Archive for February 27th, 2008
There are some interesting nuggets in this interview with Dave Lougee, the president of Gannett Broadcasting. First off, Lougee said the group’s TV sites are close to launching new designs with a new video player. (Let us know when you see one launch.) Plus, Gannett is getting ready to roll out Metromix entertainment sites in its markets as part of a joint venture with Tribune. And Lougee said they just rolled out ArizonaMoms.com, a site dedicated to new mothers. “We’re in the early stages of that,” he said. (Gannett already has IndyMoms.com and MichiganMoms.com.)
Lougee also talks about re-engineering its stations to focus on original content and sales. Some reporters are training to shoot video. “It’s not that everyone becomes a one-man band,” Lougee says. “Newsrooms have reacted to that. They feel it means a reduction in quality. But what’s the definition of quality? If a newsroom is only sending out eight reporters on a given day, what happens if they re-engineer the workflow and can send out 24 a day?”
February 27th, 2008
Similar to the Gannett interview above, there’s some news in this TVNewsday interview with Lin TV’s online chief, Robb Richter. “It was just unbelievable the traffic we got and the interest we got on those sites.” Richter says about Lin’s network of 17 political microsites on Super Tuesday. As we’ve reported before, Lin has purchased political domain names across the country in the hope of teaming with other broadcasters. “We’ve talked to a few broadcasters about just basically giving them the back end. We’ll probably be rolling out a couple of other political.tv web sites with other smaller broadcasters in their markets this spring,” he says. Coming soon, Richter says he’s planning to launch entertainment microsites in a few of the group’s markets. And he’s working on a search product. “We believe that you can go to yellowpages.com and you can go to Google and you can go to Yahoo! and that’s fine, but they don’t have that hyperlocal content, they don’t have the relationships with the advertisers locally that we do,” he said. Also, Lin sites will be getting a new video player in the second quarter. (Free sub. req. for TVNewsday)
February 27th, 2008
It’s always challenging get the conversation rolling in a new discussion forum, so please help us out on The Circuit, Lost Remote’s new forum for media/technology folks who want to vent, share ideas or ask questions to the group. There are three ongoing discussions:
- Journalists and their political Facebook groups
- Two-person local TV teams are ‘dead’
- Are you an angry web producer?
In that last thread, Rob made a terrific point about one of the biggest hurdles for innovation success in local TV today: “There’s a core issue right there in my experience: Revenue drives innovation. If the revenue isn’t there, you’re not getting that new widget, platform, hardware or tool. The expectation for the web in my general experience is that an immediate ROI is expected and if the up-front cost is too high to generate a nearly instantaneous ROI then you don’t move forward.” Absolutely right.
February 27th, 2008
How bad were the ratings for the web original show Quarterlife when it premiered on NBC this week? It was “the network’s worst time-period performance in at least 17 years,” says Hollywood Reporter. Why? Let’s count the reasons, shall we? First, the show has already run on MySpace. Second, it premiered on MTV earlier on the same day. And third, the show is designed for a web audience of young people who are watching less and less TV.
The web is not TV…
February 27th, 2008
WFAA.com and DallasNews.com are serving this big expandable Obama ad.
Once it resolves, it has an embedded player and a link to find voting locations. (Full disclosure: Both those sites are owned by Belo, the same company that owns KING5.com, where I work.)
Update: Obama also bought the same ad on 24 other sites, including Ohio.com and Chron.com. They’ll run for a week.
February 27th, 2008
Another nail in the coffin for print recruitment ads, this time from Classified Intelligence, which conducted a study on the effectiveness of job postings in newspapers. A survey of HR execs revealed that print is the most ineffective way to find good job candidates. So what’s the most effective? HotJobs. Explains Editor & Publisher, “Classified Intelligence editors point to Yahoo’s partnership with more than 600 newspapers as the probable reason for the uptick in utility. HotJobs traffic in the U.S. jumped 50% year-over-year compared to CareerBuilder, the report noted.”
Interesting. And by the way, if you haven’t posted a free job on Lost Remote, you should give it a try. We hear it’s very effective.
February 27th, 2008
