behind Boost Mobile and Amp'd Mobile, has joined with William Morris Agency to create a hybrid firm that seeks to combine the Hollywood connections of a talent agency with the digital media expertise of a technology consultancy. The venture, dubbed Agency 3.

EMediaweekly, a trade publication devoted to digital media production, ceased operations last week, only six months after it was created to replace another trade magazine, MacWeek. Mac Publishing--which publishes both EMediaweekly and Macworld magazine--blamed weak market conditions in the graphics niche. "I thought [eMediaweekly] was ill-conceived from the beginning," said James Staten, an analyst with Dataquest in San Jose.

Virtual International Community (VIC), formerly Venice Interactive Community, is hosting a panel discussion Dec. 6 on the emerging U.S. Latino digital media arena. The event, to be held at the Skirball Cultural Center from 6:30 to 9 p.m., is sponsored in part by LAredClub, a professional networking association launched in September for those working in digital media targeting the Latino market in the U.S. and abroad.

While Hollywood studios try to rein in what consumers can do with digital files, some consumer-electronics companies are speeding ahead with products that make it even easier for people to move movies and music around the home and the Web. The latest example is a gadget Toshiba Corp. is unveiling today that's an electronic library for photos, songs and movies. The device moves digital media wirelessly across the home and lets people share their audio-video collections over the Internet.

Siri may be talking to more devices in the near future, according to a patent Apple filed. The patent application suggests that Apple may be looking at connecting and controlling devices via Siri on the iPhone. In the filing, Apple wrote:"Portable electronic devices, such as digital media players, personal digital assistants, mobile phones, and so on, typically rely on small buttons and screens for user input. Such controls may be built into the device or part of a touch-screen interface, but are typically very small and can be cumbersome to manipulate....

In the voice-over introducing his video "Kony 2012," Jason Russell tells a worldwide audience, "The game has new rules. " The human rights activist's words seem fulfilled by the phenomenal response to his video about the murderous African warlord Joseph Kony: More than 58 million views had been recorded just four days after its YouTube release Monday. But the response to the video also confirmed that every digital media sensation also invites a large, if not equal, reaction, with the Kony production provoking hundreds of video retorts, uncounted Tumblr posts, countless journalism critiques and millions of comments on Facebook and Twitter.

In a bid to better compete with Apple and Amazon.com, Google has created a one-stop shop called Google Play, where consumers can buy and download digital books, music, movies and games. The Internet search giant says users can now store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks, download more than 450,000 Android apps and games, browse e-books and rent movies on the digital media hub. The initiative brings together Google Music, Google Books and Android Market.

Google is ready to play. It's creating a single destination for digital media called Google Play , putting books, music, movies and games all in one spot. It's a bid to build a powerful entertainment hub on par with Apple, Amazon.com and Microsoft . The Internet search giant says users can store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks, download more than 450,000 Android apps and games, browse ebooks and rent movies. "We're creating this notion that the consumer has a single relationship with Google as the ecosystem for their content,” said Jamie Rosenberg, Google's director of digital content.

After he became chief executive of the Journal Register Co. in early 2010, John Paton made the rounds to its many newspapers in the Midwest and Northeast. The new boss told employees they would go "digital first" with a vengeance — tweeting, Facebooking, blogging and video-posting news before contributing a single keystroke toward the next day's paper. Hearing this pronouncement, one veteran columnist at a Michigan daily confronted Paton, telling him at a get-to-know-you dinner that his emphasis on the fast and furious online world was "ruining journalism.

Personal computer drives, compact discs and media cards containing classified information were found during searches of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning's bunk in Iraq and the home of his aunt in Maryland, Army investigators testified on the second day of the soldier's pretrial hearing. Investigators also found chat logs on Manning's personal laptop in Iraq that showed the Army analyst had bragged to a former hacker that he had leaked to the WikiLeaks website hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, ground reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay detainees' files, and videos of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Director Doug Liman followed up his 1997 indie comedy hit "Swingers" earlier this year with the equally clever, funny and hip ensemble comedy "Go." Set during a 24-hour period in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, this "Rashomon"-style comedy is told from the point-of-view of three people involved in a series of outrageous events that surround a busted drug deal.

What do you say to parents who are afraid to send their 18-year-old to art school for fear that he or she won't get a job after graduation? When it began in 2007, the Otis Report on the Creative Economy of the Los Angeles Region gave parents hope (and hopeful students talking points) by documenting the wealth of jobs in creative fields such as fashion, advertising, toy design and digital media, as well as the entertainment industry. This year, the picture is bleaker, along with so many broader economic indicators.

Roughly one teen in 100 has personally engaged in so-called sexting, the sending of sexually explicit pictures of oneself via digital media, in the last year. But the senders intended the images to be an intimate message for one special recipient may be surprised: 7.1% of Internet-using teenagers told the authors of a study released Monday they had received at least one such image on their phone or computer in the last year. The study , published Monday in the journal Pediatrics , is the first to make an educated guess at how common the practice of sexting is among teens.

AOL has recruited some Hollywood heavyweights to revitalize its struggling year-old online entertainment site Cambio, aimed at teens and young adults — a demographic coveted by advertisers. Reality television producer Mark Burnett and director McG, best known for the "Charlie's Angels" movies and NBC's spy comedy "Chuck," will create original Web shows with production spending as big as any prime-time series. AOL and its investment partners — brand strategist MGX Lab and Jonas Group, which manages such musical acts as the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato and Jordin Sparks — are betting that recognizable screenwriters, actors and directors are the digital catnip needed to draw a greater share of the 49 million people ages 12 to 24 who go online.