On Monday, Mississippi Public Broadcasting announced it had dropped Terry Gross and Fresh Air because of "recurring inappropriate content." Mississippi Public Broadcasting shares a campus with offices for the state's colleges and universities, and we have learned that some of those offices play public radio for callers who are on hold. Recently, a caller got put on hold during Fresh Air and heard Terry Gross ask comedian Louis C.K. if he always has sex with his shirt on. The caller complained, the station's zero-tolerance policy for inappropriate conduct content* kicked in, and away went Terry Gross and Fresh Air for Mississippi.
Read more here.
Saturday, July 17
On-Air Radio Endorsements
On-air endorsements may seem hopelessly retro -- more Bob Hope and Jack Benny than iPads and Foursquare. But for a small company priced out of television and most forms of celebrity endorsements, radio offers a good opportunity to build trust, boost brand awareness -- and drive sales. Carbonite, for example, found that visitors who came to its website via radio pitches were 40 percent more likely to make a purchase.
Many stations and production companies are more open to deploying their hosts as pitchmen. That credibility and recognition come at a premium, especially if you want a nationally syndicated host. Fortunately, both local radio programs and syndicated hosts are receptive to endorsement deals that target smaller markets. Packages often include mentions on a host's website and, in some cases, the chance to do product demonstrations at live events.
Read more at Ink.
Many stations and production companies are more open to deploying their hosts as pitchmen. That credibility and recognition come at a premium, especially if you want a nationally syndicated host. Fortunately, both local radio programs and syndicated hosts are receptive to endorsement deals that target smaller markets. Packages often include mentions on a host's website and, in some cases, the chance to do product demonstrations at live events.
Read more at Ink.
Thursday, July 15
Media’s two tribes
IS IT better to take a little money from a lot of people, or a lot of money from a few? In Britain the Times and the Sunday Times newspapers are about to take the latter course by asking people to pay for news online. Paywalls are rising across the media landscape as many firms conclude that revenue from online advertising alone is not enough to make ends meet.
Yet there is a strong drift in the opposite direction, too. For every outfit that is trying to build a premium subscription service, another is becoming more convinced of the virtues of giving away free content. This is not merely a difference of opinion over whether to charge for online content. It is a divide between a strategy based on “up-selling” people to premium subscriptions, and a strategy based on scale and market-share. More fundamentally, it reflects different views about the extent to which consumers can be steered towards the most profitable products.
This crack stretches all the way from newspapers to the film business. The hot issue in Hollywood these days is whether the studios should sell DVDs to cheap rental services on the same day they put them on sale to the public. Television is no closer to consensus. The big media firms are not wholly consistent. The two camps are likely to grow further apart. Online advertising is picking up, encouraging firms that have hitched their fortunes to it.
This lack of consensus worries many in the media industry. Those who pursue scale (and their many allies in the blogosphere) claim that premium strategies are doomed. The other side retorts that the practice of giving stuff away undermines the value of all content. But it is likely that winners will emerge on both sides. Some will find a way of profiting from scale, while others will carve out dedicated audiences and lucrative niches. There need not be a single right way to do things.
Read more at The Economist.
Yet there is a strong drift in the opposite direction, too. For every outfit that is trying to build a premium subscription service, another is becoming more convinced of the virtues of giving away free content. This is not merely a difference of opinion over whether to charge for online content. It is a divide between a strategy based on “up-selling” people to premium subscriptions, and a strategy based on scale and market-share. More fundamentally, it reflects different views about the extent to which consumers can be steered towards the most profitable products.
This crack stretches all the way from newspapers to the film business. The hot issue in Hollywood these days is whether the studios should sell DVDs to cheap rental services on the same day they put them on sale to the public. Television is no closer to consensus. The big media firms are not wholly consistent. The two camps are likely to grow further apart. Online advertising is picking up, encouraging firms that have hitched their fortunes to it.
This lack of consensus worries many in the media industry. Those who pursue scale (and their many allies in the blogosphere) claim that premium strategies are doomed. The other side retorts that the practice of giving stuff away undermines the value of all content. But it is likely that winners will emerge on both sides. Some will find a way of profiting from scale, while others will carve out dedicated audiences and lucrative niches. There need not be a single right way to do things.
Read more at The Economist.
Sunday, July 11
High-Tech News War
Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are redefining the online news experience, but in diverging ways that underscore the evolving identities of the search giants. Last week, Yahoo unveiled the Upshot, a blog created by the Sunnyvale portal's growing staff of editors and reporters, who will use search and other user data to help determine what they'll cover and how. That announcement followed the introduction of a new version of Google News, which allows users to customize the content they see, but leaves the writing and editing to others.
"It reaffirms the fact that Yahoo is trying to be a media company, have its own content and keep people at Yahoo, whereas Google is the opposite," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, a site covering the industry.
Yahoo is already the most popular news site, with nearly 41 million unique visitors in 2009, according to Nielsen. It licenses content from hundreds of newspapers, wire services and other sources, and supplements those stories with links to stories that its editors and search algorithms pull in from around the Web.
Read more at the SF Gate.
"It reaffirms the fact that Yahoo is trying to be a media company, have its own content and keep people at Yahoo, whereas Google is the opposite," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, a site covering the industry.
Yahoo is already the most popular news site, with nearly 41 million unique visitors in 2009, according to Nielsen. It licenses content from hundreds of newspapers, wire services and other sources, and supplements those stories with links to stories that its editors and search algorithms pull in from around the Web.
Read more at the SF Gate.
Owning the News
Facts, ruled America’s Supreme Court in 1918 in the “hot news doctrine”, cannot be copyrighted. But a news agency can retain exclusive use of its product so long as it has a commercial value. Now newspapers, fed up with stories being “scraped” by other websites, want that ruling made into law. Critics say that would extend copyright to facts. It would also be hard to make either regime work in practice.
Read more at The Economist.
Read more at The Economist.
The Emerging Online Giants
The websites of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) account for more than 70% of page-views on the Russian-language internet. Naspers is Africa’s biggest media group, both offline and online. And Tencent is China’s largest internet company by market capitalisation—and the third-largest in the world.
Based in Cape Town, Naspers is nearly 100 years old and is the publisher of the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest newspaper. But it is one of the most ambitious old-media companies anywhere in its move online. It still makes most of its sales—28 billion rand ($3.6 billion) in the year to March—from print and pay-television, but it uses the cash to buy online firms.
Tencent hails from Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Founded in 1998, it had revenues of $1.8 billion in 2009. Although best known for QQ, a popular instant-messaging service with 567m users, much of its profits come from online games and a virtual currency, called Q coins. Users purchase this with real money and use it to buy digital wares, such as virtual weapons to increase the powers of their avatars.
In Russia DST has seen how quickly social networks can grow: latecomers to the internet, many Russians skipped e-mail and went right to social networks to communicate online.
Kindle no threat to college textbooks
The Amazon Kindle has been a hit with book lovers but is not going over well with students in college classrooms. Professors at seven universities around the nation tested the wireless e-reader in a pilot project over the past year. All reported that although students liked not lugging books around, the Kindle posed significant challenges that sometimes frustrated students and interrupted studying. "With respect to university courses, the Amazon Kindle is not ready for prime time," said Ted Humphrey, a professor who just wrapped up his pilot project of the Kindle DX at Arizona State University.
Read more here.
Read more here.
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