Retransmission battles put customers in the middle
There’s been a spate of retransmission stories the last few weeks. Fisher Communications stations aren’t on Dish Network, Belo stations almost left Charter, KPHO could be yanked from CableOne in Phoenix — and the whopper: Time Warner will turn off Viacom networks like Nickelodeon and MTVB on Jan. 1 unless an eleventh-hour deal is reached. [...]
MSNBC.com’s top 08 vid? It came from YouTube…
Beet.tv says the most-watched video on MSNBC.com in 2008 was this clip of two men being reunited with a lion. It garnered 2.4 million views for the site. The video’s source? YouTube. The Today Show ran the clip as part of a segment and MSNBC.com posted the item on its site.
KRON cancels on authors of TV-critical book
Put this in the file of things not to do. KRON news director Aaron Pero drop-kicked a scheduled TV interview with the authors of “No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle.” Apparently the book is critical of TV news – and when Pero found out, he canned the [...]
Very depressing local media predictions
Dianne Mermigas is one of the smartest, most pragmatic media columnists I’ve ever read. She never resorts to hyperbole. So it gets your attention when she predicts that “advertisers will spend even less than the worst-case decline forecast” for 2009. She continues: “Major advertisers such as automotive, financial services, retail and real estate will not [...]
Live, from a hotel room… it’s Tuesday afternoon!
With Boise State’s football team traveling to San Diego for a bowl showdown with TCU, we looked for a way to combine our interactive capability with video – and capture the mid-day traffic spike. The solution was a live video web chat for two days leading up to the game at 12:15pm – featuring three [...]
Coffee’s connection to local TV news
No, I’m not referring to the obvious connection, especially for folks who work the overnight shifts. I’m reading a book (that has yet to be released) called “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, and it has a fascinating story about the coffee business with some surprising parallels to local TV news, young people and declining [...]
Internet ties TV for news source among youth
Pew has released a new study with the headline, “Internet overtakes newspapers as news source.” Not surprising one bit, but there’s TV data, too. Quoting Terry Heaton now: “According to Pew, as many people aged 18-29 cite the Internet as their main source of news as they do television. This is the canary in the [...]
Neighborhood blogs cover Seattle’s big storm
At 7 p.m. on Saturday night, with one of Seattle’s biggest snowstorms in recent memory underway, NorthWest Cable News, the 24/7 news channel run by Belo (my former employer), is running a gardening show. The broadcast channels are in syndicated programming. The TV and newspaper sites were covering the story, but from a city-wide and [...]
NPR API allows you to roll your own podcast
Oh, now this is a whole lot of audio only green-screen kind of fun. NPR has an API that allows you to mix up your own podcast using their content. With today’s launch, however, the API now allows users to slice through the NPR.org archive to create custom podcast feeds based on virtually any aggregation [...]
Detroit papers cutting home delivery to 3 days each week
Both Detroit daily papers, the Free Press and The Detroit News, say they’re making a big change come March. Â They’ll only throw the hard copy to the doorstep on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Â They’ll still sell copies at newsstands every day, but if you want the dead tree version on a Tuesday you’ll have to [...]
Google News adds MyBallard.com
This morning, we received an email from Google News accepting our neighborhood news blog, MyBallard.com, into the index. Whew, turns out we are journalists! If any of you had something to do with this — we didn’t re-apply and their email came less than a week after rejecting us the last time around — we [...]
State legislator wants to require use of real names online
Idaho legislator Steve Hartgen doesn’t like some of what he sees on the Internet. Anonymous bloggers and commentors who can say whatever they want, while hiding behind a mask of secrecy. So he’s working an a law that would require people to use their real name when posting online Here’s the bias up front: I’ve [...]
WUSA switching to VJs, cutting salaries
Gannett’s WUSA-TV in Washington D.C. is replacing its crews with one-man-bands, or videojournalists, who will shoot, edit, write and report. And that’s not all: VJs will be paid 30 to 50 percent less than traditional reporters. “We believe strongly that this will raise both the quality and quantity of the product we’re putting out” on [...]
According to Google News, we’re not journalists
Update on 12/15: Google News sent us a new email this morning and accepted My Ballard into the index (without having to re-apply). If any of you had something to do with this, we thank you! Original post: For the past several months, Google News has denied repeated requests to index MyBallard.com, the Seattle neighborhood [...]
Tribune’s downfall is industry warning
Diane Mermigas this morning on the Tribune bankruptcy: Tribune is a classic textbook case on how not to take a media company private, especially in hard times. But the real tragedy will be if Zell adds insult to injury by failing to use Chapter 11 restructuring to give it a new lease on life. Undertaking [...]
End of affiliate model in 10 years?
From a MarketWatch story today about CBS CEO Les Moonves: The executive also said that in 10 years, CBS may no longer have traditional affiliated TV stations, but could offer its feed straight to cable and satellite operators. For now, however, the network has contracts with local stations that are binding for several years. This [...]
NYTimes.com’s new ad campaign
We showed you the bold ad campaign from Statesman.com last week, and now NYTimes.com has launched a unique ad campaign as well… Many more clips from different folks are on NYTimesConversations.com.
Local TV layoffs wrap-up
Broadcasting & Cable’s Mike Malone has word of layoffs at KNSD, WNBC and KSTP. “I’m not going to write up every batch of station layoffs in the next year,” he writes. “It’d be too depressing, and it would just be too damn time consuming, too.” Sad, but true, because next year is looking much worse: [...]
