Use Of Rabbit Ears Turning Me Into Elmer Fudd

June 30th, 2009

I can’t watch a single major network on my “rabbit-ears” TV any more, at least, not without some serious picture breakup. The Digital Deadline has passed, and if anyone’s experience is like mine, the bunny has serious problems.

Think back to the ancient days of analog. We saw some fuzziness on my TV, but since I wasn’t paying for a cable box, it was fine. “Good Enough” beats “Nothing.” Now my bunny ears are sad. The picture is great - when I receive it - but the digital breakup is frequent and annoying.

I’m even amplifying the damn signal. I bought a Phillips HD powered antenna. These are bunny ears that should outrun a greyhound. Yet - there is little difference in the reception between the Phillips and nothing.

It’s not like I’m far from the broadcast towers, either. I Google-Mapped the distance and came up with 3.3 MILES. A signal should travel cleanly a lot further than that. I have state-of-the-art equipment, and a practically unusable TV.

Now, I do have cable in the other rooms, but I didn’t want to spring for a FIFTH box. Call me cheap. And in those good old analog days, I could see a picture clearly or, at worst, a little fuzzy.  I’m not going to stick an antenna on my roof, for crying out loud (this is progress?) and so I’m stuck with a useless monitor.

Or so it would seem.

Because the TV wouldn’t “work,” I decided to take another route: I turned it into a big laptop monitor. With an HDMI cable hooked from my laptop “out” to my TV “in,” suddenly, I have free TV. (Or, at least, I have TV off the broadband I’m paying for.) Thanks to Hulu, I can watch nearly any show I wish. With iTunes, I can download even more shows. Programs like Boxee contribute to my choices, and YouTube absolutely thrills my kids on the big screen. (That’s right - I said YouTube is one of my kids’ favorite “channels.” Take that, “high-quality-or-nothing” broadcasters.)

What does this mean for local broadcasters? It means yet another way around you. This time it’s actually worse - HDTV reception is actually forcing me away from you. Unless you’re live streaming, I can’t see you. This is big, big trouble for local media. And it’s another reason why, as Terry and I have said, you need to create original content and put it on the Web.

Yes, it’s true, I’m one of the digerati. Most people in the bunny-eared set won’t bother with my workaround - yet. But devices are out there that let you stream to your TV from the Web without a computer. We early adopters are usually about 18 months ahead of the curve. Inevitably, the new tech (think TiVo) catches up with everyone. The HDTV switch has downright forced me to go past the locals. This is sad, but it’s also as loud a cry for help as they come. Create programming I can’t get anywhere else. Put it online. The rabbit ears have gone down the bunny hole.

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Local mobile ads to shoot up, but local online spend to drop

June 9th, 2009

A report from BIA’s The Kelsey Group should be a kick in the rear for local media to get its mobile plan in order.  At the same time, another report from the same group empahsizes the importance of having a strong mobile ad plan in place — it projects the local online ad spend to start dropping.  InternetNews.com writes:

Local mobile ad revenue will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013, up from $160 million last year, while mobile search will reach $2.3 billion, according to the firm’s forecasts. Local searches made up 27.8 percent of all searches in 2008, but are expected to hit 35.1 percent in 2013, according to the report, “Going Mobile: The Mobile Local Media Opportunity.”

In another recent study, “U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast (2008-2013),” BIA/Kelsey forecast U.S. local advertising revenues to decline from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2013, representing a negative 1.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Only the local interactive segment will show growth throughout the forecast period. All other local media will experience marginal to rapid declines in the next 18 to 36 months. A small number of traditional media will rebound with a revived economy beginning in 2011, though most traditional media will continue to decline, albeit at a slower pace, according to the report.

We have had plenty of opportunities before to shift our efforts to where the money is going, but as an industry we’ve simply been too slow to change. Here, again, is an opportunity. Terry Heaton is right when he writes that our local news applications will need to be free downloads because  “There may be hard-core fans willing to pay for access to special applications, but as a general brand-extension play, paid mobile applications are just wishful thinking.”

No more wishful thinking. Follow the money.

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Disgusting: Advertorial Masquerades as TV News Website

June 8th, 2009

Advertorials have always been on the dark side of shady. But, thanks to some product called “Reservatrol,” we now have a new low: an advertorial made up to look like a (non-existent, thank God) TV news website:

Fake TV Station Ad Used to Sell "Health" Product

The links at the top (Weather, Entertainment, etc.) all go to an order page for their “miracle product.” It claims to be rich in antioxidants, blah blah blah. Does this stuff work? Who knows? The Better Business Bureau says beware of the company’s misleading sales practices.

