It was the big showdown at 9 p.m. on Thursday, CSI on CBS vs. Grey’s Anatomy on ABC. But Grey’s came away the victor, beating CSI in both the demos and households. Also, the show is now for sale on iTunes…
And if you haven’t downloaded the latest version of iTunes and visited either the TV or movies page, then you’re missing one of the coolest web user interfaces I’ve ever seen. Move the bar at the bottom and search through the titles in animated 3D. Sweet!
Longtime Lost Remoters know I loves me my games (as does our illustrious founder, and a whole hell of a lot of other people), but what I really love is the massive potential in the medium and have been thumping and stumping to get big media companies to wake up and get serious about gettting into the red-hot game marketspace with their content. Well, most of them call me mad and can’t figure out how games can have anything to do with journalism or serious content. Now Atom Entertainment has gotten decidely unserious and is launching a new channel on AddictingGames.com dedicated to satirical “newsgames” which poke fun a current events. Old favorites like “Cheney’s Fury” (you get to be the trigger man on the veep’s quail shooter) anchor the site, but many of the games are the work of amateur designers. Dave Williams, Atom’s chief marketing officer for games, says games are becoming “a form of social commentary” and there is an upswing in games that have political or social opinion built in.
A new study of high school students reveals some fascinating tidbits of where they get their news. While TV ranked as the “best” overall source of news, half of all high schoolers get news online at least once a week. Now here’s where it gets interesting:
66 percent say they get their online news from the portals, 45 percent from national TV news web sites, 34 percent from local TV or newspaper web sites, 32 percent from blogs and 21 percent from national newspaper sites.
46 percent of students get news and information at least once a week from entertainment shows such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park.
Clearly, teens have a broader definition of news from both a content and a brand standpoint, which has serious implications for news organizations.
The Daily Show calls them “Cavutos”: lower-thirds on news that end in a question mark, usually indicating a strong hint of the channel’s belief. (Cory Bergman: Defiant Despot?) TVNewser rounds up a very funny list of the lower-thirds from Fox News’s coverage of Hugo Chavez’s visit to the U.N. Thursday. Here’s some of Brian Stelter’s timeline: 7:16pm: “Pres Chavez: Narcissistic personality disorder?”; 10:54am: “How dare Hugo Chavez blast the United States?”; 11:02am: “Should we stop buying Chavez’s gas from Citgo stations?”; 11:59am: “Chavez insults U.S.: Where is the outrage?”; 12:29pm: “Should U.S. continue to fund U.N. after applause for Chavez? All those question marks before 12:30? Won’t that spoil your lunch? Question mark journalism: this is news?
I’m getting a new phone this week, and I am stumped by the eternal struggle: Palm OS or WindowsMobile? As you probably know, I’m a Mac guy - so the Palm OS probably makes more sense. On the other hand, with The Missing Sync, I can apparently (apparently) use a WindowsMobile phone with my Mac - and there are more choices for that platform. I ask you, the LR Faithful: what the heck should I get?
For the first time, there are more TVs in our houses than there are people. Nielsen Media Research says the average US home has 2.73 televisions and 2.55 people. (That leaves .18 of a television for the dog to watch Animal Planet.) Half of the homes in the US have three or more televisions. In 1975, 57% of the homes had just one TV. And they were forced to watch The Waltons. What a terrible, terrible time.
Saying that his terrific podcast is “getting ridiculous and someone has to make it stop,” Ricky Gervais is putting the show on hold. For those of you wondering whether the pay-version of The Ricky Gervais show made any money, here’s a hint: “I wanted to see if I could cut out the middle man and make podcasting a commercial concern. Karl never has to work again and I believe that maybe he won’t,” said Ricky. Again, the difference between American and British programming - the Brits do a few terrific episodes, then stop. We’d make Gervais do a podcast a day for the next 20 years. (Thanks, Max!)
MTV.com has now launched Virtual Laguna Beach, the virtual community based on the MTV show (earlier report here.) Time to pimp out your avatar, hit the beach, shop, party it up and chat with, like, random people. Couple screen grabs…
The Bush administration does not want a federal shield law for journalists, and made that clear again this week. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on the Free Flow of Information Act of 2006, and the Attorney General’s office is arguing that “Our national security is too important to be subjected to (the) standards and burdens” of having a litmus test. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D - VT) pointed out that six journalists have been fined or jailed in the past year for not revealing sources. The AG’s office countered with “There is not one shred of evidence supporting the notion that the Department of Justice is out to get the media.”
What would we do without ol’ Sen. Ted “Tubes” Stevens? While pushing for his franchise reform bill (I suggest better McDonald’s bathrooms), Tubes is bemoaning that he’s getting delayed by the network neutrality lobby. “It’s a fetish. It’s really something that doesn’t exist,” said the esteemed Senator from Alaska. In the interest of helping Sen. Tubes, may I suggest he avoid searching “fetish” on the internet?
