It started snowing about noon on Friday and snowed until midnight. We woke up with six inches of snow covering everything except the streets (which were too warm to freeze over too much). We all had a great time outside making snow angels, throwing snow balls, and attempting to build a snowman and sled (no hills).
So, no new posts in three months. I guess I went on hiatus. Not on purpose. Just didn't post because I was too busy.
I'm three months into my job at Memphis's leading information source (online or not). So far we've had two school shootings, a tornado rip through town, No. 1 in college basketball play No. 2 and one of the largest mass killings in the city's history. Needless to say, I've been busy. Besides just trying to get all of the details in place on the site. I think it took me a while to get up to speed, but now I feel like I am moving a bit faster and caught on to the pace.
I'll try to post more often. I promise.
Tomorrow I will start my new job as the online content manager at commercialappeal.com the web site of The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis. If you know me or you have read my blog you know that I love anything new online and I have a passion for journalism. At The Commercial Appeal I will have a chance to continue exploring a new frontiers of online journalism leading their team of producers, reporters and videographers in my home town. I love new adventures-- learning about new people, places and things. This is going to be fun!
If you haven't noticed all the promos most of the Late Night TV shows are returning January 2. In most cases the hosts are crossing the picket lines to do their shows, but Letterman's World Wide Pants has struck a contract with the writer's guild. So, Letterman and Craig Ferguson will have writers while the others will not. I'm really interested in seeing how the other's shows turn out without writers. Especially the Daily Show since it seems so writer dependent.
"I was surprised that Time.com comes out in a paper copy"
-Brian Williams, Anchor of the NBC Nightly News (known for his comedy skills on SNL).
In the latest jail break from Union County, New Jersey it's apparent that the prisoner's frequented their local movie theaters (or at least caught a re-run of Shawshank Redemption on TBS) and the jailers somehow missed the movie featuring a prison escape using pin-up posters to hide the hole in the wall.
There are quite a few eye tracking studies going on, but a lot of times it's hard to really put them to work. Christina Laun has analyzed the most recent students and come up with 23 lessons from eye-tracking. Some of the ones that I'm going to pay attention to include...
The Writer's Guild has been on strike for a couple of weeks now and we are beginning to see the results of the strike as more and more network shows finish their season early, never debut the season or go into reruns. Frankly, I'm a fan of network prime time and late night programming and I've been a little upset that my favorite shows are ending their run early this year. Unfortunately, if this strike goes on for a while, I believe we will see the viewer shift away from network TV to cable and the Internet accelerate dramatically. Already, under 30 males spend more time online than watching TV and the elimination of familiar programming will shift that trend to both genders and up the age bracket in the demographics.
I do feel for the writers and understand their demands about receiving more money for the DVD and internet use of their work, but I really do not believe the TV networks are making additional money overall when you include these platforms. The networks overall value is still decreasing from gradual loss of audience, thus the value of the writers work is decreasing as the networks lose audience. If the strike continues, I think the writers are shooting themselves in the foot because the networks will discover that their reality programming helps maintain enough of a audience at a lower cost that they don't need the writers.
P.S. This post has been bubbling around in my head for a few weeks, but I haven't taken the time to sit down and write it down until now. The strike info is constantly flowing and changing. I've found the LA Times coverage to be the best place to get up to date information.
The 15k circulation Shelby Star has developed the Star Car to make provide their reporters with multimedia tools and make their online presence known. The $60,0000 SUV (lower on the page) features GPS tracking, wifi cloud, wifi camera, dash webcams, video cameras, scanners and multiple laptops. For some reason this doesn't add up to $60k to me.
As part of the Today show's ends of the earth broadcast, Ann Curry has been broadcasting this week from Antarctica. I've been wondering how they pulled this off with the horrible weather down there, but Lost Remote pointed mentioned their use of IP video to send the signal. The shoot is using a single camera shot using the Ikegami HLV55 with it’s feed hooked up to a laptop computer that runs Qvidium software to stream live video.
