Archive for November 20th, 2007
NBC’s face of news for years spoke to a group this week in Washington, and he said he imagines the printing press will be gone within 10 years. Tom Brokaw was promoting his new book when he made the comments, according to Business & Media Institute.
“I was at The Washington Post earlier today,” Brokaw said. “And in the lobby they’ve got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is … 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought – ‘Ten years from now, will it be here?’ I don’t know. Probably … if you would do a hardcore analysis – probably not. It’ll be probably digital 10 years from now.”
Brokaw added that he believes there will still be a demand for journalists to interpret information. “There will never not be a need for professional people to take complicated information, put it into a form that viewers and readers will need to know and want to understand,” he said.
November 20th, 2007
ABC.com’s new webisode series, Lost: Missing Pieces may shed some light on how the studios may structure an online compensation model for television writers. The deal — which is carefully worded as a one-off agreement — pays the writers $800 per webisode and a 1.2-2 percent residual on licensing fees. “I think it is a pretty good model,” Lost writer and executive producer Carlton Cuse said last week. “What it shows is that there is basically room for a partnership between writers and the studios in a new medium. It’s where I wish we were headed instead of being stuck in this standoff.” Interestingly, the WGA told the NY Times that “in general terms” the Lost deal is the pattern the Guild is looking for in negotiations, but with more financial upside. As always, it all comes down to money.
November 20th, 2007
It isn’t unusual of late to see a newspaper owner report a dip in profits, but it is somewhat abnormal to see reports of a decline in online ad revenue. McClatchy said total ad sales declined 9.9% in October. Online ad revenue dipped 4.1 percent to $14.6 million from $15.2 million, according to the AP.
Meanwhile, the NAA said online ad revenue for newspapers grew 21% in Q3, representing 7.1% of total ad revenue on average.
(Disclosure: I compete against a McClatchy newspaper as part of the day job).
November 20th, 2007
An interesting article in BusinessWeek points out that as more professionally produced content comes online, user-generated video is becoming less interesting to viewers, and accordingly, advertisers. Way back when Viacom sued YouTube to protect what was thought to be widespread infringement on their copyrighted material, YouTube’s self assessment indicated that the majority of their content was not pirated. Now that more professional producers are getting into the act, online video and social sites such as Bebo who recently opened up their pages to big media companies, are raising the bar to lure and engage viewers longer as the big media companies themselves are launching their own sites to feature their productions.
“People would rather watch content that has production value than watch their neighbors in the garage,” says Matt Sanchez, co-founder and chief executive of VideoEgg. ManiaTV recently canceled its user generated channels altogether, saying the 3,000 channels didn’t pull in enough viewers and that 80 percent of the users were going to professional content that featured celebrities. Maybe Amanda and ZeFrank retired at the right time.
November 20th, 2007
