Archive for August, 2008
As you might expect, the networks have sent their top anchors to Gustav, and the Republican National Convention has significantly scaled back on its first night. “It’s kind of a no-brainer,” Kate O’Brian, ABC’s senior vice president, said of the decision to send Charlie Gibson to New Orleans. “Charlie goes where the big news is…. I don’t think it’s going to be looked at as a fairness issue when the Republicans are making the same decisions we are.”
August 31st, 2008
A man in New Orleans has decided to stay behind and stream the hurricane live via UStream.tv. He’s also blogging and Twittering his experience. “Over 3000 viewers, an ABC interview, 2 missed calls from CNN, and 4 cases of beer,” he explains about his Sunday night.
Update: More live streams here (Thanks, Amanda!)
August 31st, 2008
Al Tompkins over at Poynter quickly rolled out this Ning-powered community site that’s aggregating the latest Gustav news, data, links and Twitter posts. One of the best resources on the site is a map that displays the storm surge monitors all around New Orleans.
August 31st, 2008
As Hurricane Gustav evacuees reach safety outside New Orleans, WWLtv.com’s live streaming coverage is growing its audience fast. Site manager Tom Planchet says he expects to have served 100,000 streams by the day’s end. “I expect that probably to double Monday and possibly again Tuesday,” he says. WWL’s air signal is being picked up by Louisiana Public Broadcasting stations throughout the state and on digital channels in Houston and Dallas. “This is kind of the lull time. Almost everyone who is going to get out has gone and there are no storm effects expected for 10-12 hours,” he says. “We have crews in all of the areas that could be affected and a fall back plan in case the station is compromised,” which he says is not expected at this time given the storm’s current track and strength. (4:30 p.m. ET)
Also: Says WWL-TV GM Bud Brown: “Nobody has to stay here if they don’t want to,” he says. “We have water, food and security, so as long as we’re providing that kind of environment, people are pretty comfortable.”
August 31st, 2008
A note from NOLA.com Editor Jon Donley: “We’re in the hurricane bunker now, then will pull back if necessary to one of several hardened and generator powered safe sites inside the city. We don’t intend to evacuate unless it becomes life-threatening.” Current screen grab (3 p.m. ET)…
August 31st, 2008
Updated: TV stations in the path of Gustav are now streaming live coverage. Hundreds of thousands of people watched WWLtv.com’s live stream during Katrina, and it’s back for Gustav. WDSU is also streaming it’s live coverage, as well as WVUE (Fox) and WGNO (ABC).
August 31st, 2008
Updated: Two massive stories are converging on Monday, and the networks are splitting their resources between Hurricane Gustav and the RNC.
Politico.com: Networks scramble to cover two quickly-changing stories
NBC press release: Williams to the Gulf, Brokaw to anchor RNC
NY Times: Bush, Cheney cancel convention speeches for Monday
TVNewser: NBC News making use of its newest acquisition
CNET: Wireless carriers say they’re prepared for storm this time
Have more links related to hurricane coverage? Post them in comments below, and stay tuned to Lost Remote for more…
August 30th, 2008
I remember three years ago looking at the Times-Picayune’s website, NOLA.com, as Katrina moved in. It was not nearly as prepared as it is now.
NOLA.com features a clean layout of up-to-date news, weather maps, storm tracker, video, survival guide, reader advice on over a dozen topics, forums divided out by neighborhood, and a blog powered by user-generated stories, photos and video. Oh, and there’s even a Twitter account. This is a textbook example of how to cover a major storm on the web. Of course, the challenge is yet to come: covering the storm as the staff faces an evacuation.
August 30th, 2008
Our team at msnbc.com did a great job building this interactive hurricane tracker mashed over Virtual Earth, which just debuted on the site in time for Gustav. (Full disclosure: I work there.)
August 30th, 2008
The LiveNewsCameras folks over at Fox Chicago have launched another new feature: a Google map mashup with links to live streams. They’ve adapted the map to focus on Hurricane Gustav. More on the new feature here.
