Category Archives: Media & Culture

Broadcasting on the web

Posted on by

Interesting analysis of TV station websites by Graeme Newell. The piece is buried in a long, no-way-to-deeplink post on ShopTalk, so I’m posting the full article after the jump.

“The problem is our mindset. We’re trying to recreate broadcasting on the web. We do the web just like we do TV – broad. There is just a little bit of everything and not enough of anything. Because of its very nature, TV news has evolved to become a headline service. Our web sites mirror our on-air broadcast. You usually leave our web sites still hungry, wishing for a little more meat on the bone.”

“In the future, successful stations will have a hundred different broadband channels, all of them geared towards a specific demo. Give up your need to be a broadcaster. We are now nichecasters and the web gives us a whole new way to bring new audiences to our door.”

It’s worth a read because I think it applies to a lot of radio station websites as well as TV. Maybe even some radio network websites?

Continue reading →

“There is no online department. It has ceased to exist.”

Posted on by

Jeff Jarvis points to examples of how some newspapers are trying to survive in the online world:

DelawareOnline is reorganizing the paper’s newsroom to be platform agnostic. A few years ago, only four people could post on the web but now 50 can and the number of web updates skyrocketed. They are a small paper and so they are not throwing staff at this; they are throwing simplicity at it: They are using iMovie and GarageBand to produce multimedia. He said that they have had four people leave because multimedia is not for them. I see that as a very good thing. Welcome to the future, newsroom. Says Paul: “There is no online department. It has ceased to exist. We are the online department. The newsroom is the online department.”

News organizations that are unable or unwilling to grasp this and make the transition will die.

WSJ: “How to get attention in a New-Media World”

Posted on by

Wall Street JournalThat’s the headline on a story in today’s Wall Street Journal. I won’t bother posting any of the many nuggets in this piece. You can read them yourself. And if you spend anytime online, you know a lot of this already.

Here’s what I want to know: How can any intelligent, semi-educated, reasonably well informed, man or woman entrusted with running a business (or some division or department of that business) not have at least heard about the things referenced in this story (blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc etc)?

We talk to people every day that insist (and I belive them) they’ve never even heard the terms. I don’t expect the average Joe (or Joanne) to be as into this “new media” (someday we won’t need the quotation marks) as I am… and I know that not everyone has access to the Internet. But if you own a TV set, a radio, read a newspaper or a magazine… how could you not have seen or heard one or two of the countless stories about “new media” during the last couple of years?

* I just read the local sports scores in The Daily Bugle
* I only watch Wheel of Fortune and QVC on TV
* I haven’t seen anything in People Magazine about all this stuff
* Cousin Bob on Country 108.7 would tell me if any of this stuff was important

What do you know? I answered my own question.

Let me stress that I’m not saying your business should be using any of the new media tools (you should)… but I remain mystified that there are people who have not a glimmer that something is happening.

NAB Radio Show down with New Media

Posted on by

Scott reports there are at least eight sessions on “New Media” at the NAB Radio Show going on this week in Dallas:

1) Pod Squad – Getting the Drop on Podcasting
2) Text Messaging – Where U @?
3) How to Make Your Radio Station Website the Newspaper of the Future
4) Promotions with New Technologies
5) Harnessing the Power of Blogging
6) Radio’s Future in Focus: What Millennials REALLY Think
7) It Ain’t Just Radio: Where Else Can You Find New and Bigger Revenues?
8) Email marketing

Let’s hope Scott fires up that Blackberry and files some dispatches from a few of these sessions. We’ll post them here if we get ’em. They’ve got some people who know their stuff on the blogging and podcasting panels. (Scottie: Make Roger buy the tapes for those two sessions.)

Early adopters and the masses (Hugh MacLeod)

Posted on by

“I’m astonished at how long it takes an idea to filter from the early adopters to the masses. What sort of person just read the Da Vinci Code or just discovered the iPod? I was standing in a nice store in a nice suburb and heard one 25 year old explain to a 30 year old what gmail was… it’s so easy to assume that everyone already gets it.”

— Part of the answer to one of ten questions Hugh Macleod posed to Seth Godin