Europe: Internet will surpass TV in 14 months

A Microsoft report, “Europe logs on: Internet trends of today and tomorrow,” finds that European Internet consumption in 2010 will average 14.2 hours per week compared to 11.5 hours a week spent watching TV. Aside from telling us that Europeans watch way less TV than Americans do (Nielsen has the average American watching 28 hours [...]

2009 Pew State of the News Media

The 2009 edition of Pew’s annual State of the News Media Report paints a fairly bleak picture of what 2008 actually looked like, and ventures to guess that things are not going to get much better in 2009. The key finding are here, read it for all sectors. Below are some pulled quotes and points [...]

Jon Stewart open thread

By now, you’d have to live under a rock or be Amish not to have seen or heard about Jon Stewart’s CNBC smackdown and the literal “money punch” he delivered last night to Jim Cramer. Either that or I’m not following you on twitter because that is what everyone seems to be twitterpated about today. [...]

Google Ad Sense adds interest-based advertising

The Goog is working on a new behavior-targeting platform that will identify users based upon their topical interests to try to serve them more interesting ads. This is nothing that other ad networks, like Tacoda for one, haven’t been doing for a while now. From the blog anouncement:
To develop interest categories, we’ll recognize the types [...]

DrupalCon rocks Washington DC

I’ve been in and out of DrupalConDC all week, and it is amazing to see how the little open-source cms has gone completely prime time, powering sites for major media and small indies. If you are looking to go the next steps to take your hyperlocal schemes to community-driven publishing, drupal can take you places [...]

Rocky Mountain News presses silenced

Two months short of the 150th anniversary of the first run, the presses at Denver’s Rocky Mountain News are running for the last time tonight. E.W. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne and newspaper division leader Mark Contreras abruptly told employees this morning that Friday’s edition would be the last. Online editor Mike Noe is tweeting the [...]

Pirate Bay trial underway, many charges dropped in first day

While Matt Drudge is cautioning against banks following the feared “Swedish Model,” the Swedish megatorrent site The Pirate Bay is fending off the legal broadsides of the global entertainment industry in a long-awaited trial that got underway earlier this week. On the first day, prosecutors dropped half of the charges against the site:
Prosecutors previously [...]

Ustream launches pay-as-you-go Watershed

Ustream.tv has just launched a new service for Web sites and businesses called Watershed. Targeting the market that seeks a branded player and more customization for live events, Watershed offers a ton of management options outside the scope of the usual ustream player experience. Techcrunch has a good write up with a comparison sheet on [...]

Public media feels the pinch

Pure advertising isn’t the only business model out there feeling pain. Membership and sponsorship models that sustain public broadcasting are also feeling the effects of the economic downturn, as this article on WAMU public radio shows.

Lessons in paid content from the digital broadcast transition

Washington Post staff writers Kim Hart and Peter Whoriskey dish out a wonderful narrative in their article on the Washington conundrum that has turned the digital broadcast transition into a comedy of errors:
But with two federal agencies in charge, no clear idea of how many people would be affected and constant partisan disagreements over [...]

Making your Media Matter 09

American University’s Center for Social Media is hosting the 5th annual Making your Media Matter conference today. Established and aspiring filmmakers, non-profit communications leaders, funders, and students are gathered to discuss and share information around how media makers can connect their ethical and aesthetic values with their financial needs. While advocacy and social change are [...]

Paid news conversation rears ugly head once more, publishers and ad directors still absent

The conversation following in the wake of the Time article on saving newspapers has the feeling of a bad rerun to those of us who have been around – and around- this old block for a while. Poynter has a nice summary of some of the chatter, pegged to a post on an NYT blog. [...]

APIs fuel growth at Twitter, NYTimes, and everywhere else

Twitter has grown like crazy since it first debuted in 2007 at SXSW. The Internet hip and happening went gaga over the simple ease of the SMS to Web microblogging service, and journalists have jumped on with some successes and mishaps as we have reported here. I helped throw a little twitter party for the [...]

Rack sales of magazines fall 11 percent

In the second half of 2008, single copy and newsstand sales of magazines dropped sharply, largely explained away as checkout lane impulse purchasing curbed due to the economic downturn. Weekly news magazines have fallen almost completely off the cliff, with major titles dropping from weekly to biweekly to monthly publishing cycles. Cosmopolitan lost 6 [...]

In the three screen world, television still draws the eyes and ad dollars

NYT’s Digital Domain has a tight write up on how the TV screen is holding in there against the computer screen and mobile. Advertisers still value the immersive yet passive experience, and audiences are still tuning in.
Consider that the average American household consists of 2.7 persons and contains 2.9 television sets, in front of [...]

Forrester: Is Hyperlocal Hype Or Happening?

A new Forrester report takes a fairly skeptical look a the hubub around hyperlocal strategies in news products. The analysis strongly suggests that some assumptions made by newspaper and television companies staking their future on hyperlocal efforts need to be reexamined:

Forrester data shows that more consumers care about what’s happening in their country than what’s happening in their neighborhood. In addition, there’s a disconnect between the sources consumers rely on for local news and information versus those they rely on for business listings. This is a huge problem for local TV stations and newspapers, which bear the cost of content production without reaping the benefit of classified ad sales. Companies that are poised to dominate the hyperlocal space will have three key assets: 1) low-cost, community-generated content; 2) an agile human sales force paired with smart ad sales automation; and 3) mastery of the mobile channel, which drives local offline interactions.

House votes Wednesday to delay DTV transition

The political maneuvering to delay the analog-to-digital broadcast transition is a lesson in the minutiae of the legislative process. A new vote is scheduled for Wednesday that is likely to pass with a simple majority, instead of the two-thirds required to pass the previous bill. The new deadline will move the transition from February [...]

Land a plane on the Hudson in new news games

A couple of new “news games” are looking at the recent heroic plane landing on the Hudson to put users into the news:
“Hero on the Hudson” challenges players to steady a plane nosediving toward the busy river. In “Double Bird Strike,” the goal is to evade flocks of birds — a suspected cause of the [...]

Treasure hunting is not cool, and shows glorifying it are unethical

Bully pulpit time. I’ve been blogging here for 8 years about the television industry doing dumb things. This one makes my blood boil, and it is personal.

UPDATE: Comments from the LR faithful have questioned the off-topic nature of the post, and I acknowledge the hijack. I am truncating to lower the front page scroll. Venture in if you are interested in the flame war from the treasure hunting community, otherwise, back to the regularly scheduled blog.

Study finds Web series audiences are unreliable

Here’s an interesting story over at AdAge that shows how hard it is to make a Web series stick. Ad Age asked TubeMogul to do a survey of the top 50 Web-only series and found that the series lost 64% of their audiences, on aggregate, from the first to the second episode. Most series don’t [...]