Moblogic.tv is live today, and our friends at CBS Interactive — the producing team that brought you Wallstrip — really knock it out of the park with an unique, well-paced show and a brilliantly executed website with a big, beautiful (Blip) Flash player and a design that makes sharing and stealing the show easy. We’ll be watching and taking notes - I already see much I want to steal (we’ve been moving in similar directions — check, for instance, the redesigned Veracifier website). Congratulations to Lindsay, Adam and Jeff, who have been working hard on this show for quite a while.

If you’re in Austin for SXSW, be sure to check out Lindsay on my panel, Quit Your Day Job and Vlog, where we’ll hear how she got into vlogging, and what it’s been like for her to make the jump from indie Wallstrip host to producing a daily news show for CBS.

Here’s the first episode, below.

My friend and former colleague, media professor Jay Newell, sent me this picture and article from The New York Times (July 1982) to remind me how skinny I once was. It’s about youth in the then new media of cable television at the company we worked at (now called MTV Networks), and one line in particular struck me as relevant to today’s new media. MTV executive producer Julian Goldberg says,

”Look at those faces,” he said, pointing to a group in jeans and T-shirts. ”At the networks, some of them would be ‘gofers.’ Here they’re directors, producers, they’re in charge.”

It’s true again today, only now it’s also true in cable TV too. Or, as my friend Mississippi Fred McDowell once said, “Here we are again, doin’ that same ole thing.”

Look around Next New Networks, and everywhere else in the internets too.

You can read the whole article here, here, or below. (more…)

It’s no surprise to the followers of Next New Networks that internet television has gone mainstream; 150 million views is hardly “niche.” But it’s interesting to me how quickly the mainstream media has made the transition to covering our piece of the rock like it’s an everyday thing. Today there were two buried stories in business sections of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, mentioning internet TV as just another story to be covered. The Times trumpeted the value of the web (and YouTube in particular) for Superbowl advertisers, while the Journal bemoaned the slowness of advertisers to climb on board (hear, hear). Only a year ago the idea of launching a political campaign with an online spot was the hottest thing since sliced bread.

No big point here, but it’s fun to realize how fast the right ideas integrate themselves into our lives as if they were there all along.

I started reading Ken Auletta’s wonderful books at the suggestion of my lifetime friend Nick Moy and have never been disappointed, especially as he switched his beat over towards media, my consuming interest. It’s rare to find a thorough reporter who’s also a compelling writer. So I was more than flattered when Herb suggested Ken talk to me about a future book he’s planning. Afterwards I walked him over to meet David Karp, someone who knows a lot more than I do.

Globo reporter Lilía Teles in the Next New Networks studio

Reporters from Globo, Brazil’s largest TV network (and one of the largest TV networks in the world, watched by 80 million people daily) visited the Next New Networks offices yesterday and aired a segment about Barely Political on their national news broadcast (corresponding article).

There’s footage from Next New Networks and quotes from our own Portuguese speaker/secret weapon Ramon De Souza, who produces for Barely Political and other networks.

While the rest of the blogosphere is breathlessly covering CES, Jackson West over at NewTeeVee took some time to highlight the incredible work The Uptake and Veracifier are doing, along with other videobloggers like Steve Garfield and Debate Porridge, covering the primary election season, something we wrote about here last week. Our own Marc Boxser is quoted:

“We are probably, for video coverage, in 2008 … what 2004 was for blogs,” Next New Network’s (NNN) Mark Boxser told me over the phone. Boxser, who manages Veracifier for NNN, further pointed out that the site had the second most-viewed channel on YouTube yesterday, with hundreds of thousands of views spread over multiple updates, beating CBS.

A screenshot of Veracifier early Wednesday morning, already the third-most viewed channel on YouTube.

The great angle in the article is the way everyone is partnering to cover the stories, highlighting an example where Steve Garfield wandered around with a Nokia cellphone, streamed stories live, then Chuck Olsen edited Steve’s footage into a story that was both broadcast live on TheUptake’s Mogulus feed and released as a Veracifier “Ground Hounds” report. Jackson quotes Mary Matthews from Debate Porridge: “It’s not a competition with us,” she said. “[Not] yet, anyway… If [online media makers] go the way of television and the advertisers, and be beholden to the money, then it’s just going to be television on the Internet.”

