News and Information

MySpace has launched several major initiatives this election season to get younger voters involved in the political process. It formed MyDebates.org in partnership with the Commission on Presidential Debates, conducted a poll with NBC News and the Wall Street Journal Online geared toward younger voters, and is working with major voter registration groups like Rock […]

The Wall Street Journal publishes 25-30 videos a day, and the majority of them are produced by the paper’s reporters, according to Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray. As part of a strategy to integrate online video with the reporting, The Journal trains reporters on a regular basis in New York and San Francisco to use […]

Third party presidential candidate Ralph Nader isn’t getting much television exposure, but he has 2 percent support of likley voters according to yesterday’s Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll.  Could it be that alternative media, including online video shows, might be helping his cause? Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Obama Girl herself is helping him?

Eat the Press editor Rachel Sklar will be leaving The Huffington Post after the election to work on her book, according to a report on Gawker today. Andy interviewed Sklar at the TimeWarner Politics 08 summit earlier this week about online video at The Huffington Post and expansions underway at the site.

Yahoo service BuzzTracker's "Most Blogged" feature, which tracks the most linked-to blog posts on the Internet, has been incorporated into the Beta version of the Yahoo News page, Yahoo News General Manager Alan Warms says in this interview. Yahoo acquired BuzzTracker last year, which Warms founded, and is tracking posts from 90,000 blogs with its […]

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer told Andy at the TimeWarner Politics 08 Summit that he keeps his opinions out of The Situation Room. “I’m sort of an old-school, serious, hard news reporter who likes to do the news in a responsible way and not necessarily showcase my opinion, but to try to get some information out […]

TheWashingtonPost.com broke its own traffic record in September, receiving nearly 12 million unique visitors and surpassing USAToday.com to become the second largest newspaper site on the web, according to numbers released by Nielsen today. The New York Times holds the number one spot.

CNN has planned an online experience that complements rather than reproduces the televised broadcast of the presidential debates, according to Alex Wellen, Deputy Political Director of CNNPolitics.com. As more and more viewers are watching the broadcast with their laptops close at hand, real-time reactions from CNN analysts, the People Meter, and scorecards have become an […]

NEW YORK — YouTube and PBS have put in place a joint program to solicit, organize, stream and broadcast user-generated video from polling places around the nation on election day, November 4.  The program is called “Video Your Vote.”

Big media companies need to stop imitating traditional television formats in online video, according to BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis. There’s no reason to do stand-ups and b-roll when the Internet provides the opportunity to reinvent the entire format, he says.

The theme of women in power has played a central role in media coverage this election, according to Rachel Sklar, editor of The Huffington Post’s Eat The Press page. Sklar spoke on a panel at the TimeWarner Politics 08 Summit today called “Playing Politics with Gender – Media, Candidates, and the Majority Vote.”

When a candidate says something that is incorrect, pointing it out to the viewers isn’t partisan, according to Campbell Brown, anchor of CNN’s Campbell Brown: Election Center. “If I don’t [point it out to my viewers], I’m insulting their intelligence, and I’m not comfortable with myself, because I’m ignoring something that is clearly factual and […]

Barack Obama and John McCain weren’t the only ones battling it out during Tuesday’s town hall-style debate: CNN Digital Network vied with msnbc.com and other major players for the most unique visitors. CNN came out on top, the company announced today, generating 8.3 million uniques and 67 million total minutes spent on the site. CNN […]

Competition is growing in the enterprise Twitter market: Austin-based start-up QikCom, which announced its closed beta launch today, adds some fresh ideas to the concept that won competitor Yammer the top prize at TechCrunch50.

User-generated content plays a central role in National Geographic’s dynamic multimedia platform, Senior VP for online content development Rob Covey told me at the Omma Global conference last month. Users can now share their own videos on the user-generated video hub Everyday Explorers, built with online community builder KickApps and recently launched in beta.

The New York Times announced today that it has launched a new widescreen video player, a redesigned video library and a “most viewed” feature. Brightcove 3, the new Brightcove technology, powers the player.

People-powered news site Newsvine has seen enormous growth since its acquisition by msnbc.com last year, receiving 963 percent more registrations and 269 percent more unique visitors, msnbc.com has told Beet.TV. I interviewed CEO Mike Davidson about the Seattle-based social news platform at the Omma Global conference last month.

Alice Schroeder’s biography "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," released September 29, became an immediate bestseller. PR firm CJP Communications recently launched the first two segments of an eight-part online documentary series it produced, "Shaping ‘The Snowball’: Alice Schroeder on the Oracle of Omaha", to give a behind-the-scenes look at the making […]

Thomson Reuters announced commercial options for its sophisticated metadata generation service Open Calais at the EmTech08 conference last week. Andy interviewed Tom Tague, Vice President of Solutions for Thomson Reuters, about the service and its implications for the semantic web. 

The Washington Post, the newspaper publisher which has lead the industry in integrating online video, has registered a record 1.4 million video views in September, up some 162 percent over last year, according to internal numbers released this morning.