Archive for May, 2007
Good article at E&P about three recent redesigns at newspaper sites and what the people at those sites learned from the process. E&P talked with the editors of USATODAY.com, latimes.com and washingtonpost.com. The editors’ insights into the redesign process is very interesting. One observation echoes what Cory often points out:
One theme that emerged was that redesigning their site was an ongoing process that relies more and more on taking readers’ opinions into effect and making the process more of a conversation than ever before. Still, one editor admitted, half of the reader feedback was initially negative.
It’s the web, and you will always hear negative feedback more than you’ll hear positive feedback. That’s OK. You get more phone calls from crabby viewers than you do from happy viewers. There are great lessons to be learned from the newspapers - they understand page layout.
May 21st, 2007
I’m in Las Vegas for the Broadcast Cable Financial Management Association’s annual meeting this week. I’ll be on a panel Tuesday morning at 10 at the Rio called “Making a Real Business Out of a Local Media Website.” If any of the LR Faithful are around, stop by and say hi or email me at steviesaf (at) gmail dot com.
May 21st, 2007
LIN Television (station list) says it has hired JP Morgan to advise on a potential sale. Also, Nexstar Broadcasting has hired Goldman Sachs to do the same. “Station groups may feel their value has peaked and face an uncertain future,” writes David Goetzl in MediaPost. “Consumers continue to migrate to the web for news and information, and local newscasts account for a major portion of a station’s revenue.” So have TV stations peaked in value? Or is this just a lull until stations can regain their footing in a digital world?
May 21st, 2007
After CBS canceled the serial show Jericho, fans have barraged the network in email, letters and on CBS.com’s own message boards. Now Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment, has responded on the same boards. “Thank you for supporting ‘Jericho’ with such passion. We truly appreciate the commitment you made to the series and we are humbled by your disappointment,” she wrote. “In the coming weeks, we hope to develop a way to provide closure in the compelling drama that was the ‘Jericho’ story.” It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with…
May 21st, 2007
The Syndicated Network Television Association points to one week of Nielsen ratings that show that 86 percent of TV viewers watched syndicated shows live, compared to 60 percent for network broadcast TV. “You cannot electronically skip a commercial if people are watching a program live,” says Mitch Burg, president of SNTA.
May 21st, 2007
I’d like to share a couple of projects I’ve launched at Belo’s KING5.com in recent weeks. The first is called Citizen Rain. It combines a standard blog with an aggregator that displays the latest blog posts from over 100 Seattle blogs divided by category. Click on “politics” for example, and you’ll see the latest blog posts from Seattle’s politics blogs. Same with news, entertainment, music, sports, outdoors and real estate.
It soft-launched a few days ago, and we’re already seeing a positive response from the Seattle blogosphere, not to mention quite a few emails asking to be added to the aggregator. KING 5’s newsroom — which has not been reading local blogs — is also beginning to use Citizen Rain to find fresh story ideas. You may notice that it is not branded with KING 5, but we’re not hiding the association, either.
The second project is a condos section on KING5.com. Seattle is in the middle of a condo building boom, and we wanted to tap into some of that revenue. So I found a local blog authored by a realtor who’s doing a terrific job covering the condo space, and we integrated it into a new section that also combines a Google Maps mashup with new condo properties springing up around the area.
We’re even experimenting with some paid placement inside the maps. So far, the response from condos marketers has been very positive, as you can tell from the ads on the section. Both Citizen Rain and the condos section reflect a urgency I feel to expand into content and revenue opportunities outside the typical comfort zone for local TV.
May 20th, 2007
A story in the Washington Post concludes that there’s a widening gap between Democrats and Republicans on the internet. “We’re losing the web right now,” says Michael Turk, who was in charge of Internet strategy for President Bush’s 2004 campaign.
May 20th, 2007
MSNBC.com was down for parts of Friday afternoon due to “adjustments to the site’s domain name servers.” To MSNBC.com’s credit, they posted a story explaining it all. (Thanks Zack for the tip!)
