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.

Decent synopsis of online reading versus offline reading – see if you can guess who said it:

“So reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being a run of prints where many of the readers will find it completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats.

In fact, the only drawback of the digital form are the things associated with the device, how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior.

Today for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print, but as the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.”

There are improvements to be made for online reading – I currently have four Firefox windows open and 32 tabs open as I am in heavy research mode – but I do almost all of my reading online. The quote came from Bill Gates and was delivered at the Microsoft’s Strategic Summit – this sounds like something Gates could have said years ago – he said it yesterday.

In 1999, I joined Ask Jeeves with the goal in mind of answering people’s questions. After all, I embraced the information theory that a more informed public will make better decisions. Since studying media management in graduate journalism school, I have tried to help the public become more informed using new media. So how have we done?

Two days ago, I read the Pew Study of “What American Know 1989-2007″ a gut wrenching study that says despite 24 hour cable news, the internet, blogs, rss and everything else…”Since the late 1980s, the emergence of 24-hour cable news as a dominant news source and the explosive growth of the internet have led to major changes in the American public’s news habits. But a new nationwide survey finds that the coaxial and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news audience behaviors have had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs.”

We must do a better job and progress is being made with social media and the great work Google, Yahoo and others are making with search. While we have made information much easier and convenient to find and discover – we have not made it easier to retain. That is where “save” and “share” will help people after they “search”. In fact, with the giant increase in information, content and advertising since the 1980s it is somewhat remarkable that the numbers have not gone down. That said, we still have a lot of work to do. The survey and methods are not flawless but it is worth a read.

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

A week or so ago I attended the “Future of Entertainment” conference at Stanford’s Graduate Business School. The panels were interesting and I particulary enjoyed the comments from Digg’s CEO. There is a business opportunity at Digg that has yet to be realized and I hope they get there before StumbleUpon, Delicious or others do – email me Digg if you want to discuss. Most interesting was the keynote from Kevin Tsujihara, President, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group. Kevin totally gets the intersection of media and technology. With Walmart, Blockbuster, Netflix, Amazon and Apple all taking a slice of the profits from the studios and the networks – what prevents them from calling up Cisco or IBM and placing an order for a full featured, end-to-end digital distribution system? History tells us that every time a content provider can find another distribution window to monetize their content then more money is made – what’s stopping them now?