FOX Interactive Media and a few FOX O&O’s have launched a few local music websites in connection with MySpace. The sites are an experiment to see if there is an audience for content that focuses on local bands, concerts and fans. The first round of sites include mymusictwincities, mymusicboston and mymusichouston, with MySpace pages for each (example). The sites include streaming audio, video of performances, concert calendars and links to the bands’ MySpace pages. It’s kind of a flashback to what was a key to the success of MySpace.
There is no official press release or details on the project. I’m told these sites are just a test before there is a decision to roll it out wider. I hadn’t even heard about these sites until the local FOX station here in Minneapolis started running promos for a “Battle of the Bands” contest. Take a look and if you have more information about the project, drop me an e-mail.
September 11th, 2007
We make a lot of suggestions here at Lost Remote, and we get a lot of feedback. Most of that feedback is wonderful, additive and positive. Sometimes you tell us we’re nuts. (Sometimes we are.) But sometimes we hear all the reasons why good ideas can’t or won’t happen. So I thought I’d take a moment to go over the things we’ve suggested over the years that we were told would never happen - a sample of the suggestions we’ve made since 1999 that were met with resistance or outright hostility. These are things we heard from people at stations or on other sites who were flat-out wrong. This isn’t a exercise in “I Told You So.” I hope this will empower those of you fighting the good fight to realize there is an inevitabililty about convergence, no matter how loudly the naysayers say “nay.”
Read the full post September 11th, 2007
Local news blogging pioneer Brittney Gilbert has announced she is taking a gig at KPIX in San Francisco. Just a couple of months after leaving WKRN in Nashville amid controversy over a post she made at Nashville is Talking, Brittney finds herself in a similar lead-blogger role, this time in San Francisco. Here is some of Brittney’s announcement, from her blog Sparkwood & 21:
I’ll be working from within the newsroom Monday through Friday combing through all the blogs updated daily in the Bay Area, highlighting posts I find funny or provocative or insightful or informative. There will also be an automatic aggregator. Many of you may be familiar with the concept. If you are wondering why I said I wasn’t cut out for moderating a community blog site, only to take this job 8 weeks later, you likely aren’t the only one… luckily, I learned from my very public mistakes made at NiT, and I’ve taken them to heart. This new venture will be less about me. I’m not that interesting anyway. What I mean to say, though, is that I will put less of myself “out there” and concentrate more on building a vibrant blogging community in what is already one of the most wired places on earth.
Brittney was the first (as near as we can tell) blogger to be hired by a local newsroom for the purposes of blogging. We’re happy to see more stations opening up to the aggregator model, which is starting to take off now after a couple of years of preaching. Congrats to Brittney on the new gig.
September 11th, 2007
