12 Comments Add your own

• 1. coffee  |  December 28th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

  (1) The WGA strike. The AMPTP and the studios have their reasons, with labor-negotiation precedents, protecting the incubation period for new media distribution, and greed. The writers have their reasons, with wanting an inflation/cost-of-living raise, correcting mistakes from past negotiations, and positioning themselves to benefit from new media instead of being financially punished.

  (2) In With The New: William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” talks a bit about the Web turning itself inside out with the mass adoption of GPS technologies. Much like cell phones, I never really noticed the tipping point until I turned around and everybody had one

  (3) Out With the Old: My VCR broke after a huge number of years. I looked online for a replacement and found no stand-alone VCRs. I walked up to a used record/game store and bought one for about $13. There’s a chapter in “Clock of the Long Now” and I’m sure on the LongNow site about digital versus analog degradation and why the death of analog media might be scary. Maybe it didn’t happen this year - but I haven’t seen a new VHS tape in a long, long time.

• 2. coffee  |  December 28th, 2007 at 7:14 pm

  umm… make that Willaim Gibson’s “Spook Country” - at least it’s in the same universe.

• 3. Rob  |  December 28th, 2007 at 8:20 pm

  1. First video from the Virginia Tech shootings comes from a cellphone camera. On-air talent decry the amateur video that is low quality and low resolution and yet are willing to show it over and over again. Citizen journalism becomes less of a novelty and more of a necessity. Citizens win. Some in TV are losers because they still don’t get “it.”

  2. Rupert Murdoch buys Dow Jones. Not sure who won or lost on that one yet.

  3. Writers Strike. TV networks’ loss is Wii and X360’s gain. Bow down before the Master Chief.

  4. YouTube + Google + DoubleClick. Advantage Google, even without the TV networks.

  5. Terry Heaton buys an empty box, blogs about it after CompUSA wouldn’t get him the camera that was supposed to come in said box. Terry’s blog gains traction among the anti-CompUSA blogging community. Public sentiment online boils over thanks to grassroots effort to get him his camera. Terry gets his camera. Winners: Terry and the power of Internet-based grassroots activism. Losers: CompUSA.

• 4. Charles  |  December 28th, 2007 at 9:31 pm

  Maybe Terry Heaton was the final nail in CompUSA’s coffin?

  In television land, apart from the writer’s strike, this was Grey’s Anatomy’s year. The Isaiah Washington scandal blew through untl the summer, when ABC decided not to renew his contract. NBC scooped him up for Bionic Woman, a show that few people watched. Grey’s spinned off into a show called Private Practice which gained traction and slowly became a stable hit.

  In technology, the iPhone gave us all lessons on how to adapt and anticipate the marketplace’s demand for technology - and why making huge discounts within a couple weeks will make many people very, very angry.

  iTunes provides music people want; Amazon has the power to provide it wherever they want. A potential war brews.

  In other news, movies are still performing not too spectacularly, because the bigwigs who greenlight scripts seem to not ‘get’ it, STILL. After many, many flops, year after year.

• 5. discreet_chaos  |  December 29th, 2007 at 11:13 am

  Biggest Misconception: Revenues or an identifiable money stream is not important.

  2007 marked the return of eyeballs being valued above actual currency and some of the year’s biggest “successes” had no source of income, or they only collected a tiny morsel of something which offset only a fraction of their operating costs, or they finally started working toward monetizing their ventures only during the latter half of the year.

  Most Dangerous Idea: Consolidation

  Both online and off, the big mostly got bigger and the lessons of the antitrust era seemed to be lost. During 2007, lots of people seemed to argue on behalf of the convenience of having everything in one place, instead of letting users go to different sites to gather different information and letting other companies have a piece of the pie.

  Biggest Overhype: Social Networking

  Emal, Blog, Embed, Rate or Recommend a link is one thing, but the personal ad sites seemed to dominate the news from the tech sector during most of this past year. And, despite all the hype and the values the venture capitalists would like to realize from their investments, we once again close out a year with virtually no one over the age of 28, who is not employed in bartending, media or technology having a Facebook, MySpace or any similar type accounts.

• 6. Dave  |  December 29th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

  “we once again close out a year with virtually no one over the age of 28, who is not employed in bartending, media or technology having a Facebook, MySpace or any similar type accounts.”

  Good. Stay away… Especially from Facebook.
  :-)

• 7. discreet_chaos  |  December 29th, 2007 at 6:20 pm

  Dave - See the bit about revenues…

• 8. Safran  |  December 29th, 2007 at 8:17 pm

  The networks’ shift away from the locals is the most significant development for local television this year. The launch of Hulu, NBC Direct, CBS’s partnerships, etc. all mean one thing: the networks are taking their content into their own hands.

  The Writers’ Strike is already showing us that this is different from past strikes - people have different choices of entertainment now. There is not a huge outcry for fresh episodes of “Men In Trees.”

  Vista and Leopard made significant missteps in operating systems, and also gave hope to those of us that look forward to the day when the web is the OS.

  I made a rare correct prediction that Apple TV wouldn’t be a big success. I was correct that people shouldn’t have immediately bought the first iPhone. I was absolutely wrong when I thought more TV stations would be alarmed by now at the prospect of running dry of ad revenue in 2009.

  The most significant development in local TV web came in the “Great Web Cleanup of 2007.” Many sites finally made some sense of their mission and organized their pages. The results are much more legible, and much more useful to the news audience. The Great Cleanup probably pissed of a lot of people in marketing departments, but the sites actually do their stations a favor by reflecting better upon them.

