Nov 17th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
There were rumours even before the U.S. writers strike started that it might lead to one of the networks picking up Quarterlife, the new Web drama about twentysomethings created by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the team behind Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, and now it appears that those rumours have come true. NBC, which like other networks is looking down the barrel of an empty TV season, said that it has picked up the show and will run it starting in January.
The show becomes the first to move wholesale from Web to TV, but I predict (as others have) that if the strike continues, Quarterlife will not be the last to make that jump. The major networks have a voracious need for content, and when the chips are down they really couldn’t care less where that content comes from, so long as it fills the airwaves. During the last strike it was reality TV shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted that filled the void for the networks — this time around it’s the Web.
As I noted in this post about the writers’ strike, it’s more than a little ironic that while the Web is the hot-button issue in the strike — in terms of the revenue share that writers want for online content — it’s also the place that writers are going to get their message out, and it has also now become the source of content that is replacing their traditional TV work. As my friend Tony Hung notes, these are interesting times.
Nov 15th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
More ammunition (for those who need more) for the dropping of the New York Times’ pay wall: according to Nielsen data for October, the paper’s readership — in terms of unique visitors — jumped to 17.5 million in October, up from 14.6 million the month before. A rise of almost 3 million uniques in a single month is pretty incredible. Maybe it was all that Britney Spears coverage. Hat tip for the link goes to Beet, which has posted a video interview with Vivian Schiller of the Times.
Nov 14th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
NewAssignment.net creator and journalism prof Jay Rosen’s latest venture just went live: Beatblogging is an attempt to improve the coverage of specific news areas or “beats” by using social-media such as blogs and wikis. In effect, Jay and his team — led by the indefatigable David “DigiDave” Cohn — want to help beat reporters use “crowdsourcing” methods (like Jay’s project with Huffington Post, the political-reporting effort OffTheBus.com) to draw knowledge from various sources.
The list of 13 participants is at Jay’s site, PressThink, and also at the MediaShift Idea Lab site that is part of PBS. It includes Wired digital-music writer Eliot Van Buskirk, a science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, a public-school reporter at the Dallas Morning News, a basketball writer at ESPN.com and a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. The San Jose Mercury News has some thoughts about why it’s taking part.
I think Jay’s idea is brilliant, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. I wish there were some Canadian newspaper reporters taking part.
Nov 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Well, Rupert Murdoch has been dropping pretty big hints that the Wall Street Journal pay wall is a-comin’ down pretty soon — and it shouldn’t be too hard to make it crumble, since Digg just put a pretty big hole in it. As Kevin Rose describes in his rather economical post on the subject (I counted 38 words, not including his name), articles at the Journal will start carrying the Digg button, and any stories that get Dugg will be free for readers who come from the social-bookmarking site. Mike Arrington has a slightly longer post over at Techcrunch.
Nov 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
It seems like everyone is getting into the TV game, but not on the talking box (as Forrest Gump called it) — on the Web. And in some cases, TV networks are trying to take the Web and turn it into television. Good luck to them. Here’s a roundup of some of the news:
— News Corp. unit Twentieth TV is working with Yahoo on a “Web on TV” show, which will no doubt feature the latest hilarious clips of skateboarders hurting themselves or kittens on an icy pond.
— Lifetime Networks is launching a TV-style platform as part of its relaunched website, and will create new shows just for the Web as well as streaming Lifetime content.
— Newsweek says it is going to create a political talk show that will run weekly on its website, and the magazine has hired the former producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC to put it together.
In other media-related announcements, MSNBC’s redesign is live (just in time for Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz to leave and an old friend of mine to arrive) and it has a very cool Ajax-y feature that lets you move chunks of the page up or down depending on your interests.
And in the old-time newspaper world, a number of chains have done a deal with real-estate site Zillow to put their ads on the Zillow site and use Zillow features on their newspaper websites. For more, see this piece of commentary on CNET about newspapers and the classified conundrum, and see Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing for a post on the Zillow deal.
