Yearly Archives: 2007

Campus Ladies: Too funny for network

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Campus Ladies follows Joan & Barri, two middle-aged best friends who decide it’s better to be a freshman at 40 than unhappy housewives forever. Ditching the suburban life of minivans and malls for keg stands and co-ed dorms, Joan and Barri enroll in school in search of the wild college years they missed the first time around.

Campus Ladies is based on characters created by comediennes Carrie Aizley (Joan) and Christen Sussin (Barri) while performing with the famous comedy troupe, The Groundlings. The series is executive produced by Cheryl Hines (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and co-executive producer E. Brian Dobbins (Reno 911). Among others.

“Take a Blogger to Lunch”

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“If we are to survive as news organizations, survival will have to be charted by people who live in the new world, rather than by people who view the Web as either a threat or a tool to gain temporary power in a mortally wounded industry.”

“As news organizations, we inhabit a temporary existence while we wait for the full birth of this new medium. Traditional news organizations must not invest in transitioning people to this new world; we already live in it.

“Where is the innovation? Not in most of our newsrooms. What our newsrooms do have are decision-makers who have never built a Web page by hand, watched Rocketboom, or listened to a podcast. They don’t ‘get’ YouTube and have never heard of Flickr or del.icio.us or Boing Boing.”

— Keith W. Jenkins, the Picture Editor at The Washington Post. Jenkins –a blogger since 1999– was Photography Director at AOL from 1997-1999.

Reader’s Digest Podcast

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J. T. Gerlt reports that your grandpa’s favorite magazine is podcasting:

I never really thought of Reader’s Digest as cutting edge. The outside has basically looked the same forever. They have the same insides too Only in America, Everyday Heroes, Word Power, Humor In Uniform, Quotable Quotes, and etc., but someone there must be pretty progressive thinking. Most of the audio is 3-5 minutes long, the longest I saw was 11 something.

I’m betting Aunt Betty isn’t syncing her iTunes and playing canasta with buds dangling from her ears, but I could see her listening in front of her PC. Which is how a LOT of podcasts are being heard. I’ll check ’em out and report here.

Newspaper-TV partnerships strained by online video

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Again from LostRemote: “An article in today’s Washington Post notes that the once-coveted cross-promotional and content-sharing partnerships between local newspapers and television stations are becoming increasingly strained in the new mediascape where web sites can easily roll their own video. The balance is somewhat one-sided: Newspapers are training their online producers to become videographers, but broadcasters face challenges when it comes to getting copy for their sites.”

This is readily apparent when you look at stories on TV station websites. Very thin. We feel some of this pressure on our sites, too. We’re writing for 3 minute newscasts. A single story written for broadcast can be just a few sentences. Doesn’t exactly fill up a web page.

Google deal with CBS Radio imminent?

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Merrill Lynch broadcast analyst Jessica Reif Cohen expects Google will team with a CBS Radio in a wide-ranging advertising deal. In a nutshell, Google would allow advertisers to bid for radio airtime using some of the same functionality as its online sales tool. But again, no deal has been announced.

Cohen estimated that a Google deal to sell 10% of CBS Radio’s advertising inventory would generate approximately $200 million in revenues and that the upside for CBS would be two-fold: “1) attracting new (likely smaller) advertisers to its platforms a la Google’s experience with search, and 2) creating a more efficient sales model that reduces the friction/cost of selling advertising.” [LostRemote]

Seth Godin on the iPhone

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Seth says there are two kinds of people in the world:

“The folks that want (need!) an iPhone, and those that couldn’t care less. And of course it’s not just Apple and it’s not just phones. It’s every single industry in the world. You’re not likely to convert one group into the other. What you can do is decide which group you’d like to market to.”

There you go. I am in the first group and Jobs sold me in the first five minutes.

Relaunching news websites

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Learfield NetworksOne of the first Learfield networks to have a website was Radio Iowa, our state news network in Iowa. That must have been around 1996 and it was created (using Frontpage) by Dan Arnall and Allen Hammock, a couple college guys we hired to help us figure out “this Internet thing.”

Dan and Allen went on to pursue new adventures a long time ago. And we’ve added lots of websites –for our company and for clients– since those early days.

This week we relaunched RadioIowa.com. We relaunched WRN.com a about a month back and we’ll be putting up the new Missourinet.com in a couple of weeks.

Our news networks are pretty narrow in focus. We cover the legislature, state government and –with the help of our affiliates– news from throughout our respective states.

Our websites reflect that focus. State news and sports, with an emphasis on the sounds of the news. We are, first and foremost, radio networks. Our websites are designed to complement them. They are not high-traffic, destination sites. Time will tell if this strategy is the correct one. The next couple of years should be interesting.

Our new sites are very blog-like. At WRN.com, we blog the sports and our news director maintains a blog. At Radio Iowa, News Director O. Kay Henderson is generating a real following for her political blog.

Time will tell if I have taken us in the right direction with these sites. If you like what you see, email me and I’ll put you in touch with Andy Waschick, the man behind all of Learfield’s websites. If you don’t… please don’t tell me.

Apple iPhone

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iPhoneYou know I’m not a cell phone guy. Nobody to call…nobody to call me (‘cept Barb). But the new Apple iPhone is so much more than a cell phone. Makes the Treo and the Blackberry look like Fisher Price toys. The iPod led me to purchase the MacBook…and the MacBook will probably lead me to buy an iPhone.

Update: Just watched Jobs’ keynote. Amazing. And take a look at the effect of the iPhone announcement on Palm (Treo) and Rimm (Blackberry) stock in the hours following.

Marketing through cell phones

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Brandweek has a good article on how marketing on cell phones is finally starting to work:

“Crammed into his seat on his way into Manhattan, a businessman uses his cell phone to log onto Weather.com just to see if there’s some sunshine on the way (“Seventeen inches of snow expected by the weekend.”) Just then, a bright blue banner ad with white lettering pops up on and grabs his attention: “Aruba” …He clicks on the banner ad, and his phone dials an 800 number, connecting him to an Aruba Tourism booking agent. “

The article includes several good examples.