Archive for June 15th, 2007
Here at KING5.com and NWCN.com, we’ve just won an Advanced Media Emmy Award for a video podcast we produce called “Drive,” available on iTunes here. And turns out, it’s the first time an Emmy has been awarded to a podcast on either the local or national level. Hosted and produced by Tom Voelk, “Drive” features reviews of the latest and hottest cars, trucks and SUVs. (He does everything including shoot his own material.) Congrats to Tom for winning such an innovative award!
June 15th, 2007
CNN’s beta site has been up and running for nearly a couple weeks now. Says Simit Shah, CNN.com’s director of web operations in a blog post: “This is the first time we’ve conducted an extensive beta, which is a little like trying to change your tire while driving a hundred miles an hour. Though challenging, we’ve learned a lot, especially via feedback from users. We’ve made several hundred fixes during the beta period and we have many more planned.” On July 1st, all video on CNN.com will be available for free.
June 15th, 2007
Nielsen-Netratings released its May stats today, and there’s a big development: CNN has surged ahead of MSNBC for the first time since November 2006. There’s a working theory on what may have happened, but first here’s the list of the top ten sites in the current events and global news category:
1. Yahoo News 30,451 (in 000s of unique users)
2. CNN Digital Network 29,094
3. MSNBC 28,347
4. AOL News 17,444
5. Tribune Newspapers 13,300
6. NYTimes.com 12,775
7. Gannett Newspapers 12,645
8. ABCNews Digital Network 10,211
9. McClatchy Newspaper Network 9,885
10. USAToday.com 9,528
Missing from the top 10 list for the first time in months is Internet Broadcasting (see the rankings from previous months here), which leads some people to suspect that the CNN Digital Network may have rolled in some of IB’s unique users as a result of its recent partnership, which involved CNN taking a small equity position in IB. We’ll do a little research on this and get back to you.
June 15th, 2007
Sesame Street was a major winner in the Creative Daytime Emmy Awards, but the interesting story for the LR Faithful lies in the four new categories for broadband, cell phones and other handheld devices, which were created this year. NATS teamed up with MySpace to get the nominations, and the winners are:
- NBC’s The Office: Accountants won in the comedy category
- It’s Jerrytime! on Ozone Inc. won in variety
- Cyberchase on PBS won in children’s
- Satacracy 88 from Itsallinyourhands.com won for drama
Among the major broadcast networks, ABC and CBS tied with seven trophies, while NBC brought home five. Oh, and Bob Barker brought home his 18th trophy.
June 15th, 2007
TVNewser is reporting that NBC’s Campbell Brown is headed to CNN and Paula Zahn will subsequently lose her 8 p.m. show. “There’s nothing imminent,” says a CNN spokesperson.
June 15th, 2007
Maybe the ending of “The Sopranos” wasn’t so vague after all. In an interview with New Jersey’s Star-Ledger this week, series creator David Chase said “It’s all there” when talking about what the instantly-famous blackout ending means. It could be that Tony was killed, and that we “went to black” with him. And this Reuters article has good reasoning to back that up:
The biggest hint, according to a consensus taking shape on the Web, is a scene from an earlier episode in which Tony and his brother-in-law, Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, muse about what it feels like to die.
“At the end, you probably don’t hear anything, everything just goes black,” Bobby says while they sit fishing in a small boat on a lake.
That scene is recalled briefly in a flashback played at the end of the penultimate “Sopranos” episode, as Tony is lying in the darkened room of a safehouse clutching a machine gun to his chest in the midst of a mob war.
“I think that is one of the most legitimate things to look at,” (HBO spokesman Quentin) Schaffer said when asked about theories that the Bobby Bacala flashback was meant to foreshadow Tony’s death.
Could this be the “Paul is Dead” of our generation? With the exception, of course, that Paul McCartney is A. Alive and B. Not a fictional character.
June 15th, 2007
