Product placement on TV news

Fox affiliate KVVU in Las Vegas has started putting McDonalds iced coffee cups on the news desk during the morning show.

The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.

“If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.

From the NY Times

CTV starts citizen journalist site

They're a little late to this particular game, aren't they?

MyNews.CTV.ca.

CP24 and the photos they took from Flickr

The Torontoist outlines this story fairly well, with a little blogger editorializing thrown in to get the conversation rolling.

The gist:
-photographer finds man breaking into his house, burglar jumps from window, breaks leg
-photog takes pics of injured burglar below his window, posts them to Flickr
-CP24 covers incident, asks for photos, does not get permission, but runs them anyway without attribution after accessing them on Flickr

It's a fair use issue which is fleshed out nicely in the comments section of the original post.

Take THAT Television

It's been ages since I filed anything away here. My media research has slowed to a crawl thanks to busy days at work and a desire to NOT stare at computers when I get home.

Here's a great essay by John Hockenberry called You Don't Understand Our Audience: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC.

Hockenberry is a former Dateline reporter and takes a strip out of television news with a well-written view of its audienceness.

A Simpsons episode comes to mind. Remember when Uncle Herb was complaining that his engineers were telling car buyers what they wanted instead of listening to them? Get the sense that this is what modern news reporting is doing? Instead of reporting, its tailoring information based on demographics.

Fox Business

Might as well get this link to Fox Business up now to avoid the rush. I'm sure it will be a hot topic of discussion among the media watchers south of the border... and then up here once we can subscribe.

When CNN and Reuters part ways...

Today's New York Times reports on one of the consequences of CNN parting ways with Reuters.

At CNN, No Reuters, or bin Laden describes the process by which CNN tried to cover bin Laden's latest taped message. Reuters distributed it to its other partner agencies, but CNN was a full half-hour behind in getting the footage. It ran archival footage with a transcript in the meantime.

In 24-hour TV journalism, this is a major fumble.

Fox advertisers under the gun

Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network.. Story run on on Marketing's website, fed from AP.

Edit, Aug 1: This is how one AdAge columnist responds to some of MoveOn's tactics. Now that Murdoch has bought the WSJ, they're going to print some false covers with slogan-like headlines to illustrate their point. Ken Wheaton sees it as so much hogwash.

Woefully ill-informed Americans?

Utterly fascinating.

"More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989. Citizens who call the Internet their primary news source know slightly less than fans of TV and radio news. Hmmm... maybe a little less Perez Hilton and a little more Jim Lehrer."

The questions asked were:
Who is the vice-president?
Who is your state's governor?
Does the US have a trade deficit or surplus?
Which party controls the House of Representatives?
Is the chief justice of the Supreme Court a liberal, moderate, or conservative?

Click through for data charts... one of which is titled Daily Show viewers are more up on current events than Fox News fans.

LAPD vs. reporters?

A BoingBoing post that nicely collects facts and footage of an immigration protest that turned violent.

Allegedly...
-bottles and rocks thrown at police
-rubber bullets and batons used on protesters
-reporters attacked and injured

Videos of LA immigration reform rally, posted by Mark Frauenfelder.

UPDATE (May 4)
More links to videos and blog posts, along with a bit of interesting comment from the LAPD on the historical import of the event.

The State of the News Media, from journalism.org

This report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (a.k.a. journalism.org) looks hefty, so I'll shelve it for the time being (the blog allows me to procrastinate so well).

Instead I'll go directly to MediaShift's summation (found courtesy of BoingBoing.net).

The pace of change has accelerated.

In the last year, the trends reshaping journalism didn’t just quicken, they seemed to be nearing a pivot point.

On Madison Avenue, talk has turned to whether the business model that has financed the news for more than a century — product advertising — still fits the way people consume media.

With audiences splintering across ever more platforms, nearly every metric for measuring audience is now under challenge as either flawed or obsolete — from circulation in print, to ratings in TV, to page views and unique visitors online.

Every media sector except for two is now losing popularity. Even the number of people who go online for news — or anything else — has stopped growing. Only the ethnic press is up.

Bad News by David Puner (Good Magazine)

Posting this as a reminder to read it later.

Bad News - Once the definitive voice on current events, network news fights to be heard over new media cacophony.

And wouldn't you know it... the February issue just happens to be media-themed. How about that?

Thanks Doug.