Archive for November 21st, 2007
The CW show Gossip Girl isn’t doing very well in the ratings. In fact, it doesn’t even crack the top 100 shows. “I can honestly say I don’t check the ratings after the show airs,” said Josh Schwartz, the show’s founder. So why hasn’t the show been canceled? You guessed it — it’s wildly popular online, even outpacing The Office on iTunes. Fans sites are everywhere. And when you add DVR ratings to the mix, it’s the most-watched show by teenagers. “It doesn’t give local affiliates much of a lead-in, but that is something we have to get used to,” explains AR&D’s Steve Safran. “When people use a DVR, there are no lead-ins. When you download a show, there are no lead-ins. For websites, there are no lead-ins. So after a while, the whole concept of a lead-in just… goes… away. Local news truly has to stand on its merits now.”
November 21st, 2007
I love this line, taken from a job posting for AOL: “Should know how to identify who an audience is and what they want, not from stacks of market research and focus groups, but from watching live engagement of content.”
This is a big missing link at many local newsrooms and journalism schools today. Yes, an online news producer must balance journalism with popularity, but the distinction here is anticipating instead of reacting. Reacting is moving a story into the lead position because it’s popular. Anticipating is understanding how users interact with content (via your traffic stats) so you can make better decisions. This is especially important when you consider that most stories that appear on newspaper and TV sites were assigned and written with newspapers and TV in mind — not the web. Sometimes these are very different audiences and they are certainly different approaches to communicating a story. In the end, our goal is relevancy. And learning from “live engagement of content” is a great way to get there.
November 21st, 2007
As we’ve been following the launch of the Amazon Kindle here at Lost Remote, here’s an interesting post on the NYT Bits Blog that defends the Kindle against a blogosphere backlash. “A lot of people are writing off Amazon’s Kindle book reader much too quickly,” writes Saul Hansell. Clearly not the reaction Amazon was looking for when it fussed and fretted over the launch for a year. Meanwhile, with a significantly smaller buzz-building campaign, two combatants in the e-publishing world, magazine maker Zinio and rival Texterity, have both bowed e-reader software for the iPod Touch and iPhone, which we all recall had one of the greatest launches in consumer electronics history.
Also: Jeff Bezos interview on Charlie Rose (thanks discreet_chaos!)
November 21st, 2007
Michael Arrington takes note of a interesting patent that was granted to Google earlier this month, titled “Customization of Content and Advertisements in Publications.” Bloggers have been speculating that Google could use the technology to offer users the ability to create and print their own customized magazines from Internet content, complete with customized advertising. The patent filing contains several insightful observations in the print magazine business model, which Arrington points out as flaws.
November 21st, 2007
