Political blogger laid off at WKRN

WKRN was digitally aggressive under the leadership of former station management, but it would appear the recent Young layoffs have now hit Web staff. Blogger A.C. Kleinheider managed VolunteerVoters.com, a site launched nearly two years ago to cover a local Senate race. He was laid off last week. His final post offered very kind words [...]

Spitzer story crashes NYTimes.com

The big story today that the NY Times broke about the NY Governor and a prostitution ring apparently caused the site to crash under the traffic, according to a spokesperson from the paper in response to the Huffington Post. According to the paper, the site has crashed two other times: 9/11/2001 and the crash of [...]

Dayport acquired by Entriq

The video setup that powers the CBS O&O sites, Oprah.com and several others has been acquired by Entriq. Dayport‘s site already touts the deal, which was announced with undisclosed terms. Press release after the jump. (Disclosure: I used Dayport’s tools while I worked with CBS.)

Local TV site wins National Headliner Award

One honor handed out in the 2008 National Headliner Awards stands out, awarded to local TV station website WBALtv.com. My colleagues won second place in Television Affiliated Online Journalism for their coverage of the Domino Sugar Plant Explosion. WBAL was the only local TV site to win an award. ESPN won first place in the [...]

YouTube to offer live video

While several sites have started to offer live video streaming capabilities, that feature has been missing from the internet’s largest video site, YouTube. Well, according to video blogger and lifecaster Sarah Meyers from pop17.com, live video is coming to YouTube this year. YouTube says that Google’s resources are making it a reality. (Via TechCrunch) Meyers [...]

Hulu to add Warner Brothers content?

While Hulu is still not out of beta, it’s a great site. I’ve watched many shows, and enjoy the experience. Well, that experience might get even better as more content is added. According to NewTeeVee, Warner Brothers will add their programs to Hulu. WB produces several shows on their co-owned CW, as well as shows [...]

The Rivers duo covers the Oscars

This was an interesting content strategy from the AOL blog Stylist. They had Joan and Melissa Rivers cover the Red Carpet in a video for the site. According to the site, it’s been viewed over 250,000 times. No matter your opinion on the duo, there is an audience for them, and a blog was their [...]

iTunes now second largest music retailer in U.S.

A new study shows iTunes has passed Best Buy and Target and is now second only to Walmart in sales of music in the U.S. According to Apple, the iTunes store now has more than 50 million customers and has sold more than 4 billion songs. Press release after the jump.

American Idol partners with iTunes, Apple

The top show in American has now partnered with Apple to post performances, both music and video, on iTunes the day after they air on TV. Apple will also be a premiere sponsor of the show, just like Ford, AT&T and Coca-Cola. So, what kind of in-show placement will we see? Apple iPod and iTouch will become the show’s official MP3 player and the iPhone will become its official phone handset.

Press release follows below…

NBCsports.com relaunches on msnbc.com

Joining the MSNBC family, nbcsports.com relaunched this weekend as part of the parent site. The Alpha Blog details the changes, including: What’s new? More sports videos in a new video player, NBC Sports personalities including John Madden, Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Jerome Bettis and Johnny Miller, and special content from NBC Sports’ marquee coverage of [...]

Top news sites for January 2008

Here’s the Nielsen-Netratings monthly list for news sites (ranked by uniques followed by time on site): 1. Yahoo! News – 36,074,000 – 0:23:58 2. CNN Digital Network – 35,598,000 – 0:41:58 3. MSNBC Digital Network – 35,410,000 – 0:30:00 4. AOL News – 23,732,000 – 0:31:12 5. NYTimes.com -20,461,000 – 0:35:47 Every site in the [...]

CNN launching iReport.com

CNN’s successful user generated content effort is being launched on its own site this week as ireport.com is set to go live. MediaWeek got a sneak preview of the new site. According to the story, the site will be similar to YouTube, with all content being published without an editorial validation of the submissions. “The [...]

Sex or TV?

A survey from a UK television company says nearly half of the men they asked would give up sex for 6 months if they were given a 50-inch plasma TV. Only a third of women would make that trade. According to the firm, this proves size matters more to men than women.

CBSNews.com starts linking to affiliates

Following the lead of CNN.com, CBSNews.com has begun linking to affiliates for local news stories. CBS News announced the plans to their affiliates today, asking for the stations to send them links to a story that “deserves the national spotlight.” It’s great to see more national websites recognizing the quality of local journalism from their [...]

Hulu to stream Super Bowl ads

FOX and NBC video site hulu.com will be streaming all of Sunday’s Super Bowl ads according to an interesting bit from TV Week today. The commercials will be available in “high-quality streaming video” at hulu.com/superbowl after the game ends. Do you think this means the site will go live in front of the audience for [...]

BBC blog admits they don’t know what’s going on

Thursday BBC Worldwide announced a deal with MySpace.com that brings content from the BBC to the huge social networking website. Apparently the editorial team at BBC News didn’t know, and on the same day ran a story about how hard it is to delete your profile from MySpace. Bad timing? Sure. But this blog entry [...]

EA unveils plans for free video game

In a shift for Electronic Arts here in the U.S., the video game company announced today their plans to release Battlefield Heroes as a free game this summer. EA calls the game a fun cartoon-style shooter which caters to players of all skill levels. The interesting strategy won’t be the gameplay, but the way the [...]

Netflix to offer unlimited online viewing

Just one day before Apple is expected to announce online movie rentals through iTunes, Netflix will announce that it is lifting caps for online viewing of movies. The AP says virtually all Netflix subscribers will be able to stream as many movies and TV shows as they want from a library containing more than 6,000 [...]

New Nightly site launches, video embeddable

Despite being told the site wouldn’t launch until Wednesday, it looks like NBC News launched Nightly.msnbc.com tonight. You can check it out now. The site features a large video player with a lot of “web only” clips. I’m a huge fan of content being produced that compliments what is aired, and this presentation showcases it [...]

CES 2008 blogs and other linkage

For most kids, Christmas was a couple of weeks ago, but for tech geeks, it’s now with CES. With that in mind, here is a list of places you can go to for updates. We’ve also changed the news wire in the right column to automatically update with the latest CES news from nearly two [...]