Media Life
Long-suffering fans of the quirky comedy “Scrubs” are likely to get some good news in the weeks ahead. According to Media Life, NBC is now likely to renew the show for a sixth season. This was not a foregone conclusion as recently as a month or two ago. However, with the fecklessness of NBC's prime-time lineup, observers are betting that network's programming executives will go with “Scrubs”--which has always been barely so-so in the ratings--rather than roll the dice on something new and untested. “Scrubs” has never had a locked-down timeslot during its entire run on NBC, and viewers …
MartketWatch (free registration required)
Maybe he's being a party-pooper, but Jon Friedman doesn't think so. A long-time fan of CNBC, he believes a viewer contest currently under way in connection with the channel's popular Squawk Box show will undermine audience respect for NBC Uni's business unit. Friedman believes this couldn't come at a worse time: Not only is CNBC a comparatively small operation in terms of total audience, but it is very likely to be greeted sometime this year by a brand-new competitor from Fox News. Friedman: "I contend that CNBC is playing a dangerous game by messing with its image as a serious …
CNNMoney
It seems a little inside-baseball for a consumer site, but CNNMoney's does a nice job of fleshing out the coming TV upfronts, saying ABC is best positioned to negotiate top rate increases. However, the point that writer Paul La Monica most stresses here is that all of TV is at a point where it finally has no choice but to confront the new, transformative technologies: DVRs, podcasts, online downloads. Time-shifting of television content has the very real possibility of undermining the entire nature of the medium's advertising model. But not yet. That seems to be the prevailing POV in the …
Journalism.co.uk
It's one of those assertions generally whispered in quiet corners at cocktail parties, not spoken of publicly. But this week an industry leader stepped before a crowd of fellow professionals and said it aloud: Owners of big media companies tend to be too old to fully understand and appreciate the vitality of new technologies. Rupert Murdoch's recent high-tech conversion to the contrary, Fru Hazlitt, of Virgin Radio, told a media gathering in the U.K. that it's "bollocks" that media owners can better understand technology by observing their consumers, and she quoted Henry Ford: "If I listened to my customers, I …
USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review
Given newspapers' urgency to adapt fresh reader-grabbing strategies, and in view of the blogosphere's explosive growth, Dave Panos, CEO of a company called Pluck, seems to have stumbled across a "duh" idea. Pluck, just launching, syndicates blog material to newspapers. This has been done before, of course, but never on so broad a scale. And there is a difference between Pluck and those outfits that have tried to syndicate blogs in the past. First of all, the company will not confine content to political topics. Everything from food to technology to sports will be in the mix and available …
MediaGuardian (free registration required)
In England as in the U.S., magazine executives are dealing daily with the amazing growth of the Internet. It's here, it's going to stay here, and you had better get onboard and figure out how to leverage its power if you're to stay relevant. At least that's the prevailing feeling among industry leaders who are looking to the future. Mike Burgess, the wireless editor of London-based Emap Interactive, this week outlined three key areas of a successful multimedia strategy: community, customization and user-generated content. "Media companies need to stop being like an authority figure and become facilitators," he said. "Integration …
WWD.com
In an unsigned Memo Pad column at the usually insightful WWD.com, the question posed yesterday is one asked by many around the magazine world: Why did Condé Nast kill off Cargo without so much as handing it to a different editor, if only to see if the concept--a shopping magazine for men--had any merit? Troubled, or even tired, magazines at major publishing companies ordinarily will be turned over to fresh editorial leadership. It happens at Condé Nast all the time. But Ariel Foxman, who was Cargo's launch editor, was never replaced. He was with the book until the very …
New York mag
Has America's seeming insatiable appetite for celebrity finally begun to cool? It's a provocative question, even if the answer is a definitive "maybe." And few magazine writers do provocative better than Kurt Andersen, the industry vet who, despite his bleats to the contrary, seems enamored of the celebrity whirl. He's got a fine piece in this week's New York magazine in which he suggests Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Angelina Jolie and hundreds of other pop-culture stars may have seen their best days, at least insofar as magazine and TV coverage are concerned. Andersen: "I have a hunch that the …
Ad Age
With time-shifting growing more prevalent by the day, can TV networks continue to charge advertisers premium prices for viewers who are watching shows on DVRs and mobile devices, possibly fast-forwarding through commercial spots--or skipping them entirely? That's the question increasingly confronting sellers and buyers alike. And now a number of cable channels, spotting an opportunity, are trying to take advantage of the situation by telling advertisers they will negotiate prices exclusively on live ratings. It's a possible competitive advantage in the upfronts, but it also makes for a dicey negotiation in those instances where cable channels are owned by …
New Yorker
TheNew Yorker's James Surowiecki, who writes the “Financial Page” column, takes on the beleaguered newspaper industry this week. He offers no new information, nor barely any fresh thoughts. But still, because he's Surowiecki and scribbles for the most venerated of America's weeklies, his take is worth reading. What he points out is that newspapers are indeed in a slow decline, which is why their stocks have tumbled--even though most continue to make impressive profits year in and year out. Wall Street, however, instinctively bets against industries that are thought to represent the past. That very fact alone ought …