Could this mean I don’t have to every see a flowmax ad again? I had no idea YouTube had organized news in this manner.
We’ve been fiddling around with the Internet for about 15 years and tried lots of different ideas. Streaming audio of debate from the state legislature; oral arguments from the state supreme court; online database of accident reports format he state highway patrol; and –as the say– the list goes on. One idea could never get off the ground was Obits Online. This was back in the late ’90’s as I recall. Funeral homes would log in to our online database and post funeral announcements. The public could search by name, date, city, etc etc. We pitched the funeral home associations in Missouri and Iowa (maybe some other states, I don’t recall). The idea never got off the ground because most funeral homes were still trying to figure out their fax machines and were convinced the people in their communities were not using computers and were unlikely to do so any time soon. I bring up this stillborn digital baby after spotting this story (AdAge.com) about a TV station in Michigan that’s running on-air and online obituary ads after three of the region’s four daily newspapers reduced publication to three days a week. The station’s owner, Meredith Corp., expects to roll the concept out to its other stations and says it is also in licensing discussions with other station groups. At $100 an obituary, it’s not clear that WNEM or Meredith has really tapped a massive vein of cash. Revenue from obituaries “is a teeny subset” of overall newspaper-classified revenue, said Mort Goldstrom, VP-advertising at the Newspaper Association of America. Fees charged by papers can range from as high as $1,000 for a major metro to a few hundred dollars for a midmarket paper. And many small community and weekly newspapers still run obituaries for free. WNEM started running obituaries in August at no charge, to get people familiar with the service and to work out any software bugs. Since launching as a paid service in early September, executives said, the station has over 700 obituaries in its system. The new obituaries are also prompting a change in the way people go about their daily routine, he said. “The biggest issue that we have is the elderly people that don’t have the ability to pay for internet access or don’t have a computer. Now they see it flash on TV and those that don’t have a computer can call the funeral home and ask for information,” Mr. Luczak said.” Having the TV station to promote and leverage the idea is an important component. I hope they make some money and provide a useful service. If you were recruiting for someone to manage a news organization in 2009, what skills or experience should you be looking for? What would the job description look like? (Since I know nothing about print, I’ll limit my questions to broadcast) In my experience, most people who make it to “the top,” come from the sales side of the business. The men and women who made their bones in the newsroom occasionally wind up running the show but they are the exceptions. So we’re looking for sales and marketing experience, yes? Someone who can figure out how to sell the advertising that funds company. Someone who can recruit and train people to sell 30 second radio and TV commercials? What about this Internet thing? Do our sellers need to know how to sell banner ads (or whatever), too? Or does our manager have to manage two distinct type of sales departments? “Traditional” and online? Strategically, do we manage the business we have today and hope it lasts a long time? Or, do we try to anticipate what our business will become in three, or five, or ten years? No easy task. Clay Shirky says the advertising model that has defined and driven news organizations worked because advertisers didn’t have alternatives. Now they do. But I’m getting away from my original question. Do we need a manager that is real good at “where we’ve been?” Someone with a good handle on where we’re headed? (if such a person exists) Or both? (tall order) What if advertising –as we have come to know it– plays little or no part in funding news organizations in the future? Uh, let’s not go there. Too murky and scary. As you can see, I have no answers… just questions. And I’m not sure they’re even the right ones. Maybe it comes down to finding someone who knows how to build a spaceship, verses someone who knows how to build a bomb shelter. The spaceship has to get us to a very different place. The bomb shelter will protect us for as long as our food and water hold out. “The presumption of old media was that everyone in the audience saw every advertisement and that’s why ads were bought on the basis of the size of the audience. Size mattered. But today, what advertisers really want is verification that their ads reached the audience they were sold – not just in size but in relevance.” I feel like the mom that left her child in the car to run into the mall “for just two minutes” and comes back to find the cops standing around her car with stern looks on