The Sun won’t come out tomorrow
New York’s seven-year-old The Sun newspaper printed its last edition today – on quite a big news day for the city. The paper started in the early part of the new millennium, and at its end lost more than a million dollars per month.
Enough with the phone books!
Rant: I came home today to another phone book. I loathe them. I haven’t cracked a set of yellow pages in at least ten years. I have no need for them. They are a waste – of paper, of ink and of my time. I have to pick up the giant hunk of junk, throw [...]
Spokane paper editor rips AP to shreds
The Spokesman-Review newspaper in Spokane, Washington is ditching the Associated Press. The service no longer meets the paper’s needs according to editor Steven A. Smith. AP chairman and MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton says the AP is the “best bargain I know,” and said “AP has become the whipping boy for an angry bunch of [...]
Keyword searchable video player on msnbc.com
We’re pretty excited here at msnbc.com with the launch of a new video technology last week that allows users to navigate an extended piece of video by keyword. We used it for the first presidential debate, which you can see in action right here. We’ll use the interactive player for the upcoming debates as well, and there are also plans to make the entire player embeddable. Press release below… (Full disclosure: I work at msnbc.com)
The perfect economic storm for local TV
Highly-respected media forecaster Jack Myers says he sees an advertising slump for the next 18 to 36 months. While national TV is expected to hold up reasonably well, local is a different story. “Local media will struggle because retail will be soft and almost all categories like automotive will be hurt by the economy, Myers [...]
Zvents lands new cash from interesting sources
The local events provider Zvents, which is quickly becoming a strong competitor in local search (and has dozens of local media distribution partners), has raised $24 million in a new round of funding. The investors should get your attention: Nokia, AT&T (which owns Yellowpages.com) and Navteq (the GPS mapping company). As I’ve written before, the [...]
Report: Video ad spending still skyrocketing
A new report by eMarketer says that online video ad spending will hit $5.8 billion by 2013, up from $505 million right now. That’s a jump in share from 2 percent of total online advertising to 10 percent. But the report warned that CPMs may drop in the coming years due to 1) the novelty [...]
ABC to open up video player
As part of Disney-ABC’s new “Open ABC” initiative, developers will be able to build on the network’s video player to “innovate and give access to our shows (in ways) we haven’t even thought of yet,” such as new forms of 3D visual search and other applications for blogs, fan sites, and social networks.
Economy has ‘profound effect’ on local TV
It’s not every day that you hear the head of a media company characterize the economic impact on a business division as “profound,” but these aren’t usual times. “(The economy has) had a profound effect on our local TV stations, which were highly dependent on auto and retail advertising,” NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said [...]
Think LiveNewsCameras but for HS football…
My employer, Gannett, which has invested in Mogulus, is about to embark on a fun project. Friday, we will have 12 live high school football games showing on LiveNewsCameras-esque widgets that will be posted to USAToday.com as well as many of our local broadcast and newspaper sites. The games are being produced by our broadcast and newspaper sites as well as a high school AV department. “If we can do this with a dozen games, we can do it with +100,” Kerry Oslund, the Gannett exec behind this project told me. Most of the games are single cam, laptop, aircard + Mogulus productions.
Jivox expands local video ad partners
The online video ad platform Jivox has added Media News Group, Examiner.com, Accuweather.com and Weatherbug.com to its publisher network. Small business advertisers can build (yes, edit) their own video ads on Jivox and place them on local-targeted sites.
Boston Globe launches new weekly sports tabloid
Today the Boston Globe launches its new 24-page weekly sports tabloid, called OT. Beyond the obvious (which they never mention because it is so obvious), they say OT stands for “Our Town/Our Teams.” It’s going to focus on Boston’s big four pro sports teams. They plan to print it every Thursday, just in time for [...]
Yahoo launches newspaper ad platform
Yahoo has taken the wraps off APT (formerly AMP), its new display ad platform that has been under development with the newspaper consortium. In a nutshell, sites on the platform will be able to leverage behavioral data across Yahoo and the network to improve ad targeting. Agencies and advertisers, in theory, will spend on the [...]
WJZ-TV teams with Baltimore Sun
The CBS O&O has partnered with the Tribune-owned Baltimore Sun. Beyond the usual marketing arrangement, WJZ-TV video will appear on BaltimoreSun.com with WJZ pre-roll ads. “This makes our Web site even more robust, and it extends WJZ’s reach to the millions of readers who go to our site every week,” Baltimore Sun Editor Tim Franklin [...]
Our hyperlocal experiment and why it works
Soon after we moved to the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard last year, my wife Kate reserved MyBallard.com after we noticed there was no daily news source dedicated to the community of 35,000. We rolled out a standard WordPress blog and started writing about news in the neighborhood. We added an events calendar, restaurant guide and [...]
Some national sites wise up with iPhone sites
Two months ago, I ranted about national news sites and their approach to the iPhone. At the time, MSNBC.com, Newsweek.com and CBSNews.com force-fed you their mobile channels, with no route to the normal site. At the time I said it was probably someone’s misguided attempt at good UX. Some of the sites produce a special [...]
FoxNews.com rolls with Strategy Room
FoxNews.com ramped up its online Strategy Room experiment from the conventions to a full-fledged nine hour per day live online video marathon. I watched for about 30 minutes today, and it’s not like any traditional TV broadcast. An anchor and pair of analysts sit around and talk about the politics of the day. During the [...]
Small-town publisher: Stop giving away content
Walter E. Hussman Jr. of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is so wrong… and so right all at the same time. Hussman wrote a piece last year for the Wall Street Journal that urged publishers to stop giving away newspaper content for free online. In the last year and a half, newspaper company fortunes have declined even [...]
