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Or dweeby sales guys pointing out stuff on shelves like they know what they're talking about. Or supposedly impressed customers nodding their heads just a little too earnestly. Voice over? Who needs a voice over? Just have naked women tumbling out of the sky like angels from heaven.

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Now, with an Internet start-up's hubris and whimsical name, an 11-employee New York company called Boxee is barging into the fray. It is treading over the carefully negotiated business arrangements of much larger companies and garnering accolades from tech-heads for doing what the big guys have failed to do. Boxee bills its software as a simple way to access multiple Internet video and music sites, and to bring them to a large monitor or television that one might be watching from a sofa across

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As you may have heard, it's kaput-or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture. Hollywood, vendor of Story in its most denatured form, is most at risk. Scott Brown says the film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the "hero's journey," Joseph Campbell's so-called Monomyth. (Which is just so ... well ... mono.) Beginnings, middles,

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His company's stock is diving, the debt is mounting, and the legendary 85-year-old chairman of Viacom and CBS may now be forced to sell off chunks of his media empire. But even more painful for Sumner Redstone may be the rift dividing his family. The tale of a latter-day King Lear.

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Some British newspapers took to calling him the spy who came in for the gold. Now Aleksandr Y. Lebedev is buying a majority stake in one of those papers - The Evening Standard. So he can now say pretty much whatever he wants to about himself. A man who once spied on Britain for the Kremlin is returning as a press baron to the political elite, adding one more strand to the weave of wealth binding Russian tycoons to London. Oh, feel the irony.

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Joshua Karp, publisher of The Printed Blog, at his office. On Tuesday, the first issues, containing blog posts and advertising, will appear in Chicago and San Francisco for free distribution. The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities. "We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content," he said. "There were so many techni

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This began what would become weeks of peace protests, in which thousands of Egyptians of all different political leanings gathered in Egypt's main cities, in public squares and at mosques and universities. This time, the protests were different: some of the anger was aimed directly at the government of President Hosni Mubarak. In defiance of threats from the police, and in contravention of a national taboo, some demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak. As the street protests went on, young

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The overwhelming demand meant that some web websites and data networks had trouble keeping up, forcing many people to turn to less cutting-edge forms of media. "It was really frustrating to have this great technology and still not be able to watch the speech," said Dan Robinson, who runs the box office at the Julliard School in New York. "I had to use this TV from the early '80s and some rabbit ears to watch it." Wow, rabbit ears? And no Elmer Fudd!?

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