I recently gave a talk at Promax, the gathering of media creative folks in New York City. The presentation went well, judging by the response. I'll be the first to admit when the room is "dead." This was pretty lively. 

TV Newsday wrote a good, accurate piece on the session.

A MediaPost blog mischaracterized it.

I realize that, when a news subject doesn't like how he comes across, he immediately goes on the defensive. But hear me out.

Reporter Jean Grillo at TV Newsday  wrote "Rethinking TV Station News Sites." She introduced herself to me, so I know she was there.

Writes Grillo:

The solution, he said, is for stations to create their own separate online company, building a separate site that doesn't even have the station brand on all its sub-sites but is always searchable and sharable.

"The goal is not to use this Web site to drive visitors to watch your local TV newscast," Safran explained. "TV websites are now their own business, with their own sales staff."

In this new world, local online newscasts must take blog-style formats, allowing sales to be made by daypart, with news staffs filing stories constantly, and with the lead story always the most recent story (not always the most serious news story of the day.)

"And don't load up those news sites with promos for your broadcast news."

To summarize: have the news brand extension sites, and turn them into continuous news-style presentations. Build out lots of sites that aren't slaves to the call-letter brands as well. What works as a brand for news may be of little value (or worse) for a niche vertical. Yes - you may be the trusted source for news. But have you ever found a station that thought "nobody trusts us?"

Contrast that to what Wayne Friedman wrote at the TVWatch blog for MediaPost:

HuluPeoria? Local TV Sites Should Abandon Station Brands, Find New Monikers

New media executive Steve Safran said at Promax that the best way for local TV stations to grow in the Internet space is to establish brand names that are not affiliated with their own local TV stations.

True.

"But the road will be a lot longer to success. The last thing they should do is completely abandon the lone advantage they may have left in the Internet space--that of their brand name."

Whoa. First, show me the evidence that the TV brand name is the lone advantage. I see plenty of empirical evidence it is not. What is an advantage is having great local content that is easily accessable and shareable. See: Boston.com. Your TV audience is older than the Web audience. It's also limiting.

(I don't know if Friedman attended the presentation or if he was playing off the TV Newsday article.)

"If a local TV station calls its Web site WahooTulsaNewsie.com, perhaps this might say something to someone. I'm not sure what. But then more marketing dollars and time will have to go into describing what that is, and why I would need to go there as a trusted news source."

TOTAL Whoa.

This plays into the fallacy that we need to spend tons of marketing bucks every time we launch a Website. We do not. Standalone Websites don't. Think of all the great successful sites from the past five years. What do they have in common? No marketing money.

The Web is not TV.

This wouldn't bother me so much if Wayne Friedman would have acknowledged my attempt to set the record straight. I commented on his blog that A) The headline was dead wrong and B) He mischaracterized my presentation. 

When you have a blog with comments, the expectation is that it's a conversation with your audience. You don't have to make any corrections - you can think that the commenter is full of it. I don't tell reporters what to do.

But I do expect a response. And here, Friedman is left wanting. I got no response. And apparently I'm not alone.

Friedman has chosen to respond to commenters three times in the last six months. This, despite an active community of commenters who create threads sometimes 10 comments deep.

If it's a community you want, you need to be a part of it. Blogging is more than writing something and then going away. It's participating in the conversation. It's going to other blogs and having a great debate. My friend Kirk Varner picked up on the thread and added his thoughts. So I added mine on his site. That's how it works.

A quote (and I wish I could give proper credit): "It's not enough to be on the Web: you need to be Of The Web."