Archive for September, 2007
The term blog is used a lot in our industry by people who want you to think they’re blogging, but they only post once a day or less. Well, FoxNews.com is blowing away other networks’ blogs with their new GretaWire.com blog. It’s a great look at the behind the scenes of the O.J. Simpson trial. Greta is posting frequently with photos, videos and information that isn’t going to make air. She’s even blogged from inside the courtroom. Excellent work by her and her producers in the field.
September 19th, 2007
Business 2.0 magazine is shutting down, and Mark Glaser at MediaShift points out that the reason is because parent company Time Inc. took a decidely 1.0 approach to things. By combining the sales forces for Fortune, Money, Business 2.0, Fortune Small Business and CNNMoney.com, Time Inc. ironically sank the revenue for all.
September 19th, 2007
Rather says the network violated his contract by not giving him enough face-time on 60 Minutes after forcing him to step down from the Evening News anchor desk. In the 32-page filing, he also says CBS “seriously damanged his reputation” and made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House.”
September 19th, 2007
I’ve noticed here in Seattle (according to Comscore data) that KIROTV.com — which is one of the many Internet Broadcasting affiliates participating in the new linking partnership with CNN.com — has experienced a big boost in unique users. Of course, most of these incoming uniques are originating from outside the local market. I’ve also heard from a few other IB sites that have experienced the same CNN boost. Of course, this raises all sorts of interesting questions about the value of a local unique user compared to a national unique user. But in the end, impressions are impressions, right? Or are they? I’ll leave others in comments to discuss… (Big disclosure: I work for KING5.com, a competitor of KIROTV.com.)
September 19th, 2007
RPM Communications out of Maynard, MA launched Utterz this week. It’s a new mobile voice blogging service. You call a number, record your message, and then it gets posted to the web! You can also send texts and pics from your phone too. They also provide an embed code, so you can feature your audio clips on your website or blog. Radio stations should be all over this. It’s free, easy to implement, and gives you a social networking strategy that makes sense for radio.
September 19th, 2007
I love Google News. Let me start with that. Love it. I love that it sends traffic to my site, and I love that it makes it easy to find news stories. But it frustrates me. The new AP deal makes it even more frustrating.
We have a trio of peacocks living at my apartment complex. So I wrote a feature and took some pictures. It did great traffic online yesterday. We try to do these online-only enterprised stories several times each week. The peacock story was picked up by the wire. That doesn’t bug me. The story appeared on the other news sites in the market. That doesn’t bug me. But when I did my morning search for Boise - the much shorter, Google AP version of our peacock story comes up first. THAT bugs me. I get that the Google algorithm puts more weight on “The Associated Press” than it does on KTVB. But the fact that it puts SO much weight on AP over a story that has about three times the depth… and includes photos bugs me. TV sites like ours benefit greatly from the AP - but NONE of that benefit comes from Google. They can’t “associate” because they don’t create content. So like I said: AP great, Google great. The combination? Frustrating.
September 19th, 2007
CBS Radio will again be streaming a live video webcast from a red carpet. This time it’s a season premiere party in Hollywood. Back in June CBS Radio did a “Live from the Web Carpet” at the premiere of Transformers and Bourne Ultimatum. The new part this time is the boost the show is getting from cbs.com, which will be linking to the stream. I would expect CBS’ Showbuzz to link to it as well. Catch the program tonight (Sept 19) on webcarpetlive.com starting at 8 PM, PT /11PM, ET.
September 19th, 2007
Entertainment Tonight’s website etonline.com relaunched with a new look. The new design has more of a blog feel to it, perhaps trying to copy sites like tmz.com or perezhilton.com. It didn’t work. I will give them credit for tagging content to make it easy to catch up on Britney Spears or O.J. Simpson.
September 18th, 2007
Powered by Viewdle, Reuters Labs has debuted a facial recognition search feature that scans across 609 hours of video for the beta test. For example, I typed in Amy Winehouse, and it returned a list of clips making up 18 appearances for a total on-screen time of 1:06. Click a clip, and it plays it from the moment she appears. Mouse over the video, and a box outlines her face with the words “Amy Winehouse.” Very, very cool.
September 18th, 2007
A new study by eMarketer says that local online advertising will only comprise 13.4% of the total internet market in 2007, but will surge in the years to come:
MediaPost’s Seana Mulcahy says she believes that local media companies aren’t ready for it. “Most of these companies haven’t even figured it out yet. Come on, guys — you have the audience and the people are loyal as hell, now do something,” she writes.