The site is at news 3 news (dot) com (which I write intentionally so as not to give them the Google Juice power of an actual hyperlink. In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, they can Cramitol.

Where was this appalling piece of work linked from? NewsBlues says it found it on Drudge.

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The Experts Speak: Wrong Tech Predictions Throughout History

June 2nd, 2009

I just picked up a wonderful book for inspiration, and I strongly recommend it to you. It’s called “The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,” by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky. It’s not a new book, but it is terrific. Among the many quotes that caught my eye deal with disruptive technologies. Here’s a taste:

The Telegraph: “[I am] not satisfied… that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures. - U.S. Postmaster General rejecting an offer by Samuel Morse to sell the rights to his telegraph to the U.S. Government for $100,000 c. 1845.

Cinema: “My invention… can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever.” -Auguste Lumiere (Co-inventor of the motion picture camera) 1895.

The Telephone:

“Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” - Editorial in the Boston Post on the arrest of Joshua Coopersmith who had been arrested for fraud for trying to raise money for his work on a telephone.

“That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” - President Rutherford B. Hayes after participating in a phone conversation demonstration.

Radio: (The U.S. District Attorney prosecuting the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, Lee Deforest, for fraud in 1913): “DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice over the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public… has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company.”

Television:

Lee DeForest (remember - the guy who was prosecuted for raising money for his own work on radio tubes) said of television in 1926: “I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
“People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” - Darryl F. Zanuck (head of 20th Century Fox Studios), c.1946.

The Computer: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” - Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.

(Need I point out that he was running a computer company?)
Special Credit to Thomas Edison, for dismissing lots of inventions, including the phonograph - his own.

• “The talking motion picture will not supplant the regular silent motion picture.” (1913)
• “The radio craze… will die out in time.” (1922)
• “The phonograph is not of any commercial value.” (1880)

Now, you can always find people with opinions that turn out to be wrong. But note how many of these come from pioneers themselves. Edison and the Lumieres developed inventions and didn’t immediately see the value. DeForest was prosecuted while working on his radio tube, but saw the prospect of TV as an impossible waste of time. The president of DEC couldn’t imagine a reason for us to have computers. And the U.S. Post Office was practically handed its own Western Union, only to turn it down because it didn’t see Morse Code as a profitable way to send messages. These are the classic fears of disruption Terry I and write about frequently.

What’s important to learn from this terrific book is that there will be plenty of people who will tell you something can’t be done. There will be those who don’t even recognize the value of what they have. Learn from history (and have some fun with it). Stand by your work and your vision. Besides, who wants to be remembered for saying a bunch of things won’t work?

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NYTimes.com rolls out “River of News”

May 19th, 2009

NYTimes.com has rolled out an offering that’s well worth studying, one that delivers news as it happens and not via a formal, “Here’s the lede” presentation. Times Wire publishes news to the Web as soon as the story is ready. While the Times has been publishing “instantly” online for some time, this is the first time they have put the stories up in a Continuous News, chronological format. The lede isn’t what the editors decide is the biggest story in the world. There is no lede, there is only the story that published most recently.

Whether you call this a River of News, as Dave Winer and Doc Searls have, or Continuous News, as Terry Heaton first began preaching, it means the same thing: publishers are finally recognizing we want the option to get news as it happens and to be our own editors.

The concept is not new. Anyone who has ever written for a blog has published a river of news. Winer rolled out his own proposed version of the idea in 2006. A year later, he wrote:

“Why doesn’t everyone else just go ahead and do it too. Think about it. When you want news, you want the new stuff, you don’t want to wade through sections looking for the new stuff. You want the computer to find it for you. Too many electronic news sites are patterned after newspapers, that published once a day. In the real world of today, news is published all the time.”

Also in 2007, Doc Searls endorsed the idea:

“To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.

“It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.

“A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver — if not many of them. Most papers will copy other papers, of course. But one paper will start the trend, take the lead, and break the ice that’s damned up their purpose in static sites and tombed archives.

“One of them will see that there’s a Live Web as well as a static one. And that the Live Frontier is where the action is, and will be.

“I’m betting they’ll follow the New York Times, just like they always do.”

Doc was slightly off in the time frame (close enough) but he nailed it on the Times. And you can bet he’s right about how this will tip other papers (and, hopefully, TV stations) to do the same.

Really, the Times Wire is no different from the AP News Wire we’re all used to seeing in newsrooms. The latest story is the top story. That’s it. This is a really, really simple idea. For crying out loud — it’s a blog or damn close to one. So why has it taken so long to have this as an “official offering?” Because it’s ceding editorial control to our audience, and that absolutely kills higher-ups who believe they know what we need to know and in what order.