their faces. It’s scary how quickly a couple of days can slip by without a blog post. There’s no question in my mind that Twitter and posterous have resulted in fewer posts here. And since this is not a real blog post, who the fuck are Jon and Kate? I keep seeing their names pop up and have determined they are/were the “stars” of a reality show but now have broken up or something? I have this theory that the people who insist they have never heard of blogs or Twitter are exactly the same people who made Jon & Kate household names (to everyone but me). How empty and vacuous must your life be that you would find J&K’s live worth watching? I learned this morning –via Twitter– that the Edward R. Murrow Awards will be announced this morning (11Eastern)… on Twitter. One of our company websites won a Murrow award a few years back and it’s kind of a big deal. The awards are presented by RTNDA, which used to stand for Radio-Television News Directors Association. And may still. But the association now refers to itself as “The Association of Electronic Journalists.” A good move. Choosing to announce their annual awards on Twitter speaks volumes. I salute the “AEJ” for recognizing and using this tool. A thought-provoking column by Henry Blodget in the Silicon Alley Insider. Here’s his nutshell: “As with print-based media, Internet-based distribution generates only a tiny fraction of the revenue and profit that today’s incumbent cable, broadcast, and satellite distribution models do. As Internet-based distribution gains steam, therefore, most TV industry incumbents will no longer be able to support their existing cost structures.” According to Blodget, the TV business models for the past 50 years have been based on: David Simon –creator of The Wire and Generation Kill– is currently shooting a pilot for Treme, his proposed new series about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans. “It will feature at least two veterans of his earlier work: Clarke Peters, who played Lester Freamon in The Wire, and Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk Moreland. If commissioned by HBO, Simon promises, Treme will remain true to the philosophy he pungently encapsulates in the phrase “Fuck the average viewer”. His shows, he explains, reject the conventional TV wisdom that everything must be explained upfront, instead demanding intense concentration from viewers, who must grapple with an unfamiliar world. Rather than writing for a general audience, he says: “I want to write for the guy living the event.” So, are there people who watched and enjoyed The Wire… and were also regular viewers of Extreme Home Makeover? From PoynterOnline’s Al’s Morning Meeting (Al Tompkins): “Monday morning, WTSP-TV anchor/reporter Janie Porter was on TV, reporting live from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., on the run-up to this week’s national college football championship game. She didn’t have a big live truck accompanying her, or an engineer tuning in a shot or a photojournalist standing behind the camera and setting up lights.” “Porter set up her own camera, opened her laptop, connected the camera to her computer, slipped a wireless connection card into her laptop, called up Skype and used her Blackberry to establish IFB (the device TV folks wear in their ears to hear the off-air signal). It all looked just great on air.” So here’s my question: If a reporter didn’t know how to do what Janie did, why wouldn’t he or she make some effort to learn it? If you answered, “I’m not a TV reporter,” go to the back of the line. “Unfortunately, humanity seems to lack the backbone to demand that the elderly continue to contribute until they terminate. Instead we both indulge their laziness and demean them, locking them away in retirement homes while they slowly rot in a medicated stupor. The thought seems to be, the elderly, like most minority groups, enjoy being grouped together in a designated living area. But what if we stripped them of their pills and deprived them of their Rascal scooters, perhaps the elderly would stand up and face death like a man: head on, in a battle royal. Win or lose, they’d be more alive than they are now, even if the exertion caused them to cease living.”Obits on TV
“For $100, the station will run the deceased’s name and photo on-air and publish a full-length obituary on ObitMichigan.com. Full-screen graphics listing names of people who have passed away are broadcast during the local station’s morning and noon shows Monday through Friday, as well as on weekend morning shows. Viewers are pushed to the website for more information about the deceased as well as funeral-services information.Bomb shelters or spaceships
Jeff Jarvis on “the Nielsen Revolt”
If this is reality, I’ll take virtual
Is Twitter now the place for breaking news?
“Sorry, There’s No Way To Save The TV Business”
New series from creator of The Wire
It looks like TV to me
Dwight Schrute on how to “deal” with the elderly
How to catch the latest news on YouTube
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