Give me a break. The conspiracy nuts have "found" an image of John McCain in the opening of a Fox local newscast and are out for blood.

In the animated open, just before the anchors appear, there's a frame or two of John and Cindy McCain. Clearly either a switching error, graphics glitch, or edited in by the poster who admits he was working in Final Cut Pro, the tinfoil hat crowd has decided it's a Fox mind control trick. Never mind that subliminal advertising has never been proven to work. When you want to find evidence of corporate brainwashing,... more »

The last thing holding back the Internet from ubiquity is connectivity. You still need either a wired connection, a WiFi hotspot or a wireless card to be on the Web. This still gives the upper hand to cable, phone companies, satellite, radio and the established forms of transmission.

But what happens if plans for WiFi/WiMax clouds actually happen?

Big, big change.

One of two things will happen - you'll either get free or cheap access on a city wireless connection or you'll pay a company a flat fee.

Once you're truly wireless, the remaining distinctions go away. Internet radio now goes in your car.... more »

Linking to other websites is another one of those Not Done practices in most newsrooms. This is a silly superstition, and one that doesn't grok with how the web behaves. You're hurting yourself by not linking to other sites. Ironically, the best thing you can do is link to your competition. Also - mention them a whole lot on your blogs.

Why?

Let's look back at the old practice first. You couldn't mention the other stations in town. This led to the very, very silly practice of phrases like "another station in town reported" or "at a competing station." Nobody... more »

Five years ago this week, the iTunes Music Store opened. Since then, the music industry has been turned on, well, its ear. When you think about the things that were forbidden until they were compulsory, the legal downloading of songs was high on the list. It was impossible, until it was not.

Now you can get TV, movies (for purchase or rental), podcasts, lectures, games, and - oh yes - music at iTMS. The business has changed, for good. (And for better.)

The record labels could not - and even stranger still will... more »

In T.H. White's "The Once and Future King," a telling of the Arthur legend, Merlin turns young Arthur (then known as "the Wart") into an ant. The Wart finds the ants to behave with an unsurprisingly hive-mind mentality. They speak in what we'd recognize as binary. Ants live a life of work. Their binary language consists of two signals: "Done" and "Not Done." Through these signals, they can inform each other of work tasks, and can form longer black-and-white phrases. The best known of these are the signs above every anthill tunnel entrance:

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MediaReinvent fave Mark Glaser has an excellent report on The Smoking Gun, the longtime site that has done some of the best online journalism all along - simply by posting unfiltered legal and police documents. TSG recognized early on (11 years ago, to be precise) that the Web audience didn't need finished news - it craved raw data and information. By posting mugshots, police reports and other basic information, the site is compelling and often has "why didn't I think to do that?" journalism. Writes Glaser:

In a world of social network widgets, videoblogs and Web 2.0 gewgaws, sometimes it’s the simple things that work best. That’s the lesson of Web 1.0 startup The Smoking Gun, a simply designed site that relies on public documents and criminal mugshots to bring in boatloads of traffic.

If a prominent politician or celebrity has run afoul of the law, chances are good that The Smoking Gun will have a mugshot, lawsuit brief or other document to provide the gory details. New York governor Elliot Spitzer caught with a prostitute? They have her photos. NBA star Carmelo Anthony busted for drunk driving? They have the mugshot. Google Street View cameras going up someone’s driveway? Photos here.

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I just got the coolest service from MLB.TV. I get an alert whenever the Red Sox score or a fantasy player of mine gets a hit. It's not just a text alert - it's a video. Within 30 seconds of a play, I'm watching it on my Motorola Q.  This costs me all of $4 a month.

I also pay for ESPN Insider, and I voluntarily paid the amazingly detailed and obsessed UniWatch - a blog dedicated solely to sports uniforms. That's right: a site just about uniforms.

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The NAB's David Rehr chose to make some (pretty thin) hay out of pointing out that YouTube's tagline is "Broadcast Yourself." Rehr's conclusion was that the word "broadcast" isn't outdated. The point - professional broadcasters are more important, and that the online videos are just broadcaster wannabes. This was the only lesson drawn from YT.

Let's examine the word broadcasting, a centuries-old farming term.

You're out in the field. You can either put down one corn seed at a time. Or you can cast them, broadly, as far as you can throw. From WiseGeek:

During the earliest days of commercial radio, several engineers in the Midwestern United States decided that the concept of broadcasting fit their own concept of radio transmissions. In the same way that farmers broadcast seeds over a large field, radio transmitters broadcast their signals over a large area of reception.

It used to be a hell of a thing to plant the fields. You needed to go one seed at a time or cast out a handful of seeds and hope they took root. Then came along the seed broadcaster - an expensive piece of equipment only for professionals, to be sure, but a huge improvement. You just needed a couple of horses, a cart, and you were out for a fun-filled day of seeding.

This is a story about listening to your customers - whether you're in sales, news or at the switchboard?   You'll never be successful if you don't pay attention to their needs.

There is a sales manager at a TV station in San Diego who always asks prospective sales people the same question - "sell me a pencil?"  He then sits patiently as they enthusiastically launch into their sales pitch - extolling all the benefits of the pencil.

After they've run out of superlatives about the pencil, he asks them the most important question - "How do you know I even... more »

You do them every night - primetime topicals designed to draw viewers to your late newscast - but do they send people away instead?  That's what I hear from viewers all the time in focus groups.

I remember one woman who said - "I think they are a public service.  You can decide whether or not it is worth staying up for the late news."   That's right, while you may feel these topicals are attracting viewers to your newscasts - they may be helping them make the decision to go to bed instead - based on what your topicals promise.

And, I have heard some... more »

If you had any doubt that network evening newscasts are dinosaurs - and totally out of touch with the needs of their viewers - all you had to do was to watch all three of them tonight.  It also made it perfectly clear why CBS and Couric are in last place.

On a day when oil flirted with $120 a barrel, and there were stories of people forgoing food to put enough gas in their car's tank to get to work and back, CBS inexplicably launched into ten minutes off the top of their newscast on tomorrow's presidential primary.  Why?  So they... more »