You can customize your Times Wire to suit your interests (good) but you don’t then get an RSS of that customization (bad). You still need to go to the site to get your customized information.

Given that, there is a lot to commend the site. It’s cleaner than any TV site you’ll ever see. It has a good photo interface and all the latest social sharing tools. It’s a work in progress, and it’s good to see the Times “embrace beta.” What’s also nice to see is that the developers are blogging about the process, which is appropriate given the “bloggy” nature of the site. Writes developer Michael Donohoe:

“Times Wire provides something NYTimes.com just didn’t have before: a clear, at-a-glance view of the latest content, in reverse chronological order without any other weighting or sorting. Depending on the state of the world, otherwise interesting and relevant stories aren’t always able to bubble up to the home page, or may hover there for only a moment.

“Times Wire is a stream of articles and blog posts going back over the last 24 hours, and going ahead in regular Ajax-based requests every minute…. If an article or post is updated later in the day, it’s bumped back up in the feed. It’s really that simple, and simple is exactly what it’s meant to be.”

Donohoe gives credit to those who conceptualized this before he did, tipping his cap to Winer and others. The Times is trying, and it has been great to see how the site has turned things around. It regularly releases new APIs so developers can take its information and run with it. In February, it held Times Open which invited developers to look at the Times as a platform, not a site, and to build upon it. You can build your own NYTimes.com widget, which will post whichever sections interest you.

The Times is doing a laudable job here, and we have to pay attention. Yes, it has plenty of financial issues, and some of these ideas are late to market. But the ideas are here now. As Searls wrote: others will follow.

All it has really done is put “new” back into “news.” Yet, with this simple acknowledgement of how news rivers work, the Times is also telling us it’s listening — and going with the flow.

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Pool Your Coverage: That’s the Chicago Way

May 6th, 2009

We have all seen this one coming. And we salute it. Four of Chicago’s TV stations are going to pool coverage of “non-exclusive” events.  WMAQ (NBC), WFLD (Fox), WBBM (CBS) and WGN are going to work together.

As Chicago Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal writes: “It’s going to be less crowded at some Chicago-area news conferences.”

The four outlets are establishing an independent news service to do the coverage. Rosenthal explains:

Tony Capriolo, a WMAQ sports producer, has been selected as managing editor of the service, which will be based at WBBM’s headquarters across from Daley Plaza but separate from Channel 2’s news operation. Each participating outlet will provide two news crews and an assignment editor, and they remain on their station’s payroll. Capriolo is an employee of the service, paid for by participating stations

What’s interesting to me is how much of a change this represents in editorial thinking. Yes, we’ve pooled cameras for court coverage in the past, but that was out of logistical necessity. Now it’s a financial need, and suddenly nobody in editorial has a big problem with it. The stations will still edit the feeds as they see fit.

I always figured some local entrepreneur would simply start a local news service and sell the video to the stations. (As some overnight stringers do now.) It’s good to see city outlets banding together to make more efficient use of their resources. This is by no means the only way to reinvent local news. But it’s planting the seed of the idea that we can’t do business the old way and cling to old ideals.

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Nielsen responds to questions Twitter study methods

April 30th, 2009

I give Nielsen a lot of credit on this. On Wednesday, I wrote about a study Nielsen had released about Twitter Users. What the study found was that Twitter has a pretty low return rate. They reported that only 30 - 40% of people who signed up for the service returned to twitter.com within the following month.

The report raised a big question in my mind and, indeed, among many Twitter users: did Nielsen account for the people who use Twitter “client” apps, such as Tweetdeck and other third-party ways of posting and receiving “tweets?” You can use Twitter without visiting twitter.com, once you’ve signed up. I interviewed David Martin at Nielsen, who said the study had, indeed, only focused on Twitter.com. He agreed that studying the third-party apps would be useful, and surmized they wouldn’t make an overall difference on the usage rates. Martin told me he thought such a study would be interesting “in the future.”

On Thursday, “the future” arrived. Nielsen crunched the numbers.

… as an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others.

The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. The year-long retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com.

Good for Nielsen for responding so quickly to the concerns. The Twitterati are passionate about their service, and will stand up for it ferociously at times. The study of this topic isn’t going to end, either. In an email today, Martin wrote “we will monitor data from the coming months to see if recent exposure will change  (the retention rate).”

Best of all, Martin wasn’t afraid to look people in the eye, as it were. Here’s his explanation which he posted on YouTube, in which he thanks the audience for its feedback. This is how business is done in the 2.0 world. You listen, you act, you respond immediately.