August 29th, 2008
Even before Hurricane Gustav became a hurricane, WWLtv.com began streaming two “live chats” a day with their meteorologists. They take reader questions and then illustrate the answers in a live video stream, drawing on weather maps. “The live chats have been getting between 3,000 to 6,000 simultaneous views,” explains WWLtv.com’s Tom Planchet on Friday afternoon, noting they’re also streaming so many press conferences, sometimes there are two at a time. “Our video traffic has gone up 10 times so far per day,” he said. Planchet has been through this before: during Katrina, he kept up a rapid-fire breaking news blog and streamed WWL-TV’s live signal — the only live news coverage of the story for thousands of people.
August 29th, 2008
More Americans watched Barack Obama’s speech last night — 38 million — than the Olympics opening ceremony or the last American Idol finale. It also set a record in TV ratings for a convention.
August 29th, 2008
The local media in New Orleans are preparing for the worst again, as Gustav takes aim for the Gulf Coast. “We are going to be much better prepared than we were three years ago,” said Peter Kovacs, managing editor of the Times Picayune. “Our mistake three years ago was a reliance on operating from this building. We have other contingencies that we have worked out that would keep us in the city.” NOLA.com’s user-powered “My Storm” blog is up and running, and WWLTV.com is blogging the latest and streaming live video chats with a meteorologist. Meanwhile, the networks are scrambling to shift resources while they juggle coverage of the conventions — the RNC is slated to begin next week, but could be postponed. “To have it be on the third anniversary of Katrina, if you wrote it in a script or in a book, you wouldn’t believe it,” said CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who just left Denver for New Orleans.
August 29th, 2008
Reuters writer Robert MacMillan offers a list of news aggregator service sites that the LR faithful have all been using or keeping an eye on for quite a while now. I thought about not posting as it reminded me a little bit of Dr. Evil’s “I call it a ‘Laser’” scheme, but it does offer the opportunity to remind everyone in local land that you should be thinking on your local aggregation strategy… because someone else probably has already.
August 29th, 2008
Digg has always featured local news stories submitted by its users, but they haven’t been organized around location. At a town hall event in Denver, Digg’s founders hinted at new features on the way. Quoting CNET now:
One question suggested “geotagging” for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. “Yes,” (Kevin) Rose said. “We’ve thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you.” (Jay) Adelson added that Digg has “a few projects on the way… think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff.”
August 28th, 2008
Washington Post reporter Ed O’Keefe was standing close to Hillary Clinton last night during Obama’s nomination, and he streamed this clip live into WashingtonPost.com’s webcast. “This is one of the first times a newspaper organization has had the ability to bring this level of live video coverage to viewers,” explains a WashingtonPost.com publicist. O’Keefe was using a cell phone and software from Comet Technologies.
August 28th, 2008
When popular sports columnist Jay Mariotti resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times this week, he explained his decision this way: sports journalism has become “entirely a website business.” He had just returned from Beijing, where he said most of the journalists there were reporting for the web. So now Mariotti is looking to land an online job.
Mariotti’s insight shouldn’t be limited to just the newspaper world. For coverage of pro teams, the web rules, and local TV plays a small and declining role. ESPN.com, Yahoo Sports, local newspaper sites and now the team websites themselves are the primary destinations for pro sports news. And competition is growing in college and high school sports, too. As a result, directly or indirectly, local TV has been shifting its coverage resources away from sports over the years. And unfortunately, with the exception of high school sports, this coverage shift is slowly putting local TV out of the game for sports coverage, both on TV and the web.
August 28th, 2008
Lost Remote Emeritus for Eternity, Steve Safran, is trying a little experiment. Along with his friend, animator and designer Greg Pair, they’ve launched a CafePress section with merchandise stamped with Obaden ‘08 — as in Obama and Biden, complete with the racially accurate logo. “This is a test to see how people could do if they incorporated news-specific shirts,” Safran says, no doubt thinking about CNN’s foray into the news T-shirt business a few months ago. The funny thing is, I think this will sell. Stay tuned…
August 27th, 2008
…to cover a convention? There are an estimated 15,000 journalists in Denver for the DNC. “(And) 7,500 aren’t doing much at all,” writes Justin Peters in Columbia Journalism Review. “Only a small number of reporters actually have a reason to be here.” From a business standpoint — which needs to be taken more seriously than ever in today’s economic times — sending thousands of people to cover the same thing just to have “presence” is overkill.
