Cory Bergman
I’ve been playing with “CBS EyeMobile,” a new iPhone application (iTunes link) from CBS News, built by Seattle’s Treemo Labs. You can submit photos straight from your iPhone, and browse photos and video clips uploaded by other citizen reporters. As you may know, you can’t shoot video from your iPhone unless you’ve hacked it. (Like many iPhone users, I’m waiting for Apple to unlock the phone’s video capability, both recorded and live.) “Soon we will be able to broadcast anything live from the street, essentially becoming walking televisions,” said Jeff Sellinger, GM of CBS Mobile.
As of this writing on EyeMobile, I see a photo from Yankee Stadium’s final night, a choppy video clip of Obama at the University of Miami and a bunch of other random stuff, including some guy drinking a beer. Regardless of what people are posting so far, mobile devices are clearly the platform for citizen newsgathering, and an iPhone application is a logical funnel. The challenge, of course, is how to organize the avalanche of citizen “news” that is to come — and how affiliates fit into this picture. Press release follows below…
Read more...
Share this
September 22nd, 2008
Cory Bergman
Some Lost Remote readers questioned what was new with our post last week about CityVoter teaming up with KING5.com. Now there’s some news: CityVoter has landed $2.6 million in additional funding. In addition to KING5.com, CityVoter recently landed SFGate.com and Click2Houston.com. The press release follows below…
Read more...
Share this
September 22nd, 2008
Cory Bergman
As promised, ABC.com has rolled out some updated features for its award-winning video player, from “true” full screen viewing — powered by an app from Move Networks — to embedding functionality.
The full screen mode is truly amazing, although it was buffering a bit for me.
Share this
September 22nd, 2008
Cory Bergman
Back in May, NBC Local Media announced that WNBC would be overhauled into a 24/7 “content center” operation that would provide coverage around the clock on multiple platforms, including a digital all-news channel. Instead of organizing around newscasts, the newsroom would focus on content. As you might imagine, such changes have prompted quite a few questions and concerns from the WNBC staff. Here’s a quote from Crain’s Business:
“The great initial concern, unanswered by management, is what happens to the quality,” said a station insider.
But what is “quality?” The Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards have a largely traditional view of quality, especially when you consider the regional Emmy’s are judged by peers — people who usually have worked in the TV news business for years. I have a few of these awards, and I’m proud of them. But I think they’re not adapting quickly enough to a broader definition of quality.
I keep using it as an example, but let’s take the hyperlocal news site, West Seattle Blog (forgive me, Tracy.) Here’s a site that has all but replaced the community paper in a large Seattle neighborhood with a steady stream of unique, original stories and a community forum that breaks plenty of news on its own. But the stories wouldn’t win any Emmy or Murrow awards (even if there was a category for it). Some are only a few sentences long. The photographs don’t come close to the newspaper. The video isn’t broadcast quality. And the site design certainly wouldn’t win a Webby.
But thousands of people in West Seattle read the site before they read SeattleTimes.com or any other traditional news site. Traffic is skyrocketing. A week doesn’t go by without a TV station or newspaper running one, two or even three of the West Seattle Blog’s exclusive stories. Because it has original, relevant, unique content. Because it’s a community connecting point. Because it covers the neighborhood like no one else.
These should all be components of quality in today’s times, especially as the internet becomes the primary platform for news. Not everything has to be polished, in-depth, well-designed, beautifully-shot or even well-written. It just has to fill a need with content and community you can’t get anywhere else.
I’m not plugged into the changes at WNBC, so this broader definition of quality may or may not have any application there. But I think it’s worth considering as the local TV news industry continues its sometimes painful transition to an anytime, anywhere resource.
Share this
September 22nd, 2008
Cory Bergman
Everyone watched as Ike pounded the Texas coast, but now Wall Street has diverted much of the national media’s attention, putting Houston’s local media sites back on the world stage. When Ike hit, KHOU.com peaked at 9.2 million page views and 225,000 video streams in a single day. Yet KHOU is still receiving emails from Australia, Belgium, India, Norway, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere around the world. Click2Houston.com, meanwhile, says it’s been averaging 5 million page views a day.
Share this
September 22nd, 2008
Don Day
Remember the creepy borderline disgusting Twittering of a funeral by the Rocky Mountain News? Now Denver’s alt-weekly has a post about another RMN snafu… emphasis on the “f.” During the DNC, a reporter from another Scripps paper was helping out by feeding the Twitter pipe.
That reporter somehow used a profanity that doesn’t meet the “would it be OK on the front page of the newspaper?” test. In fact, it doesn’t even belong in a Lost Remote post. Wellllll… the word was kinda hard to get rid of - so staffers decided to flood the feed with posts. Westword Denver reports that staffers were told to text “something” to the feed ASAP… so one person sent… “something.” “Which qualifies as the second funniest word in the feed,” Westword dryly noted.
