Newspapers outsource editing to India
The Orange County Register is shipping off some of the editing chores to folks in India. Workers at a New Dehli-based company will handle some copy-editing chores as well as some page layout tasks during a one month trial. Editors stress this won’t affect local decision making, or even affect staffing levels… for now.
Looked at media stocks lately?
Take a look at the six-month charts for Gannett, Belo Corp (TV), AH Belo (newspaper), Media General, Lin TV and Meredith, to name a few. Update from Michael: Young Broadcasting stock is now down to 7 cents a share.
NYTimes.com plans merger with IHT.com
In a time when media companies are launching new websites by the hundreds, NYTimes.com and IHT.com — the International Herald Tribune — are considering merging into a single site. One of the ideas is the international edition of NYTimes.com will carry both brands with expanded IHT.com content.
Yahoo tinkering with logo?
Leave it to TechCrunch to spot and note a potential change to Yahoo’s logo.
Google News not much of a hit
Google News isn’t growing nearly as fast as the rest of Google – or competitors in its field. GN is currently the #8 most popular news site, despite that prime link on Google.com. The site’s growth rate over the past two years is only about 10% – while sites like MSNBC.com grew more than 42% [...]
CNN lauches Anderson Cooper mini-site
CNN.com rolled out a new site for Anderson Cooper 360°. The site is centered around the show’s blog, and also has an archive of regular features from the show. I’ll have to subtract a few points though: Clicking on the “video” tab takes you to the generic CNN.com/video page, where finding clips from AC360 is [...]
Blooper: MS takes down MSNBC
Microsoft might not have that big stake in MSNBC-TV anymore… but once in a while the computer giant still finds a way to have an impact on the cable channel (via Inside Cable News)
Briefs: Election ads, Movies.com, Fisher, Nokia
– Obama, McCain still not spending much on online advertising – Orlando Sentinel first to launch Tribune’s new (newspaper) design (Update: Here’s the front page.) – Comcast’s Fandango buys Movies.com from Disney – Seattle’s Fisher Broadcasting rejects $383 million buyout offer – Nokia buys location-aware [...]
IB employee fired for Russert Wikipedia edits
Last week an Internet Broadcasting employee edited Wikipedia with information on Tim Russert’s death before the news went wide. Now IB has fired the employee, according to the NY Times. An NBC News spokesperson said she and her colleagues were “flabbergasted” at the edit. NBC asked the other networks to hold the news until they [...]
Users turn to Topeka site for tornado news
Topeka’s WIBW.com attracted 1.1 million page views on 136,000 unique users when the tornados hit earlier this month — not bad considering the market has only 117,000 households. The GM at WIBW is so sold on the web, he covered up the word “TV” in the big “WIBW” sign in front of the station. (TVNewsday [...]
Investigative journalism under fire
Good cover story in Broadcasting & Cable looks at the decline of investigative reporting, in part due to constricting TV news budgets, fewer hours of magazine shows on the air and a reluctance to take legal risks.
ABC, ESPN ink deal with Veoh
And it’s a little different than you might expect. Full-length episodes of some ABC shows are now appearing on Veoh, but when you click the player to watch, it links you off to ABC’s player (example). The deal involves ABC paying Veoh for the referrals, reports PaidContent. Only the shorter-form clips will be physically hosted [...]
Brokaw to take over ‘Meet the Press’
Tom Brokaw has volunteered to take over as the host of “Meet the Press” through the end of the election year. “When Tom proposed this idea, we jumped at it,” NBC News President Steve Capus told the NY Times, adding: “It was a huge relief. It offers us some time.”
Personally, I can’t think of a better journalist to take the helm. Brokaw takes over on June 29th. Press release follows below…
Huffington Post to launch local sites
Huffington Post will launch local news sites in “dozens of cities,” with Chicago as the first stop. “We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news, not just the political blogging the way we began,” said Arianna Huffington. The Chicago site, to start, will be run by a single [...]
Web grabbing more ‘share of screen’
Seems rather intuitive that online video is taking away from TV’s “share of screen,” but here’s the data. Among people who download and/or watch video online, the percentage of video viewed on TV has dropped from 75 to 70 percent over the last year. Video on a computer has climbed from 11 to 19 percent. [...]
Topix adds local content partners
News aggregator Topix is beefing up its local presence with deals with Eventful (events), InfoUSA (local business directory), Zap2it (movies and TV), LiveDeal (pet classifieds), Apartments.com and Informa Research (mortgage data.) It seems that Topix, which powers discussion forums for several local media companies, wants to become the one-stop-shopping of local.
Add this to your feed reader: VideoIsNow.com
Freshly-hatched VideoIsNow focuses on one topic: monetizing web video. Video Is Now also includes a widget to check out video ads in action. Speaking of, it led me to something from ’07 but new-to-me: NPR theme song guy B.J. Leiderman’s video ad, which looks to be produced on the cheap.
More CBS markets roll out ad network
CBS is rolling out the rest of its owned-and-operated stations in the widget-powered ad network for local bloggers. (Our original story here). Click through below for the press release from KYW-TV explaining the new network…