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Why I Blog Less and Socialize More

April 27th, 2009

I blog a lot less than I used to. For years, I posted at least four entries a day at Lost Remote. I felt compelled to do so, and felt I’d be letting the community down if I didn’t. Now, I blog less. What I do more is engage in social media. And I’m starting to feel that social media is to 2009 what blogging was to 1999. It’s an act of rebellion, in the sense that it mystifies those who don’t do it. Social Networking causes endless debate, just as blogging used to. You hear all the same negativity about it that you used to hear about blogs: “It’s for egomaniacs who want to detail the minutia of their lives.” And it causes debate about that old red herring: “Is this journalism?”

Twitter, for example, is freeing. You’re limited to 140 characters. And no matter how much you want to expound, you can’t. One or two lines is all you really need anyway. It’s great practice for TV journos who need to keep things tight. In TV, every word matters. On Twitter, every letter does. Facebook is where you can expand a little, but not much, on the articles that interest you. And only those who are interested enough in you to follow you get the updates. So you try like hell to find stories that you think will interest your friends. This is the micro vs macro world, and I love micro audiences.

A few people may share your blog entry. But a larger percent will share your Tweets and FB entries. And there’s something that feels wonderful when people “RT” you.

I also realize that not everyone is interested in reading 500 words from me every day. So a quick one-liner along with a good article is a great filter. It’s what blogging aims to be - meta-reporting.

So I blog less and use social media more now. While we encourage everyone at stations to blog, we equally (if not more so) encourage the use of social media. Blogging is a gathering, but social media is a cocktail party.

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The Kids Are Alright: You Just Need to Hire Them

April 23rd, 2009

I’ve found your staff for you. They’re graduating from college, and they’re ready to go. You only need to reach out and you’ll have a bunch of talented multi-media journalists who will blow you away.

I mean it. This is not a group that is going to go the usual “start at market 200 and work your way up” route. You may want them to – because that’s the way it’s always been done – but if you’re smart, you’ll look more at what they can do, rather than where they’ve done it.

I spoke with a number of graduating students at the RTNDA@NAB conference this past week, and I have to tell you – they’re good. Very good, in fact. So good, that one of them impressed a group president with her chops. So good, that if I were starting a local media outlet today, I’d hire the lot of them. They can shoot, edit, write, produce and direct. They are more media-savvy than any generation before them. They want – hell, expect – to produce stories for TV and the Web on the same day. You know how it used to be that we needed to teach newbies the system at our station? They will teach us. And man, do we need their knowledge.

And they’re also getting some pretty bad advice from their journalism professors, from what I could tell.

Their professors (not all of them – just a few) are still preparing them for a market that doesn’t exist anymore. The professors are there quoting chapter and verse from the RTNDA Ethics Guide instead of telling the kids what the rest of us were telling them. And that is this:

For the first time in memory, you are in the drivers’ seat.

If I were one of these seriously talented grads, I wouldn’t take the first station that offered me a job. I’d wait until I found one that met my needs. I’d wait until a News Director saw all my online work and said “Come. Teach us. We need you.” And if you’re a ND or GM you have to recognize the value in these remarkably well-trained young journalists.

Do I expect that a top-ten station would hire the entire bunch? No. (Although I would.) I do expect a smart station would start with one. First – what can it hurt? Worst case is that you have a reporter that needs a little seasoning, but has the skills to work and teach while he/she is learning from your team. (Welcome back, mentoring!)

As we have written in our book Live. Local. BROKEN News., the business of having “paid your dues” is now over. It’s still important to have dues-payers’ experience, mind you. But using “paid my dues” as an excuse not to do more than shoot or write? That entitlement program is over. It’s killing stations. As a manager, don’t accept one bit of it.
The kids are excited about news and information. Their professors are talking doom and gloom at them. What on Earth is that about? I wouldn’t pay a penny for advice like “Take a $14,000 job and hope you don’t get fired.” In what other industry would that advice be acceptable? I want my professor to tell the rising reporters this is their time. They are in the drivers’ seat. Not every news station will recognize the true value of hiring them. But some will – and the other stations will take notice. Yes, it doesn’t hurt that they will be affordable. But no, don’t hire them for that reason.

Hire them. Don’t put them on-air at first if you’re nervous about it. There will still be plenty for them to do. I’d hire one just to train everyone else on the staff for the first six months.

Hire them because they can do it all. They are leaders. They are the Tampa Bay Rays of 2008 and the Florida Marlins of this year. Just because they’re rookies doesn’t mean they can’t beat the pants off the veterans.

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Watch Replay of Live Chat at RTNDA on Tech Tools

April 21st, 2009

I used CoverItLive to liveblog from RTNDA Tuesday afternoon. Chip Mahaney hosted “Ten Tech Tools You Can Use Right Now.” Great stuff. Watch the replay right here.

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