Share this
September 20th, 2008
Kent Chapline
Late this afternoon Twitter rolled out a new design and tweaked their technology. As they explain in their blog, they rearranged the navigation a little, added some page-customization options, and set it up to refresh posts with AJAX instead of loading the whole page every time. Looks sharp.
Share this
September 18th, 2008
Kent Chapline
Group station owner ION is working with cable & satellite providers and other station owners to set up a multi-market analog switchoff test for next month. So far, B&C says stations in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Philly and Hartford have signed up. Ten days ago, most of the stations in Wilmington, N.C. made the big switch to digital permanently. And many other stations across the country have conducted switchoff tests.
This week we did our second such test at KTXA, the independent half of the CBS-owned duopoly in D/FW where I work. Based on our experiences answering viewers’ questions during our tests (which echo a Magid study last spring), I think there’s a good chance a lot of people will lose their signals in February because they don’t understand what it all means. It’s not like the industry isn’t trying to explain it; you can’t turn on a TV today without seeing a PSA about the switch. But, as Cory has said, buying a digital TV is complicated, and the hundreds of questions we’ve fielded during our tests reflect the confusion.
Share this
September 18th, 2008
Cory Bergman
This last weekend’s SNL skit featuring Tina Fey has set video records at NBC.com — 5.7 million views as of Wednesday. Over on CNBC.com, trouble on Wall Street set a new daily record of 14.6 million pageviews. And WSJ.com, which had just launched a new design (talk about timing), set a new daily record of 2 million uniques.
Share this
September 18th, 2008
Cory Bergman
A sign of the times: Tribune and Local TV stations in Denver and St. Louis will combine operations — and newsrooms — to cut costs. In Denver, KWGN (Tribune CW affiliate) will move into KDVR (Local TV Fox affiliate). In St. Louis, KTVI (Local TV Fox affiliate) will move into KPLR (Tribune CW affiliate). “These arrangements enable us to create efficiencies between the FOX and CW affiliates in each market to serve the local community like never before,” said Ed Wilson, president of Tribune Broadcast. “On top of that, we can provide advertisers the ease and efficiency of one-stop shopping, delivering even greater reach.” Back in July, the owner of Miami’s WPLG, Post Newsweek, bought WTVJ with possible plans to combine the two operations.
Also: KLAS-TV in Las Vegas laid off 17 people
Share this
September 18th, 2008
Cory Bergman
A month or so ago, Outside.in launched a toolkit for neighborhood bloggers to help them geo-tag their posts. And now the place-based aggregation site has debuted an embeddable map that plots a blog’s most recent stories by location — and its free for blogs to embed on their own sites. Nifty.
Neighborhood blogs are becoming more and more attractive for technology and media companies as well as advertisers, so I think we’ll see a lot more tools and services offered to them in the months to come. (Full disclosure: During the toolkit’s beta, I collaborated with Outside.in for a personal neighborhood news venture involving my wife and I. More about that soon.)
Share this
September 18th, 2008
Cory Bergman
Here’s a follow up on our earlier story this week that the Puget Sound Business Journal hired away the two top technology reporter/bloggers from the Seattle PI. Instead of just having them report for BizJournals.com and the weekly paper, they just announced a plan to launch a new, standalone technology site. “Our goal is to create the Pacific Northwest’s leading tech news source,” says a splash page announcing the new venture. “Over time, we plan to add many new editorial and community features, and host events around town.” Very smart. You have to wonder, why didn’t the PI do this? Why are traditional media companies hesitant to “break out” their best content into standalone verticals and take on new businesses?
Update: As Tracy correctly points out in comments, the PI has been launching quite a few verticals, from moms to pets to a younger-facing effort called SPI. In fact, the PI has been more aggressive than the average newspaper, and it’s my regional news site of choice (after KING5.com, of course.) Creating a technology site with that talent seemed like a logical choice, yet one could argue it’s not as “core” as the other verticals since it taps an unfamiliar advertising base. But those unfamiliar advertising bases help diversity revenue — an important priority for media these days.
Share this
September 17th, 2008
Cory Bergman
A new report by Borrell Associates and BIA estimates the financial value of newspaper, TV and “city.com” sites, and the results may be surprising. Sites owned by the largest local newspapers in the U.S. are worth $300 million to $450 million, and the values of the largest-grossing sites owned by local TV stations are between $30 million and $40 million. This underlines the value of investing online — these are vibrant, growing businesses that significantly increase a TV station’s valuation, especially in today’s economy.
Meanwhile, while newspaper sites still hold a large lead in revenue, TV sites are growing at a faster rate, according to Borrell. Newspapers have grown at a compound annual rate of 33.5 percent from 2002 to 2008. TV sites have grown 67.2 percent. Borrell’s now estimates the share of local online ad dollars in 2008 as 53.3 percent for pure plays, 27.4 for newspapers and 7.5 for TV sites. The key here is revenue diversification, according to Borrell: newspapers have depended too much on display advertising, while TV sites also have video in their pocket. The next battleground, as we’ve been reporting, is local search.
