Don Day
Aaron at TVBarn noticed something strange last night during the MTV VMAs: VH-1 was running a looping animation pointing folks to MTV to watch the show (and nothing else). But at least they got a sponsor… Taco Bell got its name on a “live look-in.”
Side note: Anyone else think the VMAs looked like they were staged in a high school gym somewhere? I watched with a friend who said “didn’t the VMAs used to be in a huge arena?” Plus - lots of technical glitches, lack of any watercooler moment and some underwhelming acts added up to an underwhelming show.
Share this
September 8th, 2008
Don Day
Last year, Zillow cut a deal with a newspaper consortium to run Zillow ads on its real estate sites. Now the deal is expanding, with members of the consortium and Zillow selling ads on each others sites — a local real estate advertising network. Zillow is reaching more than 5 million unique monthly visitors - giving the newspaper partners an expanded base to sell on. Eleven companies are in the newspaper group, including Scripps, Hearst and MediaNews.
ClickZ: Forging relationships with newspapers will help Zillow appeal to advertisers for whom its 5.4 million-strong audience is too paltry, according to Greg Schwartz, VP of sales at Zillow. “We need Yahoo Local scale,” said Schwartz, adding advertisers “want to see 50 million reach.”
Share this
September 8th, 2008
Kent Chapline
Hot on the heels of NBC’s live stream of the first NFL game of the season, the head of Fox Sports says he’s not sure how much he likes the idea of streaming games. Ed Goren told Broadcasting & Cable “the big dog is definitely viewership on network television and the ad revenue that generates.” And while he says he’s not convinced that live streaming of sporting events is damaging to the broadcast audiences right now, he’s clearly looking ahead to the future and what might happen to the big bucks.
Share this
September 7th, 2008
Don Day
CBS Corporation CEO Leslie Moonves appeared on CNBC Friday to talk about the company’s direction and future (video link). CBS doesn’t have a lot in the way of cable networks, with Showtime being its lone outlet (its former cable cousins split off into Viacom about two years ago). Moonves says he doesn’t need a big bundle of cable channels like NBCU has - instead he thinks the Internet is the way to go. He notes that CBS is now the 8th largest Internet company in the world, and says the CNET deal will be a big boon to his company, and there will be tight integration with CBS Interactive.
Share this
September 6th, 2008
Don Day
Newspaper company AH Belo announced it would cut jobs on an involuntary basis after a voluntary buyout process closed. The company will cut 50 jobs at the Dallas Morning News, 30 at the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, CA and an unannounced number at the Providence Journal. AH Belo hopes to save $29 million each year through the job cuts. A total of 413 employees took the voluntary packages.
(Disclosure: I’m employed by AH Belo’s sister company Belo Corp.)
Share this
September 6th, 2008
Cory Bergman
One of the students at NYU’s journalism school gives it a good ripping on MediaShift. And from the looks of it, NYU deserves it. Writes Alana Taylor:
“(Professor) Quigley tells us we have to remember to bring in the hard copy of the New York Times every week. I take a deep sigh. Every single journalism class at NYU has required me to bring the bulky newspaper. I don’t understand why they don’t let us access the online version, get our current events news from other outlets, or even use our NYTimes app on the iPhone.”
You have to wonder if the newspaper industry would be in a different place today if journalism students were empowered to pursue more of their ideas. Instead, the old ways are foisted upon them before they even start their first job. (Of course, some journalism schools are working very hard to make the adjustment, and they should be commended.)
Share this
September 5th, 2008
Cory Bergman
Rob Curley (of Lawrence.com and LoudounExtra.com fame) has been in Vegas for a few months now, and his team has relaunched the weather section on LasVegasSun.com. And I love it. You see, local weather looks pretty much the same across local media sites, and Curley’s team took a new approach. “The site features the five-day forecast illustrated over the famous Las Vegas Strip,” explains Curley on his blog. “If it’s raining in Las Vegas — like it was yesterday — then it will be raining in the current conditions area. If it’s dark outside, then it will be dark in the current conditions area, and the Luxor beam will be lit.” Beyond the nifty Flash graphic (notice the roller coaster at the New York New York), the section has a very user-friendly layout of data as well as weather stations mashed on a Google Map. Sure, the section is missing Doppler radar and satellite images (which may appear when the winter month(s) roll around). But imagine taking the weather resources of a TV station and converting them into a design like the Sun. Pretty cool stuff.
Share this
September 5th, 2008
Cory Bergman
Nearly one-fifth of Americans connected to the internet, finds a new study. That number is double the last time the study was conducted two years ago. “”Being able to watch broadcasts on their own time and at their convenience are clearly reasons why we are seeing a greater number turning to the Internet. And, it is the reason why we would expect to see this trend continue,” says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center.
Share this
September 5th, 2008
Cory Bergman
Out of $5 million in online ad spending so far this year, the Obama campaign has spent just over $3 million on Google and $618,005 on Yahoo. So how did local media fare? $512,551 was spent through Centro, the local online ad agency — so just over 10 percent of the total. Capturing online dollars during election years has always been hit and miss for local media — more miss than hit — largely because the campaigns utilize the web more for fundraising and list-building (so search gets most of the dollars) than “getting out the vote.” TV still dominates as the best emotional reach vehicle around.
