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- Some doubt that Tribune deal with Sam Zell will hold together
- Daily Show crew travels to Iraq (without a green screen)
- Fox News cancels mock news show 1/2 Hour News Hour
- Fox reality show Anchorwoman profiled, premieres Wednesday
2 comments August 20th, 2007
Frank N. Magid Associates have released the latest in their series of research on the media usage of “Millennials,” 18- to 29-year-olds. The study, reported by TV Week, cited Yahoo as being the number one news source for Millennials after the initial news of the Virginia Tech shootings. CNN followed, then cnn.com and FOX News. Take note, 2 of the top 4 sources for coverage were websites. The story also points out that word of mouth was actually the way 29% of Millennials learned of the shooting, but text messaging was included in word of mouth. I wish they had broken that out separately, as I suspect texting is increasingly becoming the way younger audiences spread news.
7 comments August 20th, 2007
Belo is in the middle of a multi-market rollout of HSGameTime.com, a national high school sports site with local ties to each of its TV and newspaper properties. Beyond the stuff you’d expect, the site features a social network for both parents and teens, as well as the capability for users to host their own blogs and upload video and photos. Much more later, but in the meantime, check out the Dallas version of HSGameTime, one of the first to launch. (Full disclosure: I work for KING5.com, which is a Belo property.)
9 comments August 19th, 2007
I’ve replaced the “blogroll” on Lost Remote with a RSS feed mashup from those same sites. It spits out a stream of stories and blog posts updated every fifteen minutes. The most recent 15 stories appear in the right column, and click “Wire” in the nav to visit a full page of the latest 50. It’s still a little glitchy, and I’ll be tweaking it over the next few days.
6 comments August 19th, 2007
Lost Remote’s Michael Gay told us about Hearst-Argyle’s new High School Playbook initiative earlier this week. Now Little Lost Robot’s JL Watkins has the inside scoop on what’s going on at the ground floor level. His station, WYFF, is training a “small army” of sideline reporters - to take video of games - then edit and upload the material to HSPB. Smart.
2 comments August 19th, 2007
BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis has a must-read take on a new Harvard report that concludes newspapers (and, I would say by some extension all local news outlets) are heavily threatened by the Internet - and that national brands have more muscle in the future than the local folks. He breaks down the report’s assumptions and conclusions - then looks at what outlets need to do to stay in the game: aggregate, syndicate, use the “old” platform to promote the new — and most importantly… produce good journalism. Read it.
9 comments August 19th, 2007
NBC inked a series of deals to make its fall pilots available for free on a bunch of VOD systems: Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Cox - and versions on Dish and DirecTV. CBS, CW and Fox aren’t planning to follow suit, but in past years have put the product online. We’re getting millions and millions of dollars worth of advertising impressions,” NBC’s Henry Ahn told Variety. While four of the five major English-language networks are getting the pilots out ahead of time - either on-air or online… one isn’t: ABC. The network has kept a “tight lid” on its pilots, outside of a few public screenings.
2 comments August 18th, 2007
After this week’s Seattle Times incident, does it come as a shock that a majority of Americans think news organizations are biased? Pew asked 1,503 adults a variety of questions - and the results should give us collective pause. 53% overall think news organizations are biased; 68% of Internet users think orgs. are biased; 43% say the media is too critical of the country; 39% think facts are a problem; 53% say stories are “often inaccurate;” only 35% think journos care about the people they report on. Ouch.
52% of those surveyed think the media has a liberal tilt - including 75% of Republicans and 37% of democrats.
Good news? A little: 78% have a favorable impression of TV news - the same figure for newspapers - but both of those figures are on the decline since Pew began the polls in 1985. Tons more data here
5 comments August 18th, 2007
Add comment August 18th, 2007
This is a big deal. The creator of Family Guy, Seth McFarlane and the star of Disney’s That’s So Raven have teamed up with Media Rights Capital (MRC) to distribute video shorts via the Google Adsense network. Not ads per se, but video content with integrated branding. So instead of creating a video site that would hopefully attract an audience — or inking online video syndication deals — the plan is to distribute these videos via Adsense and target the “ads” to relevant audiences. “We feel this partnership answers the question of how best to reach viewers online, because the web is fragmented into millions and millions of viewing destinations,” said MRC Co-CEO Asif Satchu. “AdSense connects all of those fragments and offers us access to them in one simple and powerful distribution solution.” Adds Google exec Kim Malone, “This combination allows for the creation of original content that was historically too expensive to produce for Internet distribution and connects advertisers with high-quality content” The multi-million dollar deal will involve McFarlane creating new animated characters for 50 video shorts. Separately, Raven-Symone will host “how-to” clips.
