Yahoo! Entertainment and Lifestyle General Manager Karin Gilford will explain at Digital Media Summit on Monday how Yahoo! TV grabbed 3 million more unique visitors in April than arch rival AOL Television in April.

Gilford said in a brief chat that Yahoo! climbed to the top of the online television category by focusing on launches of original online shows and working closely with cable networks to promote their programs.

"We’re in a world where everybody has a library of movie trailers, TV shows and full-length movies online," Gilford said.  "How do you rise above the crowd?"

Gilford will give Yahoo’s answer to that question on Monday in a fireside chat with Hollywood Reporter Deputy Editor Andrew Wallenstein.

See Also

• Digital Media Summit

Posted under Uncategorized

Happy to report that Marshall Herskowitz joins us as a keynote for the upcoming Digital Media Summit on June 9-10 (combined with Music 2.0) Most recently President of the Producer’s Guild of America, Herskowitz is also an Emmy-winning writer, director and producer, whose range extends from The Last Samurai to thirtysomething. In her keynote, Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester Research and author of Groundswell,will expand upon the book’s theme of winning in a world transformed by social technologies– a major theme of the conference… Look for other keynote announcements in the next few days…

Posted under Uncategorized

A friend of ours pulled her daughter off of MySpace after she discovered that the girl was publishing provocatively dressed pictures of herself labeled with "slut".

Now we learn of a prominent blogger who was forced to cancel an appearance at eTech in San Diego after receiving death threats. Programmer Kathy Sierra was guilty of no more provocative posts on her popular Creating Passionate Users blog than titles such as "Code Like a Girl" and  the "Hi-Res User Experience" might suggest.

Yet she was forced to stay "at home, with the windows locked, terrified” rather than attend the conference after she received death threats on her site — and even more alarmingly — on the sites of two other respected bloggers.

This is sobering for me. Two weeks ago, I spent two days at the Digital Media Summit promoting the role of media companies in the emerging social media and user-generated content revolutions.

The problem is, some of those users are going to be psychos. And others, like my friend’s daughter, are victims waiting to happen.

I’m not sure how closely the media giants at the vanguard of social media — companies like Fox (MySpace), Sony (Grouper) and Google (YouTube) — have thought through the implications of unleashing the public’s Dark Side. But I hope they spend more time thinking about it before people end up dead.

See Also

• Abuse, threats quiet bloggers’ keyboards

Posted under Uncategorized

OK, we’ve been bragging for years that big deals get cut at iHollywood Forum events. Problem is that journalists, bless their souls, don’t usually say WHERE deals are made — just who made them.

But the San Fernando Business Journal kindly gave our venue a leading role in NBC and Break.com deal.

"Matthew Evans and Keith Richman spent nearly an hour on a Digital Media Summit panel discussing the future of the Internet video market but it was what the two men talked about afterward that was most important," author Mark Madler wrote. "Two hours after the discussion ended during the March 13 event, Evans, vice president of digital media for NBC Universal, and Richman, chief executive officer of Break.com, knocked out a deal at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood to sell an original NBC-produced show for Richman’s Web site."

Thanks, Mark. In return, I’ll attribute the news to you!

See Also

• Mark Madler’s San Fernando Business Journal story
• Digital Media Summit

Posted under Uncategorized

The Role of `Citizen Journalists’

Citizen journalists are creating quite a stir. Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic, says his network of thousands of amateurs around the world represent the biggest news gathering team in the world.

My friend Andrew Keen, meanwhile, believes that many of these people are hacks who give journalism a bad name.

"If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics to commerce, to arts and culture," he writes in his book scheduled for release this spring, "The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture and Our Values."

I disagree with both. I think these amateurs are an entirely new animal. Call it the Fifth Estate.

Recall (from high school U.S. gov class) that there are four "estates" that serve to maintain a balance of power in the American democracy: the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch and, more informally, journalists. Congress nails the President, the President vetos bills, the Supreme Court overturns Congressional votes and the news guys  turn up dirt on everybody. (If they go too far, they get nailed by the courts, too).

Amateurs reporting on events or writing blogs are no more "journalists" than civics teachers are congressmen or Bush critics are Presidents. They’re something else. But they serve as a great check on the other four estates, as the growing influence of blogs suggests.

The reason people get away with calling amateurs "citizen journalists" is because there’s no licensing board to create journalists, as there is for the lawyers who dominate the first three estates. But most of these citizens could no more become reporters for the New York Times than I could practice law. At its best, journalism has clearly defined standards of impartiality, writing style and reporting — scandals and Fox News not withstanding.

Anyone who was at Digital Media Summit last week probably thinks I’m a hypocrite. I moderated a panel called "Confronting the Citizen Journalist" that included Brody and an exercised Keen in the audience.

Hey, a guy’s allowed to change his mind.

Exactly what to call the Fifth Estate I don’t know. CBS MarketWatch columnist Bambi Francisco, who also sat on the panel, has a blog (which this week also focused on confronting citizen journalists), and she’s certainly no amateur. So what do we call these citizen bloggers? I vote for cloggers.

See Also

• Bambi’s column
• Digital Media Summit
• Now Public
• Andrew’s website

Posted under Uncategorized

When I talk to most label executives about the idea of loading music for free onto MP3 players and having hardware makers pay them royalties, they turn red.

"If music becomes a commodity, you cheapen the art form!" they roar (usually on a panel I’m moderating). "Never!"

When I posed the idea of something similar to NBC Chief Digital Officer George Kliavkoff at Digital Media Summit this week, he replied, "Revenue is revenue."

Vive le difference.

NBC and other broadcasters are doing something the labels would regard as their worst nightmare: they’re putting their primetime shows on the web for free.

Why? Two reasons. 1) NBC realizes it’s a broadcaster, and it makes its broadcast money from ads, not content. Broadcast content, in fact, is a loss leader (another phrase music executives hate). NBC is simply returning to its free broadcast roots.

2) Shows on the web are great promotions. Far from cannibalizing NBC’s ratings, the network’s ratings have improved since the content appeared on the Internet, according to Kliavkoff. People watch the shows on the web when they miss them on TV, or at work. Some people who don’t own TVs watch the shows on the Internet.

NBC isn’t averse to making money. It makes money from selling primetime shows on iTunes (not much yet, Kliavkoff sighs). It sells DVD sets and ancillary products and syndicates its shows and…it makes money.

If Apple offered to load a year of "Crossing Jordan" onto iPods (or how about iPhones?) and give NBC a royalty for every one sold, I suspect Kliavkoff would still say "revenue is revenue". (No, it isn’t happening).

That’s something the labels ought to ponder.

See Also

• Digital Media Summit
• NBC Video Rewind
  NBC Primetime Shows on the web

Posted under Uncategorized