How untrue!

Check out Myfoxstl.com. It’s one of the best MyFoxs in the country.

Is it making money? As a marketing tool, Yes! It’s worth the investment in branding the local Fox product and for breaking news. The website often beats the on-air product.

The blogs are very interactive and community based. The anchors and reporters are very involved.

It also allows viewers to watch newscasts on the web anywhere in the world when traveling.

Also, by having a universal template and national and international content, the web producers can focus on the latest news and special sections designed specifically for St. Louis.

As always, this website is in flux and FOX is already working on the next generation.

I’m not a tech. nor an MBA, just a Journalist who enjoys the interaction of MYFOX compared to the competition’s websites

Stay tuned.

First, I am not a much of a fan of the MYFOX design, but it certainly is clean and showcases select content and advertisers with very little clutter. As a Web professional with 11 years running TV Web sites, I can tell you that keeping sites clean is a constant struggle, especially if you have overzealous creative services, news and promotions departments, or worse yet, an untalented Webmaster.

It’s not my place, but I feel compelled to appeal to you. I mean this in the nicest way, but you MAY need to take a step back and take a deep breath. You seem a bit too outraged by Meredith’s comments. The way I read it, Meredith was saying that you do not know what conversations are going on in the FOX ownership groups. She is probably tied to FOX somehow and privy to conversations.

To her point, many TV stations and groups (Gannett, Scripps, NBC, CBS, etc.) are experiementing with Web 2.0 strategies, blogging, separate verticals and brands, etc. I have worked at three of the big media companies and all are actively experimenting and many of those intiatives are overlooked on LR. Why? Partially because the experiments are kept quiet for strategic advantage. So, while I can’t speak for Meredith, I didn’t think she was calling you or other people at LR ignorant. I think she was suggesting that you were speaking out of school, of things you do not know, and for that reason possibly too harshly.

Kevin

I’ve heard the LR Faithful accused of a lot of things, but the one thing you can’t say about them is that they don’t have a clue as to what’s happening at the affiliates.

This is a site by and for people who have a ton of experience at the affiliate web level, Meredith. These people are experts and it’s wise to take what they observe a bit more seriously than you are. They understand exactly what is going on at the local stations because so many of them work in those stations.

The ones that don’t work in those places are consumers of online information. They aren’t in the least bit interested in hearing excuses about why local information providers “can’t” do something. If those providers can’t give information the way consumers want it, the audience will find it elsewhere. We had best listen to what the audience is telling us, and not tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about.

As for me trying to “drum up issues,” that suggests I am not sincere in what I write about. Not only is that insulting to me (which I can absolutely handle), it’s insulting to the people who bother to read this stuff, share it and comment on it. We could have a far more popular site if all we did was make trouble, gossip and “drum up issues.” (Don’t think we haven’t considered it, either…)

Meredith, you may find the FIM offering to be exactly what the stations need. You may support it. You may believe it is a platform that provides the “latest technology.” (I’ll let the IBS and WN folks determine whether their stuff lives up to the FIM offering. I imagine they’ll have some thoughts.) That’s great - we’re all about the debate here at LR.

But you are absolutely wrong (or haven’t read us enough) if you think the people who come here every day to share their thoughts and ideas don’t know what’s going on and don’t understand the source of the problem. They live the problem. They offer great ideas to resolve those problems. They know the frustrations far better than you give them credit for.

In fact, do not really understand what is going on with local stations related to the Internet initiatives…

What I see FIM offering and opportunity for local stations to take advantage of a vast technology network and national services, which most stations cannot afford, not even IBS, or WorldNow. It is expensive to keep up with technology and a majority of local TV stations are not even in the game.

It seems to me local stations need to focus their attention to providing local content (original) and if FIM is willing to provide a platform with latest technology, each party can focus on what they do best.

