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 [...]

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 [...]

XBox Live’s new experience launches

Xbox users who fire up their boxes this weekend will get the prompt to download the new interface, or experience. I was pretty stoked to get it because the new experience carries the new streaming Netflix service (many in HD). Then I found out I needed to upgrade my Live membership to gold to be [...]

Yang stepping down as Yahoo CEO

Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang will step down as CEO and return to his former role as Chief Yahoo once the board of directors finds a replacement. Yang assumed the CEO role at the Board’s request in June 2007. He has led Yahoo through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform. 2008 has been a [...]

Pithy observations on media from Bioneers

The Bioneers 2008 conference focused on how nature and technology can join forces to better the planet. Jaymi Heimbuch posted the following snippets on Treehugger after attending the panel “iTube, YouTube, WeAllTube: Digital Media and Distribution Innovators:” “TV is a powerful medium whose agenda was once created by newspapers. Newspapers, though, are on their way [...]

Domain typos are a million dollar business

Harvard University professor Ben Edelman charges Google is making millions off of typo URLs, domain names of trademarked brands that are off by one letter. The real sore spot here is that the owners of those brands buy them as key words, so if you type in BankofDAmerica.com, one of the AdSense ads that flies [...]

Escaping reality drives video game sales in economic downturn

One of the (many) great things about being in academia is being surrounded by smart, talented and articulate people. It often leads to serendipity. As I was in my office hours the other day, I heard broadcast professor John Doolittle playing this piece to one of his undergraduate classes across the hall: In Tough Economic [...]

Politifact game now on Yahoo elections

@mattwaite twitters: Ever wanted to play PolitiFact the game? No? Well, we made one anyway with Yahoo! News. Middle of this page: http://news.yahoo.com/elections It is a quick quiz flash game, but great play for a great site that just recently was recognized by the Batten awards.

ONA08 news game session

I’m sitting in the J-Lab news games pre-session for ONA08, which the LR faithful know is a topic near and dear to my heart. There is a lot more out there since we first started talking about serious games and the news, but so far, most of what I am seeing is developed in Flash [...]

Knight-Batten innovation awards announced

Wired‘s WikiScanner coverage took the top honors from the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, given today at the National Press Club in Washington, DC ahead of this week’s Online News Association meeting. As if that sentence didn’t have enough inline links, the other cash winners were PolitiFact.com and crowdsourcing site ushahidi.com. View the winners [...]

Palin is good news for Anchorage Daily News

But not so much for Anchorage TV sites, as you can see from the Alexa graph. Sara Palin’s call to duty to fill out the GOP presidential ticket has given the Anchorage Daily News something else to print other than bear cub stories, which I am not mocking. I love bear cubs. I also really [...]

News wires notice news aggregators

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 [...]

Newspapers cutting DC bureaus

Howard Kurtz inks and chats in the Washington Post on how local papers and publishing chains are turning off the lights at their Washington bureaus as part cost-cutting and putting more attention on local content. The pull quote here is: “Sometimes the local story isn’t sitting right here in your Zip code or area code,” [...]

RIM Bold is coming, smartphone war is on

Cory posted earlier on the iPhone’s success an implications in the local marketplace. Resarch in Motion is firing back in the smartphone wars. The Blackberry 9000, called “The Bold,” is already for sale in some international markets and is expected to be in the U.S. market within a month. The Bold offers screen resolution that [...]

More publishers using ad networks to sell inventory

A year ago, publishers sold 5 percent of their inventory via online ad networks, a year later, that number has shot up to 30 percent. That has a lot of scary implications for anyone but the ad networks. As I read the original post in Mediaweek, I recalled a presentation given by the absolutely brilliant [...]

‘Rip and read’ R.I.P. as print fades

Brian Lowry has a column in Variety stating that TV and radio news is going to suffer greatly from the print decline. As print fades, then, the fallout promises to hasten broadcast news’ descent as well — from “Rip and read” to simply “Read it and weep.” In what reads like a reaction to the [...]

ONA 2008 conference schedule is out

The Online News Association is heading to Washington DC again this year for their annual confab. The schedule so far looks pretty decent. I’ve always gotten a lot out of ONA because it casts a wide net over broadcast, print and online pure plays so everyone gets a chance to get out of their respective [...]