BusinessWeek reports:

Apple’s fiscal third-quarter earnings report, due after markets close on July 22, will likely surpass Wall Street analysts’ expectations, advancing the argument made by chipmaker Intel this month that spending on computer equipment is snapping back.

New market research forecasting record third-quarter Macintosh sales, combined with Apple historical proclivity toward issuing conservative guidance for its upcoming quarters, are leading Wall Street analysts to look for a surprisingly strong report.

For the third quarter ended June 27, analysts expect Apple to report sales of $8.2 billion and earnings of $1.16 per share. A year ago, Apple reported $7.5 billion in sales and $1.08 in per-share profit.

A strong report would make Apple the latest tech company to exhibit strength that could point to a recovery in technology spending, especially among consumers.

Written by NASA people, this is an amazing new blog.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, are the centerpieces of this blog.

NASA has a collection of different official blogs, but this is going to be very popular.

Rick Carlson (New Braunfels, Texas) writes in a comments to the most recent post:

“I had just turned four years old in July, 1969. I remember watching the launch on the small color TV in my parents’ bedroom. I also remember drinking orange Tang and eating “space food” – the stuff that looked like a cross between a Tootsie Roll (TM) and a long piece of beef jerky, individually wrapped to keep the freshness (and excitement) locked inside until snack time.
I also remember going into the backyard to watch out for pieces of SkyLab that might be falling, feeling both sad and relieved at the same time.
As a computer programmer for the past 28.5 years, I owe my living and my family’s health and security to NASA and all those who followed, driving technological innovation at breakneck speed, but inspired by and for people.
Technology doesn’t solve problems. People solve problems… for people.
The human spirit cannot be suppressed. We are driven to explore, to learn, to grow. It has been said that change is the only constant in the Universe. Everything is in motion.
The question is: are we moving forward or backward?”

The above image is from August 1, 1969 from the NASA Flickr collection:

“On July 21, 1969, only days after walking on the Moon’s surface, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin leave lunar orbit and begin the journey back to the space ship Columbia and its return to Earth. As they leave the Moon’s orbit, a look back gives them a new perspective of where they were and where man’s future lies. This was their final sight of the moon before they began docking procedures with Columbia.”

(Via ionline)

Dan Dubno describes THE moment:

“Forty years ago, a man walked on the Moon.

Words fail to describe the magnificence of this accomplishment.

Yet, much as I wished it might one day be my foot that stepped out beyond this Earth, being an astronaut didn’t seem as much fun as doing what Walter Cronkite was doing.

A rocket, more than 350-feet tall, lifted the astronauts into space.

But it was Walter Cronkite and the team of journalists he inspired that brought the rest of us to the Moon.

“Whew, boy…, ” he said, as Armstrong descended the ladder. As the world saw a boot finally touch lunar dust, words briefly failed Walter Cronkite.

Then he exclaimed, “Armstrong is on the moon — Neil Armstrong, 38-year-old American, standing on the surface of the moon.” Yet, in the silence, with a huge grin… his hand taking the horn-rimmed glasses off of eyes nearly filled with tears…

Walter Cronkite told us all we needed to know.

Thank you, sir.”

And this will be my last post about Cronkite and the Apollo 11.

La Vanguardia (Barcelona, Spain) devotes this double spread to a very important political story.

And instead of doing the usual “he said” and “he added” kind of ping-pong reporting (boring, boring, boring), they go wild and produce this amazing news package.

I am the one who said years ago that we can have daily newspapers using only infographics and photojournalism to tell almost any important story.

Why not?

When you see things like this, you recover the faith in creative and innovative story-telling as one of the main assets to deliver the news to a new generation of readers.

This is story-telling caviar!

(Via La Buena Prensa, a fantastic reservoir of great print journalism)

Malcolm Coles declares The Guardian winner of the newspaper URL twitter war.

As he says:

• The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail – but they’re not tweeted about as often.

• Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian’s URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months – way more than any other UK newspaper.

And in one reaction to his post, Richard Botley makes an interesting point:

“Advertisers will increasingly demand this level of data from media websites.”

With no doubt.

SALON’s Glenn Greenwald writes an indictment of the establishment U.S. media in a very punchy “Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did”.

His point:

“Cronkite’s best moment was when he did exactly that which today’s journalists insist they must never do.”

What’s more encouraging is that he got almost 500 very interesting reactions in less than 48 hours.

And watch here what Walter Cronkite said in 1996:

“I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards we didn’t make them stick.

We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation.”

Another Wild West World.

Thanks to Carlos Garcia-Hoz.

The iconic anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981 died at his home yesterday in New York at 7:42 p.m. at age 92.

Cronkite had been suffering with cerebrovascular disease and was not expected to recuperate.

The New York Times says:

“He became something of a national institution, with an unflappable delivery, a distinctively avuncular voice and a daily benediction: “And that’s the way it is.”

Edward R. Murrow recruited him for the network’s young television division.

He joined United Press wire service in 1939 to cover World War II.

Cronkite covered the Nuremberg war-crime trials and opened UP’s first postwar Moscow bureau.

President Johnson was watching CBS News in 1968 when Cronkite followed a report critical of the Vietnam War with rare commentary — the anchor declared the war unwinnable and said the U.S. should pull out.

Johnson reportedly turned to an aide and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Watch him here delivering the bulletin on the 1963 presidential assassination.