I think it’s a long way off before things get competitive in the way anyone might fear. If the growth of blogs as news media says anything, it’s that featuring the best reporting and commentary, wherever it comes from, and serving your audience above everything else is the way to win online. And many, including the gang here at Next New Networks, would argue that’s the trick to programming good news content in any medium.

Congrats to Ben Relles and Amber Lee Ettinger and the Barely Political crew for making many year end “Tops” of 2007 lists. Ben brought some great characters into the world this year but none more newsworthy than “Obama Girl”. My favorite: Obama Girl listed as one of 2007’s Most Influential Woman with folks like Hillary Clinton. First, it was the internet, and now it’s the world! Check out some of the lists and related press:

Google: Top 10 Video of the Year
This was selected by Google based on a number of factors.

People Magazine: Top Web Videos of the Year
(Print Ediiton) Obama Girl was top video listed

MSN: List of Most Influential Women of 2007
She was #6 on the list along with Hilary Clinton, Tina Fey…

AOL Best YouTube Moments
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2007/12/18/best-youtube-moments-of-2007/

AP: Top Cultural Moments of the Year
They listed Obama Girl in June section.

Everyone here knows that Justin Johnson is the cat’s pajamas. After all, aside from being our beta colleague (he started doing promos for Channel Frederator almost 18 months before Next New Networks formed) and mentor to us all, he was the defining catalyst for bringing Erik Beck and Steve Nelson into Indy Mogul (aside from being a primary contributor).

But it’s great when others around the media world recognize how wonderful people around here are, like Tilzy.tv’s Josh Cohen has done with Justin. Tilzy’s the only place consistently writing intelligent analysis of internet television (I emphasize the ‘writing’ because, while there are a lot of words spilled on the web, very little of it is actually written well). So, we welcome them into our world with great joy, whether they like what we’re up to (often) or not (sometimes).

Thanks for the Justin shout out guys.

Since all I do anymore is blog our media mentions (I have some other things I’m planning to write about, I swear), I just wanted to congratulate the Channel Frederator team on catching the eye of two of the pillars of New York media this week.

This Monday, our original series The Meth Minute 39 was featured in New York Magazine, which I read every week and never knew that made me, in Dan’s words, a “chic Manhattan sophisticate.” I just thought it was a fun magazine to start reading when you move to NYC like I did last year. The feature was part of NYMag’s “NewTube” issue, highlighting the best of online video, in an article called “The Cartoon is Back.”

And today, the gray lady herself (that’s the New York Times for those of you outside hipsterville –Fred) (shoot, did fred just call me a hipster? this is a pretty old term –Tim) name-checked MM39, Viropop, and Next New Networks (and our friends at The Burg), in Stuart Elliott’s article, “Web Videos Stealing TV Viewers, and Marketers,” which opens with the question,

“Why are fewer viewers watching the new fall television series? Perhaps because they are too busy watching video online.”

We love getting the credit, but of course there are a lot of things making people watch less network television. The fall series aren’t that good, honestly — many of the best ones now come in midseason or the summer — and there are a lot of other options for people, like every past season of TV ever available on DVD at Netflix and Amazon, and games like Guitar Hero and Halo, which are the new blockbusters of our age. Maybe it’s idea of a big fall TV season that’s becoming a thing of the past (our views are way up, for the record) but people are more into consuming and interacting with TV than ever.

With so much going on, it’s hard to take a minute to stop and blog the moments along the way. However, we’ve got to congratulate Josh Marshall, TPM, and our team here at Veracifier, who are having their best week ever.

It all started when an eagle eyed member of the TPMtv team posted some video of John McCain not exactly chastising a questioner who called our possible next President an unflattering world. That video’s here, if you didn’t happen to catch it.

By that afternoon, the video was the top story on the front page of AOL and our channel had racked up about a million extra views — in one day — on both YouTube and our site. To date, there are now over 1600 comments on YouTube, over 15,000 comments on AOL, and the story keeps rolling.

Oh, and especially fun for all of us — all the attention made Veracifier the #1 most viewed channel on YouTube for the day:

What’s especially interesting is that this was video footage the entire media corps had access to; our lean operation with TPM pays a modest fee to get clean access to video footage such as this from some of the same providers who provide to C-SPAN. As we noticed once before with the Rose Garden Long Shot incident, often the key to good TV online is just about finding the right stuff at the right time, and making it more available than anyone else. Great job, Josh, Ben, Marc, and everyone else on Veracifier. (And thanks to David Levin at Brainstorm for the heads-up.)