After a long hot summer, we are pleased to announce that we are ready to roll. The newsroom is fully operational in time for the students’ arrival.

Get ready for the next generation of news coming to you soon.

Quincy Smith comes right out and says it at the Web 2.0 Summit this week. From Eric Savitz blog on Barron’s Online…

Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive, said on a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week that he does not see the Internet as cannibalizing broadcast television. He contends that allowing clips to sit on the Internet actually drives more people to watch shows live or on demand or on their DVRs. His example is a recent YouTube clip of David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton, which was recently one of the most viewed things on the site. Rather than take it down, he says, the company embraced it as driving more viewership of the show.

We agree whole heartedly and Quincy’s point is essential to the business model of our new start up we begin to raise money for in the next few weeks.

Fair use copyright law allows for brief samples of copyrighted works to be used for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. Yesterday, I wrote the talented and smart Larry Lessig to ask him a fair use question and he quickly and kindly wrote me back this morning. The project I am researching involves content analysis of television network news coverage. To briefly summarize his thoughts, Larry felt the scenario I proposed should be protected by fair use but that most of the industry does not. Multi-source journalism benefits the industry and the user.

It would greatly benefit copyright holders to loosen their tight grip on their copyrights. Yahoo’s Jumpcut could allow users to create mashups using a list of copyrighted Top 40 songs that artists have made freely available to Jumpcut users – the artist will greatly benefit from the user-generated and user-distributed content. Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” cut to footage of hurricane Rita’s terrible damage to New Orleans is a perfect example. It’s been two years and I still see Karmagrrrl’s video when I hear the song. And yes, I bought the song. Sampling sells.

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a dinner held by the prestigious Capital Research and Management Company. With all the blogging about technologies, media companies and stocks it is certainly interesting that few bloggers ever mention CRMC. CRMC has been responsible for some of the most successful investments in media and technology. They often hold the #1 or #2 top position of institutional holdings at Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, TimeWarner, Microsoft and IAC. Click through on the links – think numbers like 512 million shares of Microsoft and 84 million shares of Yahoo. The people I met last night were warm, smart and very kind – they are also likely the smartest and most powerful folks in the room. Tech and media journalists often show up, take silly sideways pictures of posing CEO’s and fawn over or slam the executive team with little understanding that it is the big shareholders who decide whether the senior exexutives and their strategies stay or go. Hats off to CRMC’s investments and their smart, humble and low key profile.

Yahoo! is underrated.

The web is filling up with how to fix Yahoo! articles – some technical, some managerial – most, including myself, believe Yahoo! can do it. It is great that co-founder Jerry Yang has stepped up to the challenge suggesting the next 100 days are critical. Successful turnarounds that I have been part of involved bringing in passionate outside talent as well – they often can implement the tough decisions that will lie ahead for Yahoo!.

Audiences and advertisers will be better served by several firms vying for their attention and business. C’mon Yahoo!, we are rooting for you.

Advertising based on attention, like TV advertising, is losing the game. CNN has a constant barrage of ads for DiTech, eHarmony, Cialis, Head On…what does that say about their audience? Broke, lonely, impotent guys with a headache – yikes! Advertising based on intention, like the online ad networks, is based on the user’s specific interests and presents itself in context with the pages s/he is interacting with. By inviting, rather than interrupting the audience, an advertiser has a much better chance of creating a customer – essential in the monetization of video online. Pre-roll is traditional media interruption/attention methods bolted on to a new, intention-focused media environment – YouTube’s recent integration of related videos into their embedded player is a solid step in a positive direction.

Two big events happened last week, The San Francisco Chronicle announced cutting 25% of their newsroom staff (as well as several managers) and Microsoft announced their $6B (yes, that is a “B”) acquisition of Aquantive.

During the late 80’s/early 90’s while working for a company called, believe or not, “Multimedia, Inc.” (they owned several newspapers, tv stations, cable systems and tv programming), I spent a lot of time doing my best Elmer Gantry impression exclaiming, “The Internet is coming, the Internet is coming” – the newspaper industry, for the most part, sat on their hands.

Microsoft is good at playing catch up, but $6 billion for Aquantive? Google’s pioneering ship has sailed and when you look at a pie chart of Google’s overwhelming search/advertising market share it looks a lot like a Pac Man icon closing it’s mouth and winning the game.

A good piece on building a web site and an audience from Search Engine Land.