As a news event, it hardly compared to the capture of Saddam Hussein. But in January, just weeks after she was caught lip-syncing on Saturday Night Live, pop singer Ashlee Simpson took the stage at
the Orange Bowl and was promptly booed by the crowd of 72,000. The halftime spectacle, broadcast live on ABC, became an Internet classic: Within days a 34-second video clip of the incident posted on
the ABC News Now site had been played nearly 1 million times. That gave Walt Disney Co.'s fledgling news site a boost in the bruising battle with its rivals. "We were a hot commodity among a lot of
younger viewers, the kind of audience that TV programmers want to reach," says David Westin, president of ABC News
Read the whole story at BusinessWeek Online, April 22, 2005 »
