Archive for October, 2007
Today at 2:30 p.m. ET, the National Association of Broadcasters will announce an “unparalleled consumer education marketing campaign” to reach TV viewers about the upcoming hard switch to digital. You can watch a live webcast of the press conference here. As many of you know, the vast majority of TV viewers have no idea what’s going to happen on February 19th, 2009, when their analog TV sets suddenly become snow — a transition that will have a massive impact on local television.
October 15th, 2007
LR pal Scott Kirsner writes a great piece in today’s Boston Globe that gives insight into the birth of Brightcove, which had its roots in the same Cambridge tech incubator as Maven Networks. Jeremy Allaire, who was on the board of Maven, raised enough money to start Brightcove and announced his intentions to Maven CEO Hilmi Ozguc in August, 2004. Ozguc was “mildly surprised,” and even though, as Allaire says, “(Maven) had complete transparency into what I was doing and what the business plan was,” things have been chilly ever since. A great story.
ALSO: Maven launches new internet-TV ad platform (B&C)
October 15th, 2007
The new business network from FOX launched this morning, along with website foxbusiness.com. I appreciate the quality of the video on the site, since my cable provider is not providing the channel for me to watch. The video is 16×9, embeddable, and a pop-out feature so you can surf the site while still watching your selected video. The site’s not perfect though, offering up “undefined story” errors 3 hours after the network launched, and several pages showing html coding. By the time you read this, they will probably have those problems fixed.
Check out the channel’s launch video here: Since FOX Business decided their embedded videos should auto play with audio, I’m not embedding it. How annoying.
Update from Cory: Anyone else having trouble loading the site? Verrry slow and buggy, like Michael said. And what does everyone think of the design?
October 15th, 2007
The national RTNDA Murrow Awards are being handed out Monday, and the newly redesigned CNN.com wins the national award for best website. Big congratulations to Cory as KING5.com takes the large market television website Murrow. World Now powered WAFF.com takes the small market website Murrow. Radio Murrows went to KCBS.com for large market, and WDEL.com for small market. RTNDA also awards non-broadcast websites, and those awards went to WashingtonPost.com and publicintegrity.org. Full list of awards here. Congratulations to all the winners!
October 14th, 2007
Brian Stelter over at NY Times has written a profile piece of ABC’s daily webcast, World News. “Over the course of 20 months, the webcast has evolved from a basic distillation of the day’s news into an original program that incorporates video blogs, first-person essays and interviews,” Brian writes. The webcast’s senior producer is Jason Samuels, who has been urging ABC’s correspondents to escape the package formula that dominates TV news. “Do one long stand-up, do much longer sound bites, play an interview,” Samuels said. “Produce a story in any way you think is engaging — there are no rules.” Of course, it helps that there’s no “hard out” when producing it. “I don’t have to count the seconds,” he said. “I just try to put in a good show that’s around 15 minutes.” ABC says the webcast sees 4.5 million views a month, most of which are downloads through iTunes.
October 12th, 2007
NBC News will debut its new studios on October 22nd with Morning Joe on MSNBC at 6am, following through the net’s shows that day, and NBC Nightly News at 6:30pm ET. Inside Cable News has screen shots and video of the new facility.
October 11th, 2007
LIN Television has announced plans to launch YouTube channels for its 31 stations, according to Broadcasting & Cable. The plans will make LIN the second broadcast group to produce YouTube channels for local stations, the first being Hearst-Argyle which launched its channels back in June. (Disclosure: I work for Hearst-Argyle and was one of the managers involved in the Hearst-Argyle YouTube launches.)
October 11th, 2007
The site is now in beta (invite only) and InteractiveSalsa has a screen grab.
October 11th, 2007
MySpace will be getting a new weather section thanks to a partnership announced this week by Weather Channel Interactive. According to Reuters, the MySpace weather section will feature current conditions and five-day forecasts as well as national and regional maps, weather headlines and weather and climate-related video content.
October 11th, 2007
Members of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium take note: Valleywag has some troubling news:
Yahoo executives keep touting the company’s deal with a “consortium” of newspapers. But from what we hear from insiders, the “consortium” is just a bunch of paper, with no real technology designed to power Yahoo president Sue Decker’s grand vision. Newspaper partners are growing increasingly skeptical that Yahoo will ever deliver. No wonder doubts are growing regarding Yahoo’s grand alliance. Aside from HotJobs, the job-listings site Yahoo bought which has long partnered with newspapers, what substance is there?
