Archive for May 29th, 2008
This week I made the jump from local TV to MSNBC.com, and I’m thinking about adding another volunteer blogger (or two) to Lost Remote. Inspired by the comments in the May sweeps story, I’m looking for someone who works in broadcast television who feels that print journalists and the stock market are unfairly diminishing the value of TV. Your mission would be to identify stories in the industry trades, published research and available case studies that illustrate the strength of television as a medium. At the same time, you must be forward-thinking on the technology front — you agree the business is changing but you’re optimistic the industry will evolve to meet the challenge. You must be articulate, have enough time to write 3-5 posts a week, have a depth of experience in television AND be willing to take the heat from Lost Remote commenters (who are never shy.) Oh, and it pays nothing. But if you’re sick and tired of the press and Wall Street declaring an end to TV, Lost Remote is a great place to argue your point (we’re read on a daily basis by TV writers at the major papers). Interested? Email me at cory@lostremote.com.
May 29th, 2008
I got a fascinating look at the anatomy of a minor political story in the past 48 hours. Tuesday night, Idaho Sen. Larry Craig spoke with a KTVB anchor during our live coverage of the Idaho primary election. Craig revealed that he was writing a book that would cover a number of topics - including his time in the Senate, and the events of the past year. Of course - the biggest of those events would be his arrest in a Minnesota bathroom on allegations he was soliciting gay sex.
After the interview, I quickly flipped a story for KTVB.COM - and turned around the video of the interview. The Idaho Associated Press glommed on, citing us - and the story went out on the national wire. While the auto-feed version ran on hundreds of news sites, it didn’t get a whole lot of notice Wednesday.
This morning, the item appeared high on the left hand column of Drudge with a link to our story. While the pageview bounce is always nice - it was funny to watch what happened next. Several national news outlets called looking for video - and even wanted to interview our reporter. Yes… interview the interviewer. The story is everywhere today - even though it broke on the wire late Tuesday night. It’s starting to look to me like the Drudge Report has more influence on the nation’s media than the Associated Press…
May 29th, 2008
Borrell Associates has just published its annual report, “What Local Media Sites Earn,” with details how media companies shared the $8.7 billion spent on local online advertising last year (TV sites make up 6.9% of the total pie. Newspapers have 24.6%. Pure plays dominate with 57.3%). Borrell is predicting 50% growth in local this year, which is “phenomenal, considering the sharp decline in retail sales,” writes Gordon Borrell. “The recession appears to be an economic prod that is motivating the smaller local advertisers to abandon long-time spending patterns and seek out the most economical methods of reaching potential customers.” Borrell also says that the most successful sites are “distancing themselves more and more from their traditional media roots.” Sound familiar?
May 29th, 2008
I wanted to pass along a fun project I just completed at Cincinnati.Com: our very first video advertiser remote. The client, a group with 13 car dealerships, wanted something a little different, so we shot user-generated-style video packages for all the dealerships, then put them in a Mogulus channel which became - via embedded video players - their ad creative. We are using Mogulus to host the video because of the “live playing” feature plus their nice ticker. We’re already up to 1 million+ views and it’s only been up since Wednesday. Like Cory, my new (been there a year..is that still new?) job is revenue-driven. Who says ads have to be boring?
May 29th, 2008
At an industry conference, Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger urged television programmers to move higher-quality content to video-on-demand. “If you’re not in that space, you’re going to get marginalized,” he said.
May 29th, 2008
With funding from the Future of News, Steve Outing has launched ReinventingClassifieds.com as a community for newspaper and new media folks to brainstorm ideas to solve the classifieds problem. “Newspapers may be in a pickle currently due to the dramatic loss of classifieds revenue in recent years,” says Outing, “but there’s still time to turn things around. We believe that to do this, we must come up with a model for newspaper classifieds that probably will look very different from what we’ve been used to.”
May 29th, 2008
