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More at San Jose Mercury News : “Young Broadcasting Inc., owner of Channel 4 KRON-TV and nine other television stations, filed for bankruptcy court protection in New York, according to court filings. In a petition for Chapter 11 protection, the New York-based company listed assets of $575.6 million and debt of $980.4 million. The company said it has $640 million of publicly traded debt. "Our decision to restructure through a Chapter 11 filing will allow the company to bring its debt in line with current economic realities so that we can emerge a stronger and more financially secure company. It is important to note that we are restructuring our debt, not our operations," says Chairman Vincent Young in a written statement.” -- The slow erosion of traditional media in the Bay Area has started. KRON's first, the question is who's next?

I made this 12Seconds.tv video as a quick response to the Brooklyn (Oakland) blogs assertion that John Russo should run for Mayor of Oakland: on 12seconds.tv

I have to write with more than the usual amusement regarding the postings I've seen on the recently-held " Oakland Blogger Get Together  " because this blog you're reading is the only one that's updated daily, gets more traffic than the others, and doesn't ignore parts of Oakland, and has the only writer who actually worked in Oakland politics -- me.   So, as they do, they formed their own meeting -- an entire "White's only" gathering.  That's sad.  Perhaps I'll host my own gathering, but it will be of a different kind to be sute.  First, racially mixed.  Second, reflective of those who are at the cutting edge of New Media in Oakland, and that's beyond the small group of bloggers that got together.  As I said to Paul Cobb  , there's a "White Blogger group" and true to form, these folks proved it.  And its not as if they don't know who I am; they do and could have invited me.  In fact, that's the problem: they...

Happy Holidays! I'm Zennie Just saying 'hello' to the Seesmic Community! After months of thinking about doing it, I finally did it: contributed a video on Seesmic.com  , Loic Lemur's video conversation venture, featuring my friend Cathy Brooks, who was one of his first staffers. I remember when Cathy was totting around a laptop showing Seesmic at work; that was last year, 2007 at a STIRR Founder Hacks Meetup! Wow, how time flies!

Undercurrents: The Bay Area’s Lack of Local Day-to-Day Media Reporting. Category: Columns from The Berkeley Daily Planet - Thursday June 19, 2008 : “By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor Thursday June 19, 2008 One of the great ironies of these times—something historians in our grandchildren’s time will probably better be able to understand and explain—is that we are experiencing an explosion of information and internet discussion concerning local events while simultaneously seeing a drying up of direct news media reporting on those events. The Berkeley Daily Planet, bless our hearts, has two reporters covering Berkeley city government, and another to cover the Berkeley Unified School District and the various dealings of the Berkeley School Board. But that is a rarity. Across the border in Oakland, no media outlet—aside from the East Bay News Service’s Sanjiv Handa—regularly covers Oakland City Council or Oakland city government, no media outlet at all regularly covers the Oakland Unified School D...

I feel I'm more qualified than most to make this assertion: Mayor Ron Dellums YouTube page channel is a year late and lousy.  Why a year late?  Because I'm the person who told the Mayor's communications staff they needed a YouTube channel, among other things.  This came at a lunch I had last year with one of Dellums' communcations staffers who would regularly contact me.   I had considered writing a proposal for my company to be their new media consultant, but then thought better of it when I realized I may be giving up this blog's ability to write what it pleased unless I contractually asked for it.  Then I also pondered that writing such a proposal may just give them basic answers for free.  So I pulled back.   But over lunch, this YouTube page is one idea I said was basic.  But it's not enough to have one, and there's a lot of problems with the channel. For example the video on Dellums speaking at the Cathedral of Christ the Light has on...

This video presents the "production process" behind the planned use of New Media at the DNC Convention by Sports Business Simulations' SBS Media / Zennie Zeigeist blog. New Media -- DNC Convention Broadcast Objective: to quickly and cheaply bring text, audio, and visual information that generally tells a story to as many people as possible in as short amount of time as possible. Instruments Hardware and Software Hardware: 1. MacBook -- Has "iMovie" software built in that makes editing movies easy. 2. Sony Camcorder -- Used to make videos and feed to computer 3. iPhone -- used to take photos and also to make mobile blog posts which feed to Zennie's Zeitgeist remotely. Software: 1. Blogger -- the online home of Zennies's Zeitgeist blog. 2. iMovie -- used to edit the videos uploaded from the camcorder 3. Google -- used to get information and articles on related subjects that then can be linked to in a blog post. 4. Twitter -- updates on Twitter post at th...

According to today's NY Times , the newspaper industry is in trouble, as papers suffer from competition from the Internet. The SF Chron has been losing $1 million a week since last year. As Tim O'Reily wrote last year, he reads the online version of the SF Chron 95 percent of the time, and the "offline" version about 5 percent of the time. That's probably true for me, as well, but Tim and I are both in the Internet business. What can be done? Well, my answer is "nothing" -- the offline news people have to adjust to this New Media world, as do institutions and PR people who have been oriented toward using offline newspapers to get the news out. This also includes sports leagues like the NFL, which has a long standing relationship with such organizations as The Associated Press, but not the Huffington Post , which draws 14 million visitors a month. The SF Chron seems to be trying to find its way on The Internet, where it gets about 5 million visitors...