Valleywag also points us to Alan Mutter’s Reflection of a Newsosaur, who spoke with online newspaper folks who have a dim outlook on the program.
“We aren’t anywhere near matching the initial gains,” says an online executive at one of the earliest publishers to partner with HotJobs. “We are struggling and I don’t see how we are going to make it.” If this experience proves to be commonplace, it would throw cold water on the idea that hefty, double-digit advances in online sales in the next few years could help Yahoo’s newspaper partners offset an appreciable portion of their declining print revenues.
As always, the best idea is to build your own local advertising networks and not to rely on third parties.
October 11th, 2007
The Associated Press filed suit against VeriSign-owned news aggregator Moreover for “copyright infringement and trademark abuse.” Moreover is a service that scrapes news sources and provides links for a variety of clients. Moreover’s system provides a headline, link and short text snippet. (Sound familiar?)
The AP reports that the AP claims Moreover improperly displays the APs headlines and those text snippets (yes, I enjoyed that).
“The Associated Press spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year gathering and reporting the news, providing original coverage of vital breaking news that cannot be obtained anywhere else,” AP CEO Tom Curley said in a statement.
Ars Technica has an excellent analysis of the suit:
If they [wire services] don’t jealously guard their content, the organizations reason, many clients will simply acquire it secondhand from ultrafast aggregation services, instead of directly from the newswire. If that happens, the licensing revenue stream could dry up, taking AP with it.
The kicker: The AP discovered the alleged infringement while discussing a deal to provide content management to the wire’s members.
October 10th, 2007
Howie and his case holders take the top spot among TV series with an online presence. Hitwise metered show sites during premiere week, and found DOND had a remarkable 15% share of all show’s web traffic. TVWeek says the largess is mostly due to the win at home game, but I’d guess that those model slideshows don’t hurt. Dancing With The Stars takes #2 - again fueled by viewer participation. The top scripted show is Heroes with 9.71% share. Relatively low-rated America’s Most Wanted is the fifth most-trafficked show site. Bionic Woman was the top-ranked freshman series, in 9th place.
NBC.com is the number one network site with 48% share, followed by ABC.com at 23.40%, CBS.com at 17.13% and CWTV.com at 6.53%. FOX.com stands in fifth place at 4.59%, but its numbers don’t include stand-alone sites for America’s Most Wanted, the Simpsons, Family Guy or American Idol.
October 10th, 2007
Jive Records bumped up the release date for Britney Spears’ latest album “blackout.” The reason? You guessed it - illegal downloads. The disc will now drop on Oct. 30 instead of Nov. 13 as originally planned.
In a statement, Jive told the AP it is “doing everything possible to prevent and avoid any further illegal distribution of songs,” including the leaking of “unfinished material and demos represented as completed legitimate songs” to the Internet.”
Seems kinda like saying “yeah, they robbed our mini-mart, but they only got the stale donuts.”
October 10th, 2007
Just take a look at this photo from a classroom at the Missouri School of Journalism:
Here’s another angle of the same room here, with the sole ACER computer circled.
October 10th, 2007
Oooh - they’re good. The folks at BlogTalkRadio.com interviewed me and Fred Graver live at 2:30 pm and then turned the show around and put it online within a half hour. You can listen here. Warning: The interview contains adult language and graphic silliness.
October 10th, 2007
I hosted a panel after lunch and then did a web radio show, so I didn’t liveblog this afternoon. Fortunately, the place is crawling with students who are doing my dirty work. Since a theme of today is crowdsourcing, I’ve crowdsourced the afternoon. The session at which I played Oprah, Broadcast/Multimedia is marvelously transcribed here by Tanzina Vega. Merrill Brown held court on his Now Public, and recovered from mic trouble. Annaliese Griffin blogged that. The session on social information and networking had some great discussion which you can read about in this report by Candice Coots. Come to think of it, I’m really, really starting to like crowdsourcing.