  Let’s make 2008 the “Great Content Cleanup” and start generating more original content now.

  And obviously, my leaving LR was the biggest boost to the site this year.

  SAS

  PS: My Sox victory mustache and goatee remain as glorious as ever.

• 9. Dave  |  December 29th, 2007 at 10:41 pm

  Discreet,

  I agree but I am talking about it from a user perspective. Facebook is “my generation” as a user. If my parents / bosses got on, it would lose much of what made it attractive in the first place. Ask some of your young interns about that… and whether they would stay on it. Or whether even new young people would join…

  Companies like Facebook need to balance “revenues” with “audience demands”. It will be interesting to see how Facebook fares in the next few years as the Freshman college class of 2004/2005 (IE when FB launched nationwide) begins to graduate and look for jobs. Will they stick around for another 10 years or move on to LinkedIn.

  FB may have to pull an MTV and be willing to dump their previous audiences in order to keep a constant, young/college, target demo.

  Dave

  PS - The celebrated addition of apps is quite horrible. Nothing is more annoying than “Mike Smith just sucker punched you Mountain Dew-style. Click here to punch back.” Or “A Match(dot)com Secret Admirer just wondered what you looked like naked. Click here to find out who.”

• 10. Jeremiah  |  December 30th, 2007 at 2:03 pm

  I agree w/ Safran re: web cleanup.

  For me, 2007 was the year when I learned about every significant television event via the internet…mostly Digg’s video section. Rare weatherman emotional breakdown on a Florida affiliate? YouTube. The closing moments of the Sopranos? YouTube. Rivera tearing into O’Reilly? YouTube.

  With overall respect to media, 2007 was the year of deepening chaos. As media production technologies creep into our lives, it changes our basic relationship with media - we become producers rather than consumers. We take control of our flickering box. Fundamentally, this is what many media suits fail to “get.”

  This swarming army of professional amateurs has begun creating long-tail media history currently ignored by traditional news - search YouTube for White House press briefing comp reels, and you’ll get a sense for what kind of things people are hungry for. YouTube has a longer memory than CBS News.

  2007 is the year War Porn mainstreamed. Abundant video recording technology in war zones coupled with aggregation technology (I’m not even going to name these bottom feeding sites) continued eroding TV news’ former monopoly on sensational footage. Recordings of car bomb explosions and other acts of destruction (this generation’s snuff films - let’s be honest about that) continue to pummel the public consciousness.

  Contrary Indicators - 2007 marked several media cornerstones (i.e., cover of TIME) being called out as the backward dinosaurs they are. Read Barry Rithholz’s “The Big Picture” blog for some interesting discussion about TIME and other publications being used to peg the tail end of trends. The idea being these entities are so slow to recognize/respond to trends, by the time they publish (on a cover), the trend has officially peaked.

  That’s all I can think of for now. Many thanks to LR’s staff for keeping the site going. I hope you don’t mind if I stick around for another year.

• 11. Rob  |  December 31st, 2007 at 9:59 am

  War Porn … that’s solid. Between YouTube and MilBlogs you have a really good point there Jeremiah and so far both the networks and the military are apparently powerless to stop soliders from becoming one-man journos in war zones.

  A few more thoughts …

  2007 marked the continued slide of newspapers into the land of dinosaurs. Increasing production and staffing costs coupled with the continued surge of the Internet has really forced newspapers to publish (ONLINE) or perish.

  Local TV news began to wake up and realize that the Internet was no longer an after thought for news or added value for sales and that to survive on-air you have to thrive online. However with the push by larger organizations with deeper pockets into the local markets - like Google and Yahoo and CitySearch and Zillow among others - it might be too late for some local TV news organizations to recoup lost viewers / users and revenue.

  The American culture is one of fast food and ‘I want it now’. If you look at the last 50 years in the food industry, we’ve seen the advent of TV dinners, microwaves, chain restaurants, drive-ins and drive-throughs, take home and delivery and more recently ordering groceries and meals online. People don’t want to wait for their food … they want it now.

  I think that mentality really hit home in the media this last year. For years the Internet was a fad, it’s still called ‘New Media’ in many circles, and it was treated like a red-headed step-child within the news industry.

  However as technology advanced and brought us search engines and widgets and gadgets, blogs and digital cameras, MySpace and Facebook, personalized news pages with RSS feeds and one-stop shops for all your video viewing. People want their news like their food … they want it now, and this was the year that finally a number of news organizations really started ‘getting it’ and started focusing their attentions and resources online with smart plays (not just throwing cash at the latest fad) to try and draw viewer and user interest to their Internet platforms.

• 12. Rob  |  December 31st, 2007 at 4:06 pm

  Sorry … I forgot to add three more things (So much stuff happened this year).

  First, file these under either “Things people waited in line for days to get their hands on” or “Great live shot opportunity tonight at 11!” or “Events of cultural significance in 2007 that actually lived up to their hype”.

  HALO 3.

  Harry Potter book release.

  Last one and then I’m done … file these either under “2007’s biggest losers” or “Why are we still covering these stories as front-page news and running their mugs as top stories in our newscasts and on our websites?”

  Lindsay Lohan
  Britney Spears
  Anna Nicole Smith
  Paris Hilton
  OJ
  The random slow speed L.A. car chase of the day

  … Happy New Year everyone.

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