“A lot of experienced news people — whether broadcast or print — feel like they’ve been baited and switched, that they were trained and hired to do one thing but are now being required to do something else. That’s understandable, but it’s also completely irrelevant.”
— Terry Heaton
“An Apple patent reveals that the company is working on a podcast aggregator that would dynamically collect the news that you are interested in and deliver a personalized news podcast. In other words – Apple wants to be your news and information station. The system would allow you to:
* Subscribe to and personalize a podcast with software like iTunes;
* Select news segments selected from a variety of categories; and
* Automatically download the personalized podcast to your Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.The custom news show could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day’s national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN.
Once you select the playlist of content that you’re interested in, Apple’s servers would request the latest podcast content from content creators, stitch the segments together and then deliver the personalized podcast to iTunes or other podcast software. As part of this process, Apple could insert targeted advertising dynamically.” – Apple Insider via Podcasting News
Hmmm. A listener in the states served by our networks could include one of our 4 minute state newscasts, a three minutes sports report and a farm report. That “stitching segments together” part is what I find intriguing. Terry Heaton wrote about the “unbundling” of media. Is this a “re-bundling” of media?
If I were programming a local radio station, I’d be damned sure I had a killer local newscast/podcast up on iTunes.
Google News now allows you to localize a section of the stories. Scroll down just beneath the fold for the box to type in your city or zip code.
“This is pretty huge, folks, and it spotlights the need for everybody in the local news business to adopt best practices when it comes to unbundled distribution,” writes Terry Heaton. True enough, as Google News ranked #9 in Nielsen-Netratings for December — higher than USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com.
If you’re a local news guy and look at this and say, “Ah, but they missed some stories!” … you’re missing the point.
Terry Heaton speaks to the “accuracy” of stories reported online. His case in point was the early –and inaccurate– report that Heath Ledger died in the apartment of Mary Kate Olsen.
“What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.
So a part of the “process” of news is mistakes, and the ethical question is does it matter in a world of news-as-a-process? I’m not so sure it does, as long as mistakes are corrected — just as, I might add, they are corrected in the news gathering process in professional newsrooms.”
From Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog:
"Advertiser Perceptions latest survey of 2,047 ad executives (published twice yearly) — as published by Online Media Daily — reveals growing pessimism among ad buyers about traditional forms of advertising. I view this study as significant, because it speaks directly with people who are making decisions about spending money."
Only newspapers face a smaller increase and larger decrease than radio? [Emphasis/red from original post]