September 18th, 2007
MySpace will roll out a new system to allow advertisers to hyper-target ad content to users on a self-service basis, according to the New York Times. Beefed up targeting capabilities allow MySpace advertisers to pinpoint users with their ads. All that data about yourself that you drop on your profile helps the site to custom-tailor ads to you (single guys and gals see lots of gender-targeted match.com ads these days, for instance). The NYT uses a theoretical punk band in Seattle targeting area fans as an example of potential users for the service.
Some worry about big brother of course… leading to my favorite quote of the young week: “People should be able to congregate online with their friends without thinking that big brother, whether it is Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg, are stealthily peering in,” Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy told the Times. Bet Zuckerberg never thought he’d be mentioned in the same conspiratorial breath as Rupert Murdoch…
September 17th, 2007
Google is edging further and further into Microsoft’s bread-and-butter office software with the launch of Google Presentations. Presentations is part of the online Docs suite (which already includes a word processor and spreadsheet maker). I loaded up the program and quickly went about creating a slide. The software also imports .ppt files, and allows online collaboration. A “souped up” version will be sold for $50 to governments, businesses and the like.
Related: IBM will offer a free office software bundle called “Lotus Symphony”
September 17th, 2007
NBCU is teaming with a smattering of Clear Channel radio stations in top markets to “take over” as the exclusive sponsor of the stations for a day. Both Journeyman and Chuck will get the radio treatment. The Journeyman stations will feature :15 promos pushing people to a special micro-site where listeners can pick “now and then” songs to mash together a custom music list. The “Chuck” stations will be rebranded “Chuck FM” (ala Jack FM) - and actors from the shows will do the intro honors for news, traffic and weather.
September 17th, 2007
NYTimes.com’s premium section, Times Select, will be available free of charge beginning on Wednesday of this week. Explains the press release:
“Since Times Select was launched in 2005, changes in the way people find news and opinion on the Web have altered the online landscape. Because of online users’ growing reliance on search in order to navigate the Web, NYTimes.com expects to see a substantially increased number of unique users referred to and accessing the site once the pay wall is gone. Due to this anticipated growth in traffic, the TimesSelect subscription revenue model will be replaced by one that is based on advertising.”
As part of the change, archived articles back to 1987 will also be free. American Express has signed on as the first sponsor of the newly opened areas of NYTimes.com.
Of Times Select’s 787,400 active subscribers, 471,200 received the service free of charge as a benefit of their home-delivery subscriptions and another 89,200 received it for free on college campuses. So if you do the math, that leaves 227,200 paying subscribers. Clearly the Times believes it can beat that revenue number through advertising alone. “As demonstrated by the commitment of American Express, advertisers see the enormous value in making our site open and free to everyone,” said Denise Warren, SVP and chief advertising officer. “With the removal of the pay wall, the audience potential at NYTimes.com, already the No. 1 newspaper Web site in the United States, is vast. Advertisers on the site can expect to see an unprecedented number of Times readers interacting with their brands.”
Times Select has been the great experiment in premium newspaper content (the WSJ is a different animal). So does this put a nail in the coffin of the premium online news model? Press release follows…
Read the full post September 17th, 2007
The latest edition of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox focuses on tabs — a navigation technique that has become very popular in web design. He offers 13 best practices guidelines for tabs, using Yahoo Finance as an example. Good stuff. (Thanks, Dale!)
September 17th, 2007
TechPresident.com walked away with a $10,000 check after winning the grand prize in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. “The site not only reports on, but encourages, citizens to participate more directly in the political process,” the panel of judges said. “It’s an amazing source of information from a non-traditional news outlet.” Here are the rest of the winners:
$2,000 First Prize: CFR.org Crisis Guides
$1,000 Wild Card Award: Reuters’ Second Life Virtual News Bureau
$1,000 Citizen Media Award: The Forum, Deerfield, N.H.
$1,000 Special Distinction Award: washingtonpost.com’s onBeing
$1,000 Special Distinction Award: OrlandoSentinel.com’s Varsity MyTeam H.S. Sports
Press release with more details follows after the TechPresident screen grab…
Read the full post September 17th, 2007
Amy Gahran’s blog contentious.com is a very good read, and she’s one smart cookie who has been asking some very good questions lately in her role as a contributor to Poynter’s e-Media Tidbits blog. Last week, she asked if online journalism awards are old hat and also produced a brilliant post on why journalists should care about online ad networks. These broach two topics that are near and dear to my heart, so I jumped in and commented there, and want to share some thoughts with our readers here to get the LR community talking.
Read the full post September 17th, 2007
I always enjoy doing this. Right now, I’m being interviewed for a segment on WCVB’s evening show “Chronicle.” It’s one of those locally-produced shows I’m always saying that locals should do. This is the part where they have completed the interview with me and now they’re shooting what I do for a living. So I have to look busy. How do I look? Busy? The segment should air in two weeks on Monday the 24th.
September 17th, 2007
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