May 20th, 2007
Time.com has published an excerpt from Al Gore’s latest book, The Assault on Reason, and Gore doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to TV’s impact on democracy. Despite the internet, Gore says TV still dominates. “In practice, what television’s dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics—and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role.” He goes on to cite the news media’s fascination over the years with O.J. Simpson, Chandra Levy, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, among others. “In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The ‘well-informed citizenry’ is in danger of becoming the ‘well-amused audience.’”
Gore writes that the internet can “revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework” because of its interactivity, openness and low barriers to entry. He may not have invented the internet, but Gore certainly understands its potential.
Update: Broadcasting & Cable responds in an editorial, “Gore ought to be embarrassed.”
May 20th, 2007
Clear Channel Communications has accepted an offer to be purchased for $19.5 billion. The board approved the joint bid made from private equity firms Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital. The Mays family - founders of Clear Channel - and the comapny’s top shareholders had been feuding over the future of the company since last year.
May 19th, 2007
San Francisco
Read the full post May 18th, 2007
Mountain View, CA
Read the full post May 18th, 2007
Mountain View, CA
Read the full post May 18th, 2007
Here’s the full text of the new NFL rule that effectively bans video of NFL press conferences, interviews and practices from media websites. For TV sites, this is a huge blow. Our only competitive advantage in sports coverage is video, and now the NFL has essentially yanked it. Well, unless we want to send out web video photographers to track down players and coaches off NFL property, at all times of the day and night. Hmmmm.
May 18th, 2007
David Zaslav has been cleaning house since he took over at Discovery Communications, stripping out low-performing units and supporting Internet video and high-def TV, which promise higher revenue potential. Discovery has announced they are closing up shop in their 103 retail stores around the nation, a move that eliminates a cool 25 percent of the private company’s workforce. While Discovery is shedding the outlet overhead, they are not getting out of the business completely. The edutainment-focused toys and other merchandise will be distributed through other retailers like Toys-R-Us and also be available at discovery.com’s online store, where sales have jumped 144 percent YTD. There is speculation that Zaslav is gearing up to take the company public, having already simplified the ownership structure by buying out partner Cox communications. Dumping the low-margin, high cost retail outlets is the kind of move private investors will like. They’re also going to like that Discovery’s Q1 revenues are up 10 percent and cash flow is up 24 percent compared to last year.
May 18th, 2007
In its largest acquisition ever, Microsoft is acquiring Seattle-based online ad company aQuantive for $6 billion — an 85 percent premium over yesterday’s closing price. “Today’s announcement represents the next step in the evolution of our ad network from our initial investment in MSN, to the broader Microsoft network including Xbox Live, Windows Live and Office Live, and now to the full capacity of the Internet,” Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, said in a statement. Microsoft had lost out in the bidding on a number of online ad companies over the last several months, most notably Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of Doubleclick. And judging by the huge premium, Microsoft wasn’t about to lose out to someone else on the aQuantive deal. aQuantive is made up of Avenue A/Razorfish, Atlas and DRIVEpm.
May 18th, 2007
I’m visiting my 60-year old parents in Florida right now. Their newspaper, Florida Today (a Gannett newspaper), is usually delivered by 7am each morning. Well, it didn’t come today. This has happened to them a few times in the last couple of months, even though they have a prepaid subscription and everyone else on the street got their paper! When my mom called Florida Today they told her it would be coming on a “later truck”. She knows it’s not coming and she keeps telling my father, “I hate being lied to.” OK newspapers, your last core demo are people like my parents and this is how you treat them? My mom is canceling their subscription and says she’ll be getting her news online from now on, but she won’t be going to FloridaToday.com. A double whammy: loss of a subscriber and negative word of mouth marketing. Ouch!
May 18th, 2007
“Cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26, were returning home from work at the ABC News Baghdad bureau yesterday afternoon when their car was reportedly ambushed and they were killed by unknown assailants,” according to ABCNews.com. This brings the total to 176 journalists and media assistants killed in Iraq since March 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders.
May 18th, 2007
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.
May 17th, 2007
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.
May 17th, 2007
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.
May 17th, 2007
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.
Press release with the Boston.com details…
Read the full post May 17th, 2007
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.
May 17th, 2007
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.
May 17th, 2007
Bakersfield, CA
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