On Sunday, Sarah, Marianne and I followed a long march of tens of thousands of protestors through the streets of Mexico City to the Angel of Independence monument, gold and blazing in a stunningly intense sun. The protest itself was surprisingly upbeat - the mostly young people seemed exhilerated by their numbers and the freedom they felt to express anger in the streets.

One of my favorite features of Mexico City is the blank billboards. The ones for which no one has bought an ad. All that remains are quadrants of empty space, beautiful geometric shapes in shades of grey and beige that gain color from this city’s extraordinary evening skies.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

On last week's show, my colleague PJ Vogt and I interviewed game designer (and hero) Tim Schafer about his decision to fund his latest game entirely through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Over the course of the 60+ minutes that we spoke to him, we got way more than we could possibly use on the show about what inspires him, how he approaches game design, and how to tell an interesting story. Since we thought other parts of the conversation might interest listeners, we decided to cut a second interview and post it on the blog. Enjoy, and please let us know what you think in the comments below.

Next week, On the Media is going into the field to report on foreign media at an important moment in history. In the past, OTM has traveled to Israel and the West Bank, Russia, China, and just last year to Cairo in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution. This time, we are going somewhere a bit closer to home, but that  feels worlds away: Mexico.

This weekend’s Belmont Stakes could make I’ll Have Another the first Triple Crown winner since 1978, and attempts to predict the race abound in the sport-specific and mainstream press alike. All the hubbub—speculation about whether I’ll Have Another’s dismal starting post will hurt his chances, rundowns of his biggest competitors, endless rehashing of his pedigree and purchase price—reminds you why ‘horserace journalism’ has become a popular way to describe election coverage.

When talking about China, we often try to fix points that help us understand the country’s seemingly strange and contradictory politics. We retell certain types of stories about China, framing the experience of Chinese people in terms Americans can easily relate to. After watching a short clip from High Tech, Low Life, I was looking forward to watching the kind of David and Goliath story that Americans so love: a story of two Chinese bloggers or “citizen journalists” who defy government censorship while reporting on issues like homelessness and corruption the government would rather keep below the radar.  I wanted to walk away from the film with an “Ah, so this is the kind of stuff the Chinese government censors” and an “Oh, and these are the tricks outspoken Chinese citizens use to circumvent it.” But Stephen Maing’s film challenged my David and Goliath framing.

The staff of On the Media choose a few of our favorite things. Please, please leave us comments below and enjoy.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

Between 2009 and 2010 the number of children who died as result of abuse or neglect in Florida dropped from 197 to 136. That's a big drop from year-to-year. It turns out, however, that children might not actually be much safer in Florida since, according to the Miami Herald, the drop can be attributed the Department of Children and Family Services narrowing the definition of what is considered abuse and neglect.

A few weeks back we spoke with Justin Elliott, who highlighted ProPublica's Free the Files project. The idea there was to get ProPublica readers and journalism students to go to local TV stations and pick-up the station's 'public file,' which contains information about, among other things, who's buying political ads and for how much. The FCC recently ruled that some stations would have to put their files online. Not having those public files online and in a searchable, digital format is why the files had to be physically freed from stations in the first place. (Note: it turns out they may remain 'unfree' for a while meaning Free The Files remains an important project.)

In the Internet era, both companies and scientists are well aware that more and more of our daily activities have moved to cyberspace. And they know the value of understanding the meaning and trends behind the countless links we follow ever day. Facebook scientists use data to study users’ ethnicities, improve geolocation and even to predict election results. At universities all over the country, schools of information study the effects of people’s attentions shifting to screens.

The OTM staff choose a few of our favorite things.  Please, please leave us comments below and enjoy.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting that don't make it onto the show end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

This week OTM reflects on a night twenty five years ago when two Chicago television stations' broadcasts were interrupted by the someone posing as the fictional computer generated host “Max Headroom.” But of all the faces available to hide behind, why Max Headroom's? What was it about a disembodied computer program that appealed to the Chicago signal hijacker?

Back in January, OTM reported on an FCC proposal that would require local television stations to disclose political ad buys online. According to an article by ProPublica, the National Associations of Broadcasts has sued to block the proposal from taking effect.

Growing up, I called it a 'clicker.' Most everyone else, I was sternly told in college, called it a 'remote control.' 'Remote control' still sounds too clinical for something that's been such a big part of your life. On Sunday the inventor of the remote control, Eugene Polley, died. I not sure that the remote control was as crucial to the development of television as the mouse was to computers, but both inventions made two of the most important screens in our lives more malleable, more useful. Channels 13 thru 755 owe a great debt to Polley.

On last week's show we spoke to German media professor Nikolaus Peifer about Hitler's Mein Kampf entering the public domain. Listener Chuck Strinz wrote in to tell us a story about how in 1939, Adolf Hitler's American publisher engaged in a copyright lawsuit against an American journalist who published a tabloid version of the book without permission.

Before Alan Cranston became a US Senator for California, he was foreign correspondent in Germany for the Independent News Service. In a particularly colorful 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cranston recounts seeing an English-language version of Mein Kampf on display at Macy's bookstore in 1939, but when he picked it up,"[he] knew it wasn't the real book because it was much less weighty, it was much thinner.  It turned out it had been edited so that a good bit that Hitler wrote was left out."

The OTM staff choose a few of our favorite things.  Please, please leave us comments below and enjoy.