Kelsey Local Media Blog
Why watch "American Idol" tonight? As an alternative, I recommend that you download the lawsuit filed by MediaNews Group against Par Ridder, the former publisher of St. Paul's Pioneer Press, and son of Tony Ridder, who bolted across the river…
Local.com announced today that it will launch a basic version of its Local Promote service for small businesses. The full version of Local Promote ($39.95 per month) is a tool offered to businesses to establish a Web presence with a…
A new ad serving technology for Internet broadcasters launched this week with funding from Union Square Ventures, CBS Radio and Oddcast. Known as TargetSpot, the technology will allow advertisers to create buy and place their own advertising in online streaming…
It is not especially surprising, but media shift is being accelerated by new devices, expanding media channels, user-generated content and aggregation. IBM Global Business Services tries to make sense of all of it in a new report: "Navigating the Media…
Inside the newspaper industry, the notion of the Web as a Hail Mary pass has never been fully embraced. But last week's earning reports from the major newspaper chains is a bracing cup of cold water. An article in today's…
Knowledge@Wharton published an article Wednesday that uses some Kelsey Group information. It's a mini case study titled "All Politics Is Local and So Are Sales Leads: The Birth of an Internet Search Company." The subject is a company called Natpal…
A new Interactive Local Media Advisory looks at Google’s moves over the past week to continue its march toward becoming a one-stop shop advertising powerhouse across all media. They include of course the massive DoubleClick acquisition and the deal with…
A few months ago, Freedom Interactive President Michael Matthieu said he was "tearing out the infrastructure" at his newspapers and TV stations and making everything Web-centric. Now we see the first tangible results. At The Shelby Star, Freedom’s 15,000 circulation…
This morning, I joined 500 or so members of the San Diego Venture Group to hear Vint Cerf, the tech legend who was instrumental in the Internet's creation in the 1960s. More recently, he's been working as a very high-profile…
For media "old-timers," the annual NAB show is synonymous for where-it-all-happens. Year after year, the masses of media professionals still come, with this year's edition attracting 108,000 people from around the world. I went yesterday, mostly to see how TV…
We all share the grief in the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but it is especially gnawing on me. Over the years that I lived in Virginia, I watched with pride as the Hokies became a first-rate school and…
Whenever a new man moves into my community, one of the mothers in my neighborhood immediately searches the Megan's List database, which is dedicated to ID'ing sex offenders. A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side…
The recently acquired Tellme today announced that it will integrate a new local business search into its multi-modal voice search platform. From the press release: The free service launches today with local business search by business name or category. Designed…
The disintermediation of local media doesn't stop. First, we got Realtors cutting into newspaper audiences (and advertising) by adding all the area listings to their Web sites. Phase Two is going to be the disintermediation of Yellow Pages, if you…
A successful SES New York is coming to a close. This was a significant event for many because it was the last SES show that Danny Sullivan will run. Last night, Danny hosted his evening seminar, a bittersweet event that…
The WSJ is reporting that McClatchy, the publisher of 30 newspapers, is set to be the 12th newspaper publisher to join the Yahoo! consortium, leaving behind Gannett and Tribune, which had hoped to work with McClatchy to build an alternative…
After weeks of rumors that Microsoft was in talks to buy DoubleClick, and subsequent rumors that Google had swept in to start its own talks, Google today came away with the company for whopping US$3.1 billion. This could mean a…
Mobile versions of newspaper and TV station sites WAPsites have mostly been corporate vanity projects, generally attracting just a couple of dozen regular users. But as the demographics for enhanced mobile services have graduated from kids downloading ringtones and…
Between sessions at SES New York, I had the chance to sit down with Alex Vlasto, head of global communications for Miva. The company is moving in some interesting directions, shown most recently by the deal it formed with Conde…
OpenTable, the secretive eight-year-old restaurant reservation service, was slow to take off, with some of its local media and directory affiliates reporting little traffic in its early days (and a competing service, Foodline, basically dropping off the map). But in…
