The Wall Street Journal – YouTube said it will begin showing full-length television programs in addition to its shorter video offerings to generate ad revenue.
The Google Inc.-owned Web site said the new program is to begin with shows from CBS Corp., including “The Young and the Restless,” “90210,” “Dexter” and “Californication.” YouTube said it is in discussions with other media partners, but declined to elaborate.
The Web site plans to start selling commercial slots for advertisements that are to run before, during and after full-length videos. The content provider—CBS, initially—has the option sell the ads and YouTube will take a cut of the revenue.
YouTube previously resisted selling this ad format because the Web site feared turning off viewers of its shorter clips. But marketers have been slow to warm to advertising adjacent to the usual user-created videos that make up a majority of the videos on YouTube; some larger advertisers say they would prefer to run their ads alongside more-predictable online video content.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122366964694723851.html?mod=testMod
Categories: Entertainment · Web · You-Tube
What does this say for the future of News – the popularity of Jon Stewart – a fad or something more significant?
The New York Times – IT’S been more than eight years since “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” made its first foray into presidential politics with the presciently named Indecision 2000, and the difference in the show’s approach to its coverage then and now provides a tongue-in-cheek measure of the show’s striking evolution.
In 1999, the “Daily Show” correspondent Steve Carell struggled to talk his way off Senator John McCain’s overflow press bus — “a repository for outcasts, misfits and journalistic bottom-feeders” — and onto the actual Straight Talk Express, while at the 2000 Republican Convention Mr. Stewart self-deprecatingly promised exclusive coverage of “all the day’s events — at least the ones we’re allowed into.” In this year’s promotional spot for “The Daily Show’s” convention coverage, the news newbies have been transformed into a swaggering A Team — “the best campaign team in the universe ever,” working out of “ ‘The Daily Show’ news-scraper: 117 stories, 73 situation rooms, 26 news tickers,” and promising to bring “you all the news stories — first … before it’s even true.”
While the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls “the coolest pit stop on television,” with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests. One of the program’s signature techniques — using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves — has been widely imitated by “real” news shows, while Mr. Stewart’s interviews with serious authors like Thomas Ricks, George Packer, Seymour Hersh, Michael Beschloss and Reza Aslan have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.
Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/arts/television/17kaku.html?ex=1376712000&en=77bb98d839f4b382&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Categories: Daily Show · Entertainment · News
