Media Industry Archive

U.S. sees record Internet traffic — Online coverage of the inauguration led to record traffic on news sites and social networks. CNN.com alone provided more than 21.3 million video streams while Facebook reported 1.5 million Obama-related status updates. Some users did report waiting in online “waiting rooms” to view streams and other hiccups. [Source: New York Times] Google...

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As the Bush administration left Washington yesterday, there were no controversial, Marc Rich-style pardons to digest, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any parting shots. According to a story in Broadcasting & Cable, outgoing FCC chairman Kevin Martin suggested “hundreds of thousands of dollars in proposed fines against cable operators.” Their crimes?...

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What qualifies as a reasonable way to measure TV viewership moves much more slowly than the technological changes that shift our viewing habits. So, those of you who don’t analyze the TV measurement biz might be surprised to learn that the networks only just started to count time-shifted viewing of series via digital video recorders (DVRs) during the 2007-08 season. That’s when they...

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The first new media inauguration — Today’s presidential inauguration of Barack Obama may be the biggest new media event in history. There are dozens of ways to stream the festivities online, and many media sites are taking the opportunity to experiment with new features such as 3D photo mosaics, “mood maps” and the utilization of services like Twitter, Seesmic and Qik....

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The nice thing about being The New York Times, as opposed to the Podunk Picayune, is that when you’ve got news about yourself, you can break it and guarantee that it will generate headlines around the world. Or, if you don’t exactly “break” it, since in this case the Wall Street Journal had that honor, you can quickly provide a bunch of juicy details based on unnamed...

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Inauguration day to test social media — Facebook, Hulu, Reddit and other social media services are taking extra measures to keep their sites operational under the assumed rush of Inauguration Day activity. In the past, social media services such as Twitter have notoriously failed to live up to demand on big news days. [Source: LA Times] Mexican Billionaire to invest in New York Times...

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About three years ago, my oldest son introduced me to one of most creative uses of the web I’d seen up until that time, a site called We Feel Fine. The essence of this project is a data collection engine that crawls the web every few minutes “harvesting” human emotions as expressed in any of the millions of blogs containing new posts. These data are then expressed as an...

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With the newspaper industry on death watch, magazines hurting, and radio facing a massive shakeout, the last bulwark of the old media world — television — is beginning to hear footsteps along what Al Gore 30 years ago dubbed the Information Superhighway. A new study by the Pew Research Center polled young Americans aged 18-29 found that as of last month, their main sources for news,...

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CNN to debut instream commercials during inauguration — In anticipation of a record online audience for inauguration, CNN will add 30 and 60 second commercials during online streaming coverage. Currently, CNN only shows a single preroll advertisement before the stream begins. [Source: Beet.TV] Star Tribune declares bankruptcy — After talks between management and the newspaper...

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By now, I assume everyone has been thoroughly drenched in plane crash coverage. (Please forgive the standing-on-the-wing-of-a-plane-in-the-Hudson pun.) Well, try this on for size: last night when I Googled the term “plane crash”, Google News placed two stories about citizen journalist coverage of the plane crash above the plane crash itself. (See screen grab.) So, let me get this...

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