4 comments August 17th, 2007
According to a post on the Silicon Valley gossip blog ValleyWag, Fark.com founder Drew Curtis says he’s “99 percent sure” that someone at WHBQ Fox 13 attempted to hack into his website’s servers. Here’s the comment thread on Fark.
Update: “Grab” mentions in comments that WHBQ just built OnMemphis, a cool blog aggregator. He writes, “In defense of the person involved, you (as in Lost Remote) just featured a site he built as ‘an example of what’s right’ with TV and the web. I just hope and imagine this is a big misunderstanding.”
True enough, the way Drew describes the “attack,” it sounds very unlikely.
4 comments August 17th, 2007
A report from the Army found that the Pentagon’s own military websites are posting more security breaches than those big, bad, anti-American military blogs out there. “It’s clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It’s a pretty major disparity.”
Add comment August 17th, 2007
Fans of the CBS reality show Big Brother 8 can now watch a dedicated 24/7 live feed from the house on their Verizon Wireless phones. The service is powered by V-CAST Mobile TV and MediaFLO — which is now available in 30 markets. While you may not be a big fan of Big Brother, you have to admit that broadcasting a dedicated 24/7 live feed to a cell phone is pretty cool. Press release…
Read the full post 2 comments August 17th, 2007
With the MyFox deal, the Fox-affiliated television stations have just taken the path of least resistance in the area where they need to make the biggest strides. They have chosen ease over risk. In doing so, they have given away access to fully half their sales inventory. They have just sold their chances for success to a low bidder who is the only winner in the deal. And they are making the announcement that they are not interested in the local web at all. This is going to be a mortal wound, self-inflicted by people who still believe it’s TV first, then web as an afterthought.
Read the full post 19 comments August 17th, 2007
The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News are joining the newspaper alliance with Yahoo, bringing the total to 19 publishing companies and close to 400 newspapers. “The open nature of the partnership between the newspapers and Yahoo has made this the solution of choice for the newspaper industry,” Hilary Schneider, executive vice president at Yahoo, said in a statement.
3 comments August 16th, 2007
This is a journalist’s dream come true! You can now discover which organizations (or at least their IP address) have added or edited entries on Wikipedia using the WikiScanner. Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at Cal Tech, developed the tool. Why did he do it? In his list of FAQs for the media he writes, “To create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike.” Check out what Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, the CIA, and the U.S. House of Representatives have been editing on Wikipedia. Gotta love the web for the transparency it brings.
3 comments August 16th, 2007
Seven Hearst-Argyle markets launched a new social networking site that is focused around local high school sports. HighSchoolPlaybook.com provides an environment where teens can share video and photos about their schools’ sports teams, cheer leading and bands. Many of the stations have even hired a group of student sideline reporters who are using HD cameras to shoot local sports stories and reports for the site. According to Broadcasting and Cable, Hearst-Argyle plans to license the service to non-Hearst-Argyle stations in the next year. As part of the launch, Hearst-Argyle also launched five new YouTube channels for the stations involved in HighSchoolPlaybook. (Disclosure: I work for Hearst-Argyle and was involved in the launch of the new site.)
11 comments August 16th, 2007
In a sweeping deal, Fox Interactive Media will manage 160 Fox affiliate websites and bring them into the MyFox network — the same network already in use by Fox’s owned-and-operated station sites. “It’s important for local affiliate stations to have a web strategy and compelling online content, and we believe the MyFox platform is the best solution to help them deliver it,” said Joe Denk, chairman of the Fox affiliate board of governors. As part of the deal, FIM will have access to half of the inventory on the sites for national inventory, and the revenue share arrangement will be “similar” to Fox’s earlier arrangement to stream network shows on affiliate sites. One of the biggest Fox affiliate ownership groups, Sinclair, is still evaluating its options and is not part of the 160 site deal.
The move fits an urgency in the media industry to scale up quickly to attract higher-quality national advertisers who are hungry for unique, easily-executed, targeted campaigns across a large audience. Two semi-recent examples are Internet Broadcasting’s deal with CNN and Yahoo’s newspaper consortium. And I imagine you’ll see plenty more ad network partnerships in the near future.
