Tight & Bright: Radio reporters make copy sing. CBS Radio guy Peter King offers great insights into telling the story in the fewest possible words in this Poynter Institute tutorial. King tells interviewer Al Tompkins how he distilled a 250-page report about the Columbia space shuttle accident into this 15 second broadcast:
“Investigators say the root cause of the accident was a piece of foam that fell off of the fuel tank and punched a hole in the shuttle’s left wing after launch. That hole allowed hot plasma gas to seep into the wing during re-entry, and destroy the orbiter. The report says management problems were a contributing cause.”
Will Apple get us to Television 2.0? Eagle-eyed contributor Deep Cuz came across this Macworld piece in which Alan Barnhart says critics of the $299 Apple TV miss the point — the device is built to funnel Web content onto the big living room screen. Here’s a snippet:
“New video content, whether streamed or stored, (must be) as easy to access as the video content on cable, DVDs, and DVRs. YouTube videos are fun to watch if you’re killing time at work. But when I go home I want to be able to turn on my 55-inch big screen and watch British documentaries and my hometown minor league baseball team and Al Jazeera English and lots of other great content that, for various boring reasons, I can’t get now . . . The Apple TV is the first device I’ve seen designed to do that . . . This is about giving me TV choices so compelling that I don’t want to waste another moment of my life on Seinfeld.”
Advertising slowdown? A report on advertising spending in Q1 2007 by TNS Media Intelligence shows big declines in national, old-media buys (network TV down 7.2 percent, national newspapers off 5.3 percent) but big increases in Internet media (up 16.7 percent) and Spanish language magazines (up 14.3 percent). Among advertising types, auto, travel and telecom were all down. The only bullish ad buy was direct response. The total ad spend was essentially flat, Q107vQ106 at $35 billion. I was pointed to the TMS report by Paid Content — which celebrated its fifth anniversary Tuesday. Congratulations to Rafat Ali and the gang.