Share this
September 17th, 2008
Cory Bergman
The local directory service CityVoter has landed a big TV client: KING5.com is now using CityVoter to power its ongoing “Best of Western Washington” contest. CityVoter’s approach is to use a “best of” contest — leveraged by on-air promotion — to build a local business directory with user reviews. Businesses can also log in to update and enhance their listings. In addition to powering partner listings, CityVoter is also a standalone local business directory. Press release follows below. (Full disclosure: I worked at KING5.com until May of this year but had no role in the CityVoter deal.)
Read more...
Share this
September 16th, 2008
Cory Bergman
… and she’s out of a job. We need more public information officers like Metrolink’s Denise Tyrrell, who took a stand after this weekend’s accident.
Adds Olsen in comments: “She told the public the Metrolink engineer was to blame. That is not the truth. We will know the truth in one year when the NTSB investigation is complete. She just ASSUMED the truth. As a PIO, she did not ‘take a stand.’ She prematurely gave out unverified information in a crisis situation — that would be a big FAIL as a PIO.”
Share this
September 16th, 2008
Don Day
I Want Media has an interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. They talk a little bit about how the service is being used by big name media - and Twitter’s role in our media universe. “I don’t think it will ever replace newspapers,” he said. “We will always need a medium that carries more words and explores a topic in a greater detail. We will always need more journalistic research. We will always need video and images. Twitter doesn’t replace any of those things. But it complements them quite well. “
Share this
September 16th, 2008
Don Day
Facebook has transitioned its “beta” new design to full production, and eliminated access to the old site. The new version doesn’t seem better to me… but at a certain point - it is a free service and I can adapt. That’s why groups like “10,000,000 Against the New Facebook” make me laugh. They aren’t going to change it back. They might listen to your feedback - but at the end of the day, getting all worked up over a design change is a pointless waste of effort. Futilist? Maybe. Just joining a group saying you don’t like something is silly. Instead make a specific suggestion, and in aggregate that may make an impact.
And really… it’s just Facebook.
Share this
September 16th, 2008
Matt Sokoloff
Ok, so it’s not #358 but you could make a blog about how people poorly use Twitter (if there already is one…please forward to me). The latest installment comes to us from the Rocky Mountain News. After recently discovering Twitter, they twittered from the memorial service of a 3-year-old. Our friends over at Social Media Influence captured this screen shot.
Share this
September 15th, 2008
Matt Sokoloff
We all know by now that online video advertising has a lot of potential, but how do you go about tapping that potential. Some recent numbers showing that less than 20% of SMB’s are using video online got me thinking about the options for online video advertising and what works best.
Pre-roll – This has become the standard and do a search on LostRemote and you’ll find all sorts of studies. The problem for most local media outlets is that the CPM doesn’t cover the costs of creating content.
In-display ad video – A growing trend that uses video as a display ad. Some outlets are doing this on their own with their existing staff and technology, while others are turning to vendors. This seems to be pretty successful because the investment is made after a sales rep sells (not to mention the CTRs are pretty impressive).
One-off advertorial videos – This is the area that is most interesting to me. It’s easy to make a video about a business, and it’s easy to host that video, but how do you get traffic to it? A lot of media outlets, including the one I work for, seem to create one-offs that never get traffic (and each one means new development). A good example is an Attorney Guide with video about the ten different attorneys in the area. Who goes to a news website to learn about attorneys? I think the answer to this problem is local search. With a local search site you have people looking for businesses and if you want to expand into a new vertical, you’ve already got the infrastructure. Companies like TurnHere, Mixpo, Jivox and PixelFish specialize in creating videos for businesses wanting to advertise on local search sites.
So, while we all are spinning our wheels trying to figure out what works, what’s your online video advertising solution? Does it work?
Share this
September 15th, 2008
Cory Bergman
Folks at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are stunned today after the newspaper’s top two technology reporters/bloggers simultaneously quit to join the Puget Sound Business Journal. John Cook (Venture Blog) and Todd Bishop (the Microsoft Blog) turned in their resignations and are headed to the Business Journal for an “entrepreneurial venture” — which implies the BizJournals.com folks are up to something more than just adding a couple reporters. Sometimes we forget that BizJournals.com is another potentially serious local competitor on the web, especially when you consider their audience. (And the combination of Cook-Bishop is a powerful one: they’re essentially the “TechCrunch” of Seattle, for lack of a better comparison.)
And, of course, this is another example of the talent drain major papers are experiencing right now. Last week, the Seattle Times’ top political reporter/blogger David Postman submitted his resignation to go work in public relations at Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc.
Share this
September 15th, 2008
Next Posts
Previous Posts