27 comments August 15th, 2007
With a fair amount of reluctance, the Republican candidates have agreed to a date for their own CNN-YouTube debate. The debate will be held on November 28 (it was originally scheduled for September) in St. Petersburg, Florida. While the candidates were on the fence, Republican bloggers pressured them to go ahead with the debate. Save The Debate, which had a petition, writes “We did it! Thanks to you, we saved the debate. Now we’re helping make this a substantive debate by encouraging questions from Republicans across America.” Submit your questions at YouTube.com/debates.
3 comments August 14th, 2007
Google Maps is coming out with a feature that will allow people to embed a map onto their blogs with just a snippet of code. You’ll be able to pull up whatever map you want in Google Maps, and then you’ll have the ability to get the “embed code” the same way you can embed a YouTube video. The map won’t be a static picture - it will still have the usual functions of a Google Map. Every site needs to realize this is what they should be doing: distributed information is what it’s all about. Make it easy for blogs and sites to embed your stuff and you will have instant syndication.
4 comments August 14th, 2007
Here are the top news sites according to Unique Visitors in the U.S. for July 2007, according to Nielsen/Netratings. (via Cyberjournalist)
So Google News and CBS News Digital Network fell out of the top 10 we saw in June 2007, replaced by USAToday.com and Fox News Digital Network.
6 comments August 14th, 2007
Google has been the undisputed king of search for an online eternity, having risen from the bloody search engine wars of the early Web with only heavyweights like Yahoo and Microsoft left able to compete (remember HotBot? Dogpile? AltaVista?). Well look out Mountain View, here comes Jimmy Wales and a legion of open sourcers with the Wikia project, which seeks to build an organic search engine that may spawn hundreds of rivals for Google’s core service. Wikia may not be a the giant dinosaur-killing meteor, but rather a shower of meteors that blast the lids off of all the SEO jobs and little businesses who have carved niches for themselves on the single premise of gaming Google’s engine. But wait, there’s more…
Read the full post 5 comments August 14th, 2007
How’s this for a media swirl? The Dallas Morning News has a long story today on a Dateline NBC “To Catch a Predator” visit to Murphy, TX. The DMN notes competing news magazine 20/20 is now looking into the growing controversy. During the Murphy sting, more than 20 people were arrested, but later had charges dropped due to “evidence problems.” One man, a former district attorney, caught by Dateline, Perverted Justice and police later killed himself. Dateline rejects charges they manipulated or interfered with a police investigation. “The premise, the notion, that’s been floated that Chris Hansen or his producers somehow could have controlled or manipulated a police department, prosecutors or the whole law enforcement organization is ridiculous,” Dateline EP David Corvo said.
(Disclosure: The DMN is published by my employer Belo and I work for an NBC affiliate. Oh, and I enjoy watching 20/20).
9 comments August 14th, 2007
Phillips Electronics has a new high-end HDTV flat screen line called Aurea it has launched in Europe. They’re not bothering much with TV ads, however. They’re spending their ad bucks by producing five minute, artsy films and then showing the films on the Aurea at fashion and jewelry stores in Europe. From the NY Times:
The idea is to be more exclusive, to be very different from your traditional kind of advertising,” said Sandrine Huijgen, marketing director for consumer electronics at Philips. “We don’t see Dior advertising a lot on television.” Philips said it might run a few television spots in markets where it cannot be avoided. But most of the $68 million that Philips expects to spend in Europe through the end of the year will be used in other media…
Phillips also has magazine ads shot by a fashion photographer. I’ve always thought it was strange when I saw an ad for a hi-def TV on a regular TV. “See this TV? Trust us - it’s a better picture than the one you’re watching. It’s got more scan lines! It’s plasma! It’s LCD!” What’s missing from the Aurea ad campaign? There is no tech-speak at all.
2 comments August 14th, 2007
Awww yeah… OutsideIn did a survey of blog postings and found that Boston bloggers are the ‘bloggiest’ in America. Well, at least we put up the most blog posts for the survey period of March and April. (Duh - it was spring training and we were already worried about the Yankees.) The bloggiest neighborhood, however, isn’t in Boston - it’s in (sigh) Brooklyn. The Clinton Hill neighborhood had the most prodigious blog production in March and April.
Add comment August 14th, 2007