In fact, many local TV stations and newspapers have passed this time around due to budget concerns. Even WCCO in Minneapolis, the site of the upcoming RNC, didn’t send a reporter. “My company, and local media in general, have been talking about not going for the last 12 years, the last three conventions,” said WCCO’s chief political correspondent Pat Kessler. “I’ve been waiting for a long time for this shoe to drop, and now it has.” In fact, even Minneapolis’ online-only news site, MinnPost sent a reporter. And the Minneapolis NPR station sent an entire team. “They’re sending what, like 20 people?” Kessler says. “Is there such a thing as too much local coverage?”
In journalism’s new financial reality, yes there is, whether you like it or not.
August 27th, 2008
Google says that media companies, when faced with a decision whether to pull a YouTube clip with their copyrighted material or monetize the ads surrounding it, choose to take the ad money about 90 percent of the time. “This has led directly to a similarly significant increase in monetizable partner inventory, as our Video ID partners are seeing claimed content more than double their number of views, against which we can run ads,” explains the official Google Blog. Surprised?
Related: Court sides with Veoh in porn video lawsuit
August 27th, 2008
CNET has left the green and yellow design behind for a new look.
Among the new features: high-def video on CNET TV, faster serving, better search and aggregated reviews. On the advertising front, explains the WSJ (free version): “The new CNET.com includes a ‘brand showcase’ feature, allowing advertisers to pay for pages where they can promote products with links to CNET reviews, a service for which CBS can charge higher rates, according to Joe Gillespie, who oversees CNET.com.”
August 27th, 2008
After months of beta testing, Google has launched AdManager, a full-service ad serving and management tool. And it’s completely free. You can integrate third-party ad tags and then compare CPMs with Adsense on the fly, selecting the ad with the highest return. Or you can turn off Adsense altogether. There’s back-end reporting. Full permission settings. And you can use AdManager to power your own ad network across multiple sites. Very, very cool.
August 27th, 2008
ESPNrise.com has launched, joining the fray of high school sports sites battling for attention. Unlike many local high school sports efforts, ESPNrise.com takes a broader approach, focusing on states and regions instead of drilling down on individual high schools and all the rich data that comes with it. But it comes with all the usual community functionality, from discussion to user blogs, and soon you’ll be able to upload video, too.
Meanwhile, many local high school sports efforts are entering their second full football season: HSGameTime.com (Belo), HighSchoolPlaybook.com (Hearst), FoxHiLites (Fox) and High School Football (Cox). Gannett is entering its first full season with HighSchoolSports.net, and it’s been a year and half since CBS bought MaxPreps. Certainly a very crowded, competitive space.
August 27th, 2008
A new report from Forrester Research says that the future of television, something it calls “personal TV,” will be delivered on-demand in a web-like experience with targeted advertising based on location and behavior. This isn’t surprising at all, of course, but the question is how the networks, studios, local TV stations, cable & satellite providers, agencies, syndicators and technology companies are going to get there. And why is it taking so long? “Forrester spreads the blame across the TV landscape,” explains AdWeek. “Cable companies didn’t build-out video on-demand as an ad-supported platform, networks protected the lucrative status quo and agencies didn’t push for innovation.” Forrester pegs the transition date to “personal TV” sometime between 2012 and 2018. This ought to be interesting…
August 27th, 2008
Gib Olander works for Localeze, which helps local businesses excel in search engines. He wrote a column for MediaPost that does a great job outlining the challenges and semantics of local search. For example, people don’t just search for “Oakland plumber” but “Oakland leaky faucet.” Or a golfer may search for “PING putter Elmhurst, IL” instead of “golf store Elmhurst, IL.” Local search now represents 25 percent of all searches, and nearly 90 percent of people will research online and buy offline, according to Comscore. There’s even an acronym for it. “ROBO is changing consumers’ definition of ‘window-shopping,’” Olander writes. “Now the Internet is becoming the vantage point through which consumers gauge the retail landscape, and if a business is identifiable in local search engines through only its name or category, it is not going to be found by the things that make it truly unique.”
August 27th, 2008
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