Share this
September 5th, 2008
Cory Bergman
Tonight’s first regular season NFL game will be broadcast on NBC as well as streamed live on NBCSports.com. You can select from four different camera angles, track live stats, submit questions and even watch replays along the way. Pretty cool stuff. More info here. (Full disclosure: I work for msnbc.com, which powers NBCSports.com.)
Share this
September 4th, 2008
Don Day
A revamped Wall Street Journal will hit the Internets on Sept. 16th. Not a ton of details to be found, except a brief blurb from the AP that says the site will make access to free content easier and include “lots of wonderful gizmos.”
Side note: Where’s my ESPN.com redesign?
Share this
September 4th, 2008
Cory Bergman
First there was Amazon Unbox, the downloading service, and now there’s Amazon Video on Demand, offering streams of your favorite TV shows and movies. Unlike Hulu, most of the videos aren’t free: shows cost $1.99 unless you buy a “TV pass,” which gives you a 10-cent discount per episode. You can either rent or buy movies. And you can also port the videos to your TiVo or Windows PC for viewing on your TV set. For me personally, it’s hard to beat the Hulu experience for computer-based viewing, but Silicon Alley Insider says it’s “the best competition iTunes has seen yet.”
Share this
September 4th, 2008
Cory Bergman
The NFL has slightly relaxed its online video restrictions, now giving local media websites the right to post 90 seconds of video over a 24-hour period. But still, no archiving. So far, nobody has mounted a legal challenge to the NFL’s restrictions, but some think local media may have a “fair use” case. Meanwhile, WorldNow VP Clayton Thomson says he’s been advising stations to cover pro games from a fan perspective as well as focus more on high school and minor league sports. “Local news outlets need to reinvent themselves by finding new ways to be more creative, more relevant and more engaging with their online sports coverage rather than relying on game highlights, locker room interviews and post-game news conferences,” Thomson writes. “There is nothing unique about that kind of content anymore, and, frankly, it’s getting rather boring and clichéd.”
Earlier: Sports journalism now a “website business”
Share this
September 4th, 2008
Kent Chapline
It’s the same sad song, different sad verse. Today three newspapers announced layoffs or buyout offers that could affect more than 500 jobs altogether. Two are McClatchy papers: the Charlotte Observer, which aims to eliminate about 75 positions, and the Raleigh News & Observer, which is cutting 320 jobs has offered buyouts to 320 employees. The third is the Daily Oklahoman, which is cutting 150 positions.
This is the third round of buyouts/layoffs this year for each of these McClatchy papers. Here in Dallas-Fort Worth, McClatchy’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently announced its fourth such round for the year. (Full disclosure: I work for the CBS TV station in D/FW and compete directly with the S-T.)
If you want a clear visualization of the job losses in the newspaper business just this year, check out Erica Smith’s well-done Google Maps mashup over at graphicdesignr.net/papercuts. (Via graphicdesignr.net)
Share this
September 3rd, 2008
Cory Bergman
After Katrina, TV stations in New Orleans invested in infrastructure and communications to prepare for the next hurricane. As Gustav blew through, the investment paid off. “We’ve been rehearsing ever since Katrina,” said WWL GM Bud Brown. “We covered the story. We did remarkably well.” WWLtv.com’s Tom Planchet reminds us that all the journalists working in New Orleans had to help their families evacuate then race back to cover the story. “One staffer drove his family from New Orleans to Little Rock and returned himself within 24 hours,” Planchet says (which is a 880 mile round trip). Fortunately this time around, it was no Katrina repeat.
Share this
September 3rd, 2008
David Johnson
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 love watching how they are playing their local news with their sudden national attention.
Share this
September 3rd, 2008
Cory Bergman
While most of Local.com’s sales is handled by partners, the business directory site has ramped up its direct sales force from 100 to 150.
Share this
September 3rd, 2008
Cory Bergman
Gannett has paid Tribune $135 million for an additional 10 percent stake in CareerBuilder, which gives Gannett a 50.8 percent controlling interest in the classifieds company. Press release…
Read more...
Share this
September 3rd, 2008
Cory Bergman
Google is preparing to launch an open-source internet browser, dubbed Chrome, to compete with IE, Firefox, Safari and even Microsoft’s operating system. “Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast,” explains the official post announcing Chrome, which is slated to launch sometime today. “We were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better.” Google says it realized it needed to completely rethink the browser and build it from scratch. “What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”
Says one analyst: “This is the potential threat that Microsoft has been worried about since the 1990s,” he said. “You’ve got web apps running inside isolated processes. It really sounds a lot like Google trying to take the web application model and make it more viable as a replacement for the desktop PC application model. This is Google trying to really push applications to the web and make that the way people do computing.”
ZDNet: Will Google’s Chrome be a death blow to Firefox?
Update: Chrome now available for download here. Have you tried it? Let us know what you think in comments below…
Share this
September 2nd, 2008
Cory Bergman
A handful of fall shows will premiere first on Hulu before air — Knight Rider, Chuck, Life and Lipstick Jungle. Hulu has set up a fall premiere section with a week-by-week lineup of network TV premieres.
Share this
September 2nd, 2008
Next Posts
Previous Posts