The folks behind the otherwise acceptable “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” have come up with a terrible, terrible idea for a blog called “Defaker.” It’s a, um, fake blog. It’s meant to be written from the POV of a Studio 60 viewer/fan who writes “Since I’m lucky enough to have some contacts at the show, and thought that other fans might find the backstage shenanigans of interest in light of the recent shakeup…” It has stills from the show posted as “shots my friend smuggled out.” Worst of all, there are fake comments interspersed with real ones. Dreadful. How does a show with such decent writing turn out this? I’ll stick with the Studio 60 real blog instead, if you don’t mind, Aaron. (thx, Best Week Ever, which presents a funny network-exec-meeting scenario of how this marketing “idea” may have happened.)
Unsigned bands and musicians can submit original music videos to YouTube next month, and the finalists will appear on ABC’s Good Morning America as well as on video-enabled Cingular phones. The best will be picked by… the YouTube community, of course.
As the Lost Remote Manager in Charge of Bragging, I was thrilled to read this: Robert Scoble found that Lost Remote was among the most frequent posters in his estimable RSS feeds. Scoble conducted an unintended experiment by not checking his RSS reader since mid-August. (He humbly writes: “That’s why my blog has sucked lately.” Hardly.) His top five frequent posters in that time: Engadget had 1,093 since he last checcked in, Boing Boing had 701, LifeHacker had 552, GigaOm had 466, and there’s LR at #5 with 408. Considering Cory had some considerable tech challenges (remember nowbreaking.com?) I’d say that’s pretty great company. But we don’t envy Scoble’s backlog of RSS reading. (Dude - just skip to LR…)
Seen on MSNBC yesterday (video): anchor Chris Jansing interrupts a talk-back with NBC News’ Jay Barbree on the space shuttle to announce “breaking news” of an ostrich on the loose on a school playground in North Carolina. “Is that breaking news?” Barbree asks. “I have a bicycle crash down here, you want to cover that, Chris?” Jansing laughs, “I don’t know.”
The Hewlett-Packard boardroom spy scandal would have come to a newsroom near you if some of the HP braintrust had their way. HP reportedly ruminated over hiring spies in the offices of CNet and The Wall Street Journal. The spies would have cleverly been disguised as custodians or worked in clerical positions. The report also says the company’s surveillance extended to a CNet reporter, whose email they tapped by sending him an email with monitoring spyware in it. The scandal didn’t stop a San Francisco group from honoring HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn - she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Bay Area Council. Maybe the council didn’t feel like reprinting the invites.
Here’s just a sampling of the citizen journalist video getting uploaded to YouTube. I enjoy the non-narrated slice of life stuff most. You can tell from this simple street scene that a peaceful coup has taken place. Forget distilled reports - when you see tanks riding peacefully down the street with passenger cars, that tells you plenty.
Global Voices has been gathering blog posts from Thailand that are reporting on the military coup. The reports from the street sure sound like life is pretty normal. The blog Lost in Translation, Life in Bangkok has this headline: Happy Military Coup. From the blog: Well… today.. scary day? No.. its more like a holiday. After the TV declared a holiday, I slept till 3pm… It’s not scary like how military coups are like else where. It’s a happy mode. No one blowing each other brains out. And if only everyday Bangkok could be naturally this less congested. On the streets, civilians are enjoying the holiday. Bringing food and water to the soldiers, photo taking session, flowers presented to soldiers.” (via JD Lasica)
WBZ, the CBS O/O in Boston, took on the tricky challenge of a multicast Tuesday night for the state’s primary elections. While ‘BZ ran CBS programming for much of the night, it had an online newscast all night. And it was in that webcast that they broke the news that they were calling Deval Patrick as the winner of the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. They then put the news on their sister station, WSBK, which had been in a break of its coverage. Finally, the news broke on WBZ. So to summarize: they beat the competition by breaking the news online, put the TV scoop on their UHF station and then had it on the “parent channel.” That’s how you break a story - and a mold. Does anyone still think breaking news online before anyone in the market had it on-air somehow hurt them? Another myth says goodbye. Watch here to see how WBZ broke the story first online.
Roughly 17 percent of the adult population are console gamers. They consider themselves trendsetters and consume an above-average amount of media according to a new study by Universal-McCann. They are also accepting of product placement in moves and television. The study said that the media consumption habits of console gamers, combined with their feelings toward advertising, make them a good target for marketers.
AdMission powers the site that allows paying users to create in-depth listings in a featured ads section. Windows Live Expo includes social networking features and connects to Microsoft’s Live Messenger and Live Spaces products. AdMission also powers classifieds for Web properties of The New York Times Company, Cox, Gannett, the Washington Post, and Hearst, as well as YellowPages.com.
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What would we do without ol’ Sen. Ted “Tubes” Stevens? While pushing for his franchise reform bill (I suggest better McDonald’s bathrooms), 
Seen on MSNBC yesterday (