Message From Michael -- February 18, 2007

DO IT YOURSELF JOURNALISM
DO IT YOURSELF TV AND RADIO
TV BEING BEATEN AT THEIR OWN GAME
THE SECRETS OF MARILYN MONROE
COCKTAIL CHATTER

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DO IT YOURSELF JOURNALISM: In the San Francisco Bay area, Clear Channel owned KFTY-TV has fired its news staff and is going to rely primarily on viewer-submitted items for its local coverage. Reading between the lines, this appears more of a cost-cutting move than any kind of social experiment. It is almost humorous to visit their website and find one person listed under the biographies link and every story on the news page appears to have been submitted by one other person. For a more serious local version of citizen journalism, a Danish newspaper (Nyhedsavisen) is merging reader submitted material with its staff material in a sort of competition between the professionals and the amateurs. And on a much more serious, and much broader scope, The Associated Press announced a partnership with website NowPublic.com to bring citizen content under the AP newsgathering umbrella. The news release notes that NowPublic.com is the world’s “largest participatory news network” with more than 60,000 contributors from 140 counties, and the AP is the world’s “largest newsgathering organization” with a staff of more than 4,000 employees in 240 bureaus in 97 countries. The AP move follows earlier, similar announcements by Reuters and the British Broadcasting Corporation.And, of course, they’re not the only ones.

The “grand-daddy” of citizen journalism initiatives may be ohmynews.com which originated in South Korea but which now has an English version. Website cyberjournalist.net lists 79 citizen journalism sites around the world. It lists everything from Al Gore’s Current.tv to WikiNews, Your Hub and down to MyMissourian.com, Ourlittlenet in Atlanta and even Blufton, Georgia’s Bluftontoday.com. Most are, as you would expect, amateurish and most are un-paid. But that is rapidly changing as well. Trend-watching website springwise.com says Generation C (for Content) is fast becoming Generation C (for Cash). Examples cited include CNN’s Exchange, Yahoo/ Reuters’ YouWitnessNews, Scoopt along with ScoopLive and SpyMedia which pay for pictures, Reporter in South Africa, and Ohmynews of course. In previous MfM’s we’ve cited all the various video sites that are now paying for content, forcing giants like YouTube to follow.

DO IT YOURSELF TV AND RADIO: It adds a whole new meaning to the term ‘reality tv,’ according to MIT’s Technology Review. It’s called Splashcast and it lets you create your own shows and broadcast channels, viewable on the web. In a previous MfM, we mentioned the website Brightcove.com which allows you to create your own online TV station. The Splashcast version combines the concepts of video blogging with dynamic syndication using the RSS concept. The article says more than 1,000 “publicity-minded users” have created channels offering a selection of multi-media shows with pictures, video, music and text even though the software was only introduced in January of this year. And if you decide you have a great face for radio, instead, the BBC Worldwide reports the development of a software called Campcaster that allows you to run an entire radio station operation off a laptop. You can store and schedule music, line up news clips and interviews and preview before going to air.On a very much related note about the personalization of the web, Yahoo has announced the release of a tool which it calls Pipes and which lets you pick and choose different feeds from the Internet and create your own online program. The beauty of the program, according to the Technology Review, is its simplicity, with an editor and execution engine that doesn’t require you to know C++ or Java to operate. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media online publisher, calls it a “milestone in the history of the Internet… (with) enormous potential to turn the Web into a programmable environment for everyone.” And on a related note to the related note, Blip.TV has introduced a do-it-yourself, interactive advertising tool that lets people create ads to go along with their online programming. Company CEO Mike Hudack says it shifts power from the big-time networks to the content creators. Veoh Networks claims it has the most comprehensive platform for Internet video, providing DVD quality content. Video is uploaded to the Veoh website which then syndicates the video to all the other video providers, such as Facebook, YouTube, etc.

TV BEING BEATEN AT THEIR OWN GAME – VIDEO: Newspapers are actually doing a better job of selling LOCAL online video ads than television, according to research and consulting firm Borell Associates. The company says LOCAL (let me emphasize that word) online video advertising will reach $5 Billion in five years. And, as the company says in its news release, “believe it or not” newspapers are outselling television with $81 Million a year versus $32 Million. Frank Barnako who writes a media blog for MarketWatch, cites video classifieds from the San Antonio Express-News as examples of how newspapers are doing a better job than TV. But he also credits Time Warner Cable in North Carolina for doing it right, producing video advertisements for local merchants at GrandStrandNow.com. (Congratulations to friend and MfM reader Alan Mason, who is GM of the operation.)As a side note to this, research firm eMarketer predicts that podcasting will become a $400 Million a year advertising market by the year 2011, quintupling the ‘paltry’ $80 Million spent in 2006. The research says podcasting, which it called “the hot new media darling before YouTube stepped in,” failed to match the sales you would expect when you consider the proliferation of iPods andMP3 players but that is about to change.

THE SECRETS OF MARILYN MONROE: So, who did the blonde bombshell actress become infatuated with in Mexico? And, no, it wasn’t President John F. Kennedy. I don’t know who it was, but it’s all part of the intriguing 100-page dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation put together on her and it’s one of the many documents you can find on a website http://foia.fbi.gov/alpha.htm. Did you know comedian Bud Abbott showed pornographic films at parties at his house. According to the FBI, he did. He also snuck such subversive words as “kick in the France” into his radio scripts. Olympic medal winner Jesse Owens once sent greetings to the National Negro Conference. There are files on everybody from Desi Arnaz to Andy Warhol, about groups ranging from the Black Panthers to the Ku Klux Klan. It ranges from the entertaining to the strange. For example, there’s a file on Gracie Allen, but none on George Burns. Why’s that? Regardless, there’s hours and hours of entertaining reading.

WORTH NOTING: ABC News with Charlie Gibson has taken over the #1 spot in the evening news race with 9.7 Million viewers, over-taking NBC News with Brian Williams which had 9.52 Million viewers. Now you may have heard that, but a tidbit that was over-shadowed in that news was the fact that the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric scored its best week since the show premiered, with 8 Million viewers. All of the syndicated magazine programs (Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight, Extra) saw a “significant” spike in ratings with their coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

WEBSITES TO WATCH: The owners of WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., Allbritton Communications has lanched a website – politico.com, aimed at – just what its name implies – Washington politics. The site is the focus on a recent article on TVNewsday.com, which is another site to watch. ABC has a similar website in which it tracks what’s going on inside the beltway – http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 64% of Americans support teaching creationism in school. The rock group Queen have won the unofficial title of Greatest British Band of all time, actually beating out the Beatles, according to a poll in Britain. The survey said Queen got a boost in the survey because teen rock group McFly said they had been inspired by the group. The Rolling Stones came in third. The Washington Post asked its readers to come up with alternate meanings for common words. Some of the winning submissions include: Coffee, the person upon whom one coughs; Negligent, a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown; Lymph, to walk with a lisp; Testicle, a humorous question on an exam; Pokemon, a Rastafarian proctologist; and Frisbeetarianism, the belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.