October 10th, 2007
So a morning of ideas and idealism comes down to practicality here at the Networked Journalism Summit, as Jeff Jarvis hosts a discussion called “What’s Needed, What’s Next.” On the panel were Mark Potts, the founder of Backfence; Debra Gallant of Baristanet and Scott Clark of the Houston Chronicle’s Chron.com. This has been the most interactive, Q&A-intensive session so far.
Read the full post October 10th, 2007
New York University Professor Jay Rosen started NewAssignment.net to explore “open source reporting.” Its big public test came with AssignmentZero, a partnership with Wired on the topic of Online Collaboration itself. Rosen says NewAssignment.net learned six key lessons…
Read the full post October 10th, 2007
Moderator Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine wrote an influential article last year that brought the notion of “Crowdsourcing” into the vernacular. He spoke with three employees of Gannett, which has turned around a number of its properties into social and interactive sites with success. Jeff spoke with Gannett’s Jennifer Carroll, and MacKenzie Warren and Kate Marymount of the Ft. Myers News-Press about some of their experiments in crowdsourcing. Read on, for my messy, unfiltered notes.
Read the full post October 10th, 2007
How is networked journalism working (or not) abroad? It’s a topic we don’t usually hear much about at these conferences, so good for the organizers to put together a panel of people from outside the U.S: Martin Huber, of My Heimat, Germany; Adrian Monck, City of London Polytechnic and Sky News and Robin Hamman, BBC and Cybersoc.com talked about what they’ve learned in the international world of contributory journalism at the Networked Journalism Summit in NYC…
Read the full post October 10th, 2007
So, you’re all asking the same question: “Where’s the frickin’ money in all this?” The Networked Journalism Summit called, simply, “Revenue” tackled this with Rick Waghorn, a soccer writer with a newspaper background in England who started My Football Writer, Jeff Burkett of WashingtonPost.com, Henry Copeland of BlogAds and Stephen Smyth of Reuters. Jump on for the $$$
Read the full post October 10th, 2007
The first session at the Networked Journalism Summit in New York City focused on “Local pioneers,” those who took the risk to innovate online. On the panel: Dan Pacheco, Bakersfield Californian; John Wilpers, BostonNow; Jarah Euston, formerly of Fresno Famous, and Dan Barken, Deputy Managing Editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC. The session was conversational, with lots of questions from the audience. I summarized a lot of their questions underneath each person’s name, rather than trying to do a full transcript. Where there is a sentence in quotes, that’s an actual quote. Because this is liveblogging, you may find the occasional typo. My notes, after the jump…
Read the full post October 10th, 2007
I’m at the new and impressive New York Times building in Manhattan for the first Networked Journalism Summit. Props to the City University of New York’s Grad School of Journalism for putting this on. Fearless leader Jeff Jarvis is running the wingding. Amid the digerati I’ve chatted with so far: Fred Graver (late of VH-1), Andrew Heyward of Marketspace LLC (and former president of CBS News), Brian Stelter, the TVNewser who became a New York Times blogger, and NYU Prof Jay Rosen. I’m playing Oprah at a session later this afternoon, and will be liveblogging throughout the day.
October 10th, 2007
Mara Schiavocampo has been hired by NBC News and “will report primarily to nightly.msnbc.com.” Schiavocampo has been a contributor/guest commentator for ABC News Now, ABCNews.com, NPR, Current TV, Yahoo!, Ebony and Uptown magazines. “Mara has the perfect mix of broadcast and digital journalism experience, and we are thrilled to have her bring her innovative reporting to nightly.msnbc.com and the Nightly News team with her reports for the website,” said executive producer Alexandra Wallace. Press release follows below…
Read the full post October 9th, 2007
WCBStv.com has launched a slight tweak in their design as part of a back-end rebuild. The biggest changes happened on the CMS side of things, but looking at the site I notice small changes in the look as well. There are more featured stories on the homepage, a new display for slideshows, and small changes to the story pages. The best improvement is the speed of the pages. They are incredibly fast to load now. Congratulations to the CBS team for replacing their CMS while keeping the site look virtually identical. For anyone who has changed CMS systems in the past, you know that’s not easy. If any CBS insiders want to tell us more about what has changed, leave a comment! (Disclosure: I used to work for the CBS O&O group at cbs2chicago.com)
October 9th, 2007
Next Entries
Previous Entries
