More than 100 students and advisers from 17 states and 30 colleges are coming to Nashville for CICM’s “Future of Journalism” workshop. Ole Miss’ Arvinder Kang provides a Google map of particpating schools. Thanks Arvinder.

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Fascinating story from the NY Times. A good read.

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The Business Beat

For years we’ve heard about the woes of newspapers. The business model is eroding (imploding), blah blah blah.

It’s been fairly quiet on the TV front, but I have no idea why because trouble is brewing. TV has always enjoyed what they described as the most powerful medium on the planet: Video. Moving images. I guess they thought that was enough. It ain’t.

Then newspapers realized they could do “TV” and often do it better than TV and without the constraints of 1:15 time limit for a big story with a fourth of that time wasted with a reporter standup.

Cable and other online channels continue to siphon traditional network viewers.

The networks are hosing affilates by offering video on demand (why do we need your towers in St. Louis when Katie Couric is a click away from the CBS national site)?

And now magazines say they want to go head to head with the big networks with TV shows based on their universal brands (Time, People, Sports Illustrated).

I am very bullish on Time Inc. TV,” he said in describing the new Time Inc. Studios formed last November to develop video content. “We can now compete with television for ad dollars, and [the video] is built into our existing Web infrastructure.

I have an idea for the TV folks, maybe they should start newspapers (punchline goes here).

Full story from Online Media Daily.

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The Business Beat

We’re used to the nasty bottom line news for dailies, but the latest data from Nielson spells trouble for TV too. Even number years used to mean the gravy train just rolled in for local TV affiliates because politicians can’t get enough tube time. In years past like ’00, ’02 and ’04, TV raked in record dough. Not so for ’06. Yes, profits were up compared to ’05 at top markets, but less than 10 percent. Small market stations didn’t fare so well.

Here’s the numbers courtesy of LostRemote. Read ‘em and realize TV stations, like newspapers, are having a tough time.

The New York Times Co. dumped their nine TV stations. I think they are on to something.

Auto advertisers, the buns and butter of TV revenue, are finding better places to spend their ad dollars.

And to add to TV’s troubles, newspapers have discovered video and some, like WaPo and NYtimes, do it better, in my humble opinion, than TV does.

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The Business Beat

If you were one of the kazillion viewers of the Super Bowl and watched the ads, you saw some user-generated content. The Doritos Challenge asked consumers to send in their own amateur video commercial for a chance to be aired during the game. Doritos received 1000 videos.

This was no give-away. The Doritos Challenge was a carefully crafted marketing campaign designed to generate a social networking site. To say it worked is like saying water is wet.

The Doritos challenge attracted 2 million hits on the contest microsite, 750,000 unique users, and 2 million total video views. McDonell called the comments section of the “Crash the Super Bowl” site “social networking at its best”–saying the technology enabled competitors to talk to one another and wish each other well, and invited visitors to comment on the entries. The contest racked up a lot of buzz: One billion impressions, which equates to $36 million in paid media, according to McDonell’s presentation.

So what do Doritos and social networking have to do with you? Plenty if you listened to the CMA/CICM speakers from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Gannett, who said developing communities was critical for news organizations including college media. Readers/viewers want to be engaged, want a voice and want to interact with others online. Those are keys to a “sticky” site, the holy grail of the Web. It’s all about building relationships.

Here’s the winning entry.

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