Steve is just trying to drum up issues for us to comment, not truly get to the source of local station issues…

MA

But have we come to a point where we can feel comfortable with poor journalism? I think many readers here got into news because we wanted to work on great stories, not because of all the technical possibilities that would come available after we’d launched our careers. NO ONE is wondering why the journalism is so bad on those sites, which are racked with weak headlines, shoddy writing and just awful presentation overall.

It’s sad that we critique this shortcoming and that one, but we overlook the quality of the real reason why we go to the sites in the first place — to read the news!

Allow me to suggest the obvious. We have a leadership problem. The generation of leadership now at the helm is faced with a sea change they are unable or, in some cases, unwilling to confront.

Too many came up in the days when all one needed to do was keep the carrier on and you made a good living. Capx investment in DTV is the result of regulatory mandate. Initiatives to compel cable operators to carry new spectrum offerings speaks directly to the problem at hand. We have a massive failure of imagination here. The most effective and efficient approach to getting local cable operators to carry programming is to offer local programming that cable customers value, programming cable customers want. What investments are being made in creating local original programming? Is the NBCU Weather product engaging and different enough to stir local consumer demand? Chances of a consumer driven I want my Weather Plus? The safe wager is 6 to 5 against. My point is if leadership fails to see DTV as a significant game-changing opportunity then it is, perhaps, unreasonable for us to expect these same leaders to have any grasp whatsoever of the promise, opportunities of local Web 2.0

A serious leadership problem, an ongoing failure of imagination, industry genetic blindness and inertia are creating second and third order effects it will take us years to address.

I can’t agree more. The MyFox setup truly is the worst of the “big group” bunch (IB, WorldNow, etc.) Ugly, not functional, lite on content, poorly executed, and clutter heavy. The rev share is bad bad for the affiliates - and ties them into a poorly executed platform, and drowns out their local brands.

“How do we do this as cheaply as possible with as little risk as possible?”

My how…

Actually, I’m pretty impressed with the Fox folks. I almost went to work for them at one point, and from what I could tell, they had a better sense than most broadcast network folks about the possibilities of their sites.

I agree with the general idea that everyone should contribute to every platform that a station has. However, it’s hard to expect a great website or a great newscast if you ask producers from either venture to split up their workload. At some level extra staff does have to be hired and it does have to be budgeted for. It’s hard for most managers to justify such a cost if that person is only going to do this extra work part of the time and do work that others are already doing for another part of the time.

One encouraging sign: I have checked out many of the myfox sites and see more differentiation than I thought I would. I also see a lot of community generated content and content from anchors and reporters that gtets on the web long before it gets on the air.

I don’t really see this deal as any different from IBS or WorldNow.

Welcome to all those reading LostRemote for the first time!

Ofcourse vBulletin doesn’t impose a unified design which could be a problem.

The most important part, as I’m sure this blog would usually agree, is content … the content will still come from the local stations.

i think the deal is exactly as you state it, my position in my comment yesterday should state that more clearly that it makes sense for FIM. My point: If the locals are using doubleclick or google or another third party ad vendor, then why not do it with FIM instead? If you are going to be splitting your revenue anyway, you might as well split it with a stakeholder in the core product space instead of a web pureplay.

the ownership groups of the local stations need to offer their own network of ad serving, one that allows the customers you’re talking about above to buy ads and manage their own campaigns through a web service platform. big companies like tribune, belo, scripps, gannett, should all be developing solutions like this, and doing it in an open source platform that would allow them all to work together. the big win is then offering all the bloggers and microsites in your community a google like adwords block that you sell into and split the revenue with them.

face it, FIM knows who is going to be gobbling up the $63 billion online advertising pie when the tipping point hits in 2011. it will be big service providers like google and yahoo, and the majority of the ads are not going to be on content, per se… they’ll be on webmail, chat platforms, google docs, etc, because we spend more time online communicating than pretty much anything else.

if we want to keep the money we’re losing around our content and services as this shift happens, we need to be offering better advertising services to our local advertisers.