Local TV or Social Media - What comes first?

Thanks to a friend on my Facebook stream, I'm able to share this video below with you where a few laughs about social media and news gathering are shared in a spoof video by the Fox 4 team in Dallas on how social media might be changing local newscasting. Or vice versa.

The Dallas Observer writes:
"The video's jam-packed with about as much awkward social media name-dropping as you might expect, from the MySpace to the GeoCities -- move over, Tripod! -- to comment on This Modern Media Landscape of ours, all the while boldly declaring that the time to joke about City Hall shootings is now."

It's fun! Share with your parents!

Newsflash! Downtown Phoenix Journal Adds Color Print Edition

I guess print's not dead after all. News comes across today that Downtown Phoenix Journal, the online site that does its best to chronicle and support the growth of downtown Phoenix, is adding a bi-monthly color print edition to its offerings.

Here are the hard stats:
- DPJ Magazine will debut Nov 4, 2010
- Bi-monthly, 20,000 circulation (next issue: Jan 1!)
- 20-page, 4-color book
- Distributed throughout Greater Downtown and strategic spots around the Valley
- Limited time: 6-issue ad rates available

Read more and grab a media kit here.

From their blurb:
"Urban Affair, the publisher of DPhxJ.com, announced a new way to explore Downtown: a Downtown Phoenix Journal print magazine. The publication will debut on November 4, 2010, at the Mayor’s State of Downtown event at CityScape. Since its 2006 launch, Downtown Phoenix Journal (DPJ) has delivered an insider’s view of the people, places and happenings in the Greater Downtown Phoenix area. The bi-monthly, four-color publication is the first product of a partnership between Urban Affair and Phoenix Community Alliance developed to spotlight the community."

This will likely help out those seeking more info on Downtown Phoenix happenings, and will be nice boon to those in PR to share some of their client downtown-related offerings with the DphxJ folks Catrina and Si, who are an altogether good crew.

HyperVocal launches - Internet Sherpas for you

Slade Sohmer (cool name or what?) just launched a new startup called HyperVocal - it aims to be a website with news and info that will do for you what you can't - like sort out the noise and fill in the gaps. Minimizes the crap, essentially. And work hard for your viewership. Or something like that.

In the opening salvo post "Is This Thing On: Meet Your New Internet Sherpas", Hypervocal writes:

"Great. Just what you need. Another website to check incessantly. More noise on the Interwebs. But that’s exactly why we’re here: We sort through the constant noise for you. We do the hard part, the hunting and gathering of what matters and what you need to see. We’re post-partisan Internet sherpas, groundskeepers of rationality, arbiters of reality and pseudo-nonsense. We like to think we know what the biggest stories will be before they blow up and what will go viral before it happens.

HyperVocal combines the best of what’s working on the web into one all-encompassing home page. It’s a news aggregator of what’s relevant and important. It’s a constantly growing interconnected network of blogs from bright, young minds from around the world. It’s an editorial team churning out timely original text, audio and video content about politics, entertainment, sports, culture and the absurd. It’s a community."

To me it looks like a crosscut, news-to-the-bone hotflash amalgamation between Huffpo, Gawker, Politico and USA Today. And that works for me. How do you like its initial offerings? Follow them on Mark Zuckerberg's social network.

Here's a teaser clip they put together:


And there's a NYC launch party tonight if you're there. Good luck to this new site!

Quantitative Easing - Our next buzzword

I'm no finance guy, but heard a fascinating story on NPR this morning called "Quantitave Easing, Explained." Ever heard that term? No, I hadn't either.

Wikipedia dryly defines it as:
"The term quantitative easing (QE) describes a monetary policy used by central banks to increase the supply of money by increasing the excess reserves of the banking system. This policy is usually invoked when the normal methods to control the money supply have failed, i.e the bank interest rate, discount rate and/or interbank interest rate are either at, or close to, zero."

Well, it seems that the Federal Reserve Bank, the commercial banks and the government are borrowing a game plan from the Japanese to ease our troubled economy. The problem is, no one know if it will work.

You can listen to the entire segment here. In a nutshell, NPR explains it like this:

"For almost all of modern economic history, policy makers have used those two tools — government spending or Fed interest rate cuts. That's it. But with this financial crisis, for the first time in U.S. history, those two tools won't work.

Enter quantitative easing, an idea the Fed is borrowing from Japan, which used it a decade ago when it had a similar problem. It works like this.

A big bank — Bank of America, say — has $50 billion in government bonds. They'd sell those bonds if anyone would pay enough for them, but nobody is willing to pay that much. So the bank just holds on to them.

With quantitative easing, the Fed comes along and says, "Hey, Bank of America, we'll buy those bonds for a little more than anyone else is willing to pay." Bank of America says, "OK, great, send us the money."

This is where the Fed gets to use central-bank magic. They pay for that $50 billion purchase in new money. They just invent it. That's what the Fed — but nobody else — gets to do.

So now Bank of America has $50 billion they need to do something with. The Fed is hoping that Bank of America will decide to lend that $50 billion to companies and people to invest or spend. That stimulates the whole economy.

It sounds great. Create new money, get it out there, everyone wins. But nobody really knows if this works. It's still really controversial among economists. It's only been tried a few times and, as in the case of Japan, hasn't had the greatest results."

One commentator at the story helped out with: ""Quantitative easing" is equivalent to "printing money" - it's inflating the money supply and devaluing the dollar."

"Devaluing the dollar...." - that doesn't bode well for us workers. Is it too late to invest in gold?

Are Groupon-type deals good for your business?

There's interesting marketing news from ClickZ today in a story Study: Groupon Unprofitable for a Third of Businesses about a recent study that's showing poor results from 1/3 of companies surveyed that have done Groupon promotions.

And I say - hey that means 2/3 of those surveyed have been profitable with their are happy with their promotion. Indeed they have.

ClickZ's Lisa Lacy writes:

"Utpal Dholakia, author of the study and associate professor of marketing at the Jones School at Rice, surveyed 150 businesses in 19 cities that completed Groupon promotions between June 2009 and August 2010. According to Dholakia’s data, Groupon promotions were unprofitable for 32 percent of the businesses surveyed and over 40 percent of those businesses indicated they would not run a comparable promotion again. However, 66 percent of businesses told Dholakia their promotions were profitable."

More importantly, I think, small businesses that are trying Groupon (and other one-day deal companies like Living Social and KGBdeals) need to really be prepared for the more-than-average amount of customers that are either signing up online or barging through store doors. Lacy adds: "The study also found that the most important contributor to a successful campaign from the standpoint of a small business is whether its employees are happy during the promotion. This led the survey’s author to conclude that social promotions companies need to better balance consumer appeal with positive outcomes for the businesses offering them." (My bold emphasis).

In related news, the founder of Groupon has unleashed to the world Grouspawn, a site "...that awards two $60,000 college scholarships each year to babies conceived by couples who used a Groupon deal on their first date. Mason claims that the company “wanted to make sure that Groupon babies were the smartest babies out there." It was apparently his response to babies conceived during Groupon dates. Read more at this link: