McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau blog — which is updated by both U.S. staff journalists and Iraqi freelancers — has a compelling post with the simple title, “Leave.” Truth be told, I bet you’d be hard pressed to find a seasoned journalist in Iraq who would agree, privately, that we should stick it out (by the way, have you seen Richard Engel’s “War Zone Diary?” Excellent.) I’m not expressing an editorial opinion here, just a fact. And this blog post — written by an Iraqi — is certainly worth a read.
Ad company WPP has agreed to acquire 24/7 Real Media for $649 million. Google recently shelled out $3.1 billion for Doubleclick, and Microsoft was reportedly looking at both online ad companies before they were sold.
You may have heard of this already, but now CNET has some pictures. As part of MSNBC.com’s marketing campaign, they rigged a few theaters with motion cameras so the audience can play a game called Newsbreaker Live before the movie. Basically, the crowd sways left and right to collectively move a paddle in a brick-breaker game. The game also incorporates real-time RSS feeds from the site. Cool idea.
Boston.com has taken the wraps off a new co-branded jobs section powered by Monster.com called Boston.com/monster. And NYTimes.com will launch something similar in the near future.
Click fraud is happening much more often that originally thought, according to a new study by Fair Isaac Corp. The research labels 10-15 percent of pay-per-click ads are “pathological,” or likely the result of click fraud. “It’s still an early result,” said Joseph Milana, the company’s chief scientist. “The question remains about how broad the problem is in the entire marketplace.” Google has maintained it’s able to catch all but .02 percent of click fraud across its network.
Captured on my cellphone cam: the “Million Pest March,” a gathering of Opie and Anthony fanatics on a New York street corner Thursday morning, protesting O&A’s 30-day suspension from XM. (Somewhat less than a “million,” there were certainly a couple dozen “pests.”) Oddly, the protesters were outside the offices of FreeFM in New York City, which hasn’t suspended O&A (it’s a different show on FM than on XM). So it doesn’t take much to figure that the “protest” was timed to coincide with the O&A morning show on the radio.
As LR reader Joel said when he sent us the story, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” But the NFL has come out with official language now summing up its new restrictive policies regardling online video and audio. This includes press conferences, practice video and player interviews. Ready? You get :45 seconds a day TOTAL. No archiving. No live streaming. Everything must have a link back to the NFL. Nothing can be highlighted in video sections (only allowed in story sidebars). No integrated ads. Ads that appear alongside the video must not specifically relate to the NFL video (such as sponsorships.) Oh! But you can post video of your own reporters doing a straight standup (yes, it actually says that!) Ladies and gentlemen, the NFL media mafia continues its blind quest to own every scrap of its material, regardless of promotional value.
To help promote CBS’ upcoming shows, CBS.com has set up a Blogger toolkit that allows people like us to grab a player from a given show and embed it online. Cool idea. The promo for The Big Bang Theory is embedded below (it’s actually rather funny):
While the embedding is working (you have to manually set the player size in the code), the video links are not. They link to Innertube and for me, nothing plays. LR reader Adm had the same problem and sent us an email. “After a couple more tries, I gave up, wrote this complaint, and moved on. If anyone can get this to work, let me know. If not, send this one back to the labs, CBS.”
Update: The embedded player isn’t is sort of working in Firefox.
Lots of good stories coming our way from LR readers, and I’ve been very busy recently at work, so I’m a little behind. But here are the highlights:
- CBS cancels Jericho, fans hit the ceiling and rip the network on CBS.com’s own message board. (Thanks, Rob!)
- KGO-TV News Director Kevin Keeshan blogs from a Google media briefing at the company’s HQ. (Thanks, Sara!)
- How do you measure ratings in a DVR world? (Thanks, Alyssa!)
There are plenty more, which I’ll post later. And send us a tip here.
There are other issues on both sides but here are the webby ones…
1) The Baltimore Sun wants the union to okay combined reporter-photographer positions at the paper media organization.
2) The Sun’s union wants, “to combine operations of baltimoresun.com, whose employees are not Guild members, into The Sun’s unionized newsroom,” said a guild spokesman.
Captured on my cellphone cam: the “Million Pest March,” a gathering of 