After he is handed a wire report, Cronkite pauses to gaze at it, then says, “From Dallas, Texas, the flash — apparently official — President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time . . . some 38 minutes ago.”

Cronkite may have been calm but “he was always a hard-driving, fiercely competitive newsman off camera,” David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times noted in 2003.

“Throughout the day,” Shaw recalled, “he was calling sources, prodding subordinates, asking questions, editing copy, deciding how stories would be played on that night’s broadcast. At one point, when someone handed him a statement that had come in earlier from the Iranian Embassy, answering several questions he’d been pursuing, he exploded. . . .He continued to fume and fret and drive and demand through the day, right up until 6:28, when he combed his hair, put on his jacket and — two minutes later — began the broadcast with his calm and customary, ‘Good evening.’ ”

Watch here a great AP video review of his life.

Follow here CBS’s continuous tribute to Cronkite.

And here are some memorable reports by Walter Cronkite.

Obama on Cronkite.

Obama called Cronkite “more than just an anchor.” He was “someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day; a voice of certainty in an uncertain world.”

Alessandra Stanley makes a good observation about his style delivering the news:

“Mr. Cronkite, who sat at a desk next to a typewriter in what at least seemed like a bustling newsroom, would fiddle with his earpiece, move his chair and glance down at his notes; he looked like a kindly newspaper editor interrupted in the middle of a big news day, busy, of course, but never too busy to explain the latest developments to out-of-town visitors.”

Cronkite was sometimes called “the eighth astronaut.” During the first moon landing in 1969, he “was on the air for 27 of the 30 hours that Apollo 11 took to complete its mission.

His first words when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969, were “Oh, boy.”

He was deeply disappointed that outer space remained beyond his reach.

“He keeps looking into the sky at night and saying, ‘I have to go there,’ ” his wife once recalled.

He published his autobiography, A Reporter’s Life, in 1997

The camera never lies, says Global National anchor Kevin Newman. “TV news exposes who you are, especially when you’re on live during crises. Everything Cronkite was, was transparent: his experience, his discipline, his humanity.”

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz said:

“There will never be another Cronkite because we are beyond the era of mass audiences and mass respect for journalists.”

Yes, all this is gone.

But what a life, what a ride!

Drawing by Jayson Mondala

When a news Web site, like The New York Times’, has a columnist in the top of the rankings (most e-mailed, most popular), this is good news.

Today’s Krugman column is, as I said this morning, pure Journalism Caviar.

At the same time, if you look at the hyped Huffington Post, the three most popular issues are not Journalism Caviar but just Gossip Garbage.

So, it’s your choice.

You select your audience.

You select your media.

In the online world, we have trashy tabloids versus quality media, too.

The New York Times pays its columnists very well.

Arianna Huffignton dosen’t pay them at all.

So, you get what you pay for.

Garbage in, garbage out!

The Independent tells the fascinating story behind these unseen photographs from the First World War:

The place, according to a jokingly chalked board, is “somewhere in France”. The time is the winter of 1915 and the spring and summer of 1916. Hundreds of thousands of British and Empire soldiers, are preparing for The Big Push, the biggest British offensive of the 1914-18 war to date.

A local French photographer, almost certainly an amateur, possibly a farmer, has offered to take pictures for a few francs. Soldiers have queued to have a photograph taken to send back to their anxious but proud families in Britain or Australia or New Zealand.

Sometimes, the Tommies are snapped individually in front of the same battered door or in a pear and apple orchard. Sometimes they are photographed on horseback or in groups of comrades. A pretty six-year-old girl – the photographer’s daughter? – occasionally stands with the soldiers or sits on their knees: a reminder of their families, of human tenderness and of a time when there was no war…

Within a few months – or days, most probably – many of the soldiers were dead. The “somewhere in France” where these pictures were taken was a village called Warloy-Baillon in the département of the Somme. Ten miles to the east was the front line from which the British Army launched the most murderous battle of that, or any, war, which lasted from 1 July to late November 1916 and killed an estimated 1,000,000 British empire, French and German soldiers….

More than 90 years later, at least 400 glass photographic plates preserving the images were found in the loft of a barn at Warloy-Baillon and cast out as rubbish…

The survival of the images is owed to two local men: Bernard Gardin, aged 60, a photography enthusiast; and Dominique Zanardi, 49, proprietor of the “Tommy” café at Pozières, a village in the heart of the Somme battlefields.

M. Gardin was given a batch of about 270 glass plates by someone who knew of his hobby. He approached M. Zanardi, who has a collection of Great War memorabilia, including a football dug up 12 years ago inside a British soldier’s rucksack. M. Zanardi, it turned out, already had 130 similar plates which he had gathered from other local people.

“About three years ago, someone bought a barn near Warloy-Baillon,” M. Zanardi said. “They found the glass plates in the loft and just threw them out as rubbish. Many of them were picked up and taken away by passers-by. I started collecting them and had reached over 100 when M. Gardin turned up with this great batch of 270. They must also, originally, have come from the same source. There may be many more out there which we have not yet been found.”

M. Gardin and M. Zanardi have had prints made, at their own expense, from the original plates. M. Gardin describes these as “9 x 12 centimetre glass plates, of the kind used at the time by amateur photographers. A professional would have used a camera with bigger plates, 18 centimetres x 24.”

And The Independent’ story ends with this public call:

Although some research has been conducted into the photographs, much hard work is yet to be done. Such compelling images must have a story attached; and with your help we hope to uncover as much of their fascinating history as possible. Click here to see how you can help.