The Media Drop

Okay, so for those of you who happen to enjoy paying attention to what I’m doing on the Web, you’ve probably gotten bored out of your skull coming back here to TMD and finding nothing of interest for quite some time. That’s what I get for picking up a whole new batch of projects.

After a whole lot of thought and long conversations with people like Thilk, I’m shifting the way that TMD works to go back to some of the core stuff I did way back when the site was launched - namely, interviews of people in “media.” From hiphopmusic.com’s Jay Smooth to former Bloglines dude Mark Fletcher, those were some of the cooler things I got to look into and publish, and I hope to do pretty much 99% of the same going forward. My publishing schedule will be better (obviously) than the dismal zero for awhile that it has been for a month or so here, and I’m hoping to bring in some audio or video for these interviews whenever possible - sobe on the lookout!

All that said, what I’ve really been spending my time on is putting together (and launching, last night), Groomify, a blog dedicated to groom-related stuff for guys, since there aren’t a ton of good resources out there for that sort of thing. It’s not meant to be an FAQ on how to ask people to be in your wedding (though we’ll cover it) or tell you exactly how to dress (we’ll cover that, too), but to talk about all kinds of things that are potentially involved with being part of a wedding, whether you’re a best man or the man of the hour. So please keep an eye on me over there, along with tombiro.com, where I spend a bunch of time, too.

More soon, and thanks for sticking around!

• Pat O’Brien is reportedly out the door at “The Insider.”
• Rafat Ali is all over the story about Ziff Davis hitting the Chapter 11 button.
• TiVo beat estimates of analysts, getting closer and closer to profitability, it believes.
• Want to buy the Weather Channel? Others are bidding, why not you?
• Nick Douglas says a few words about why “big media” shouldn’t be buying blogs anytime. Ever.
• Kevin Roderick has a list of those accepting the initial buyout offers at the LA Times

. [via Jossip]

• PR Week bumped up Julia Hood to publishing director and Keith O’Brien to Editor-in-chief. Congrats, Keith & Julia!

This morning, caught an awesome blockout of ads on the Thrillist New York newsletter for the MINI Clubman. I capped my favorite part of it, which defines a new term, “bootgating,” which is “like tailgating, but utilizing the split rear barn doors of the MINI Clubman.”

Check out The Onion News Network’s take on an FCC decision to let nudity fly on television, but only if it’s Alyson Hannigan.

Reuters’ Peter Kaplan is reporting Monday that FCC commissioner Michael Copps is looking into allegations that a Huntsville, Alabama CBS affiliated “blacked out” a segment of “60 Minutes” on February 24 that contained “civil rights footage from the 1960s.”

Why can’t Slate make its RSS feeds actually go to *exactly* what story I’m clicking on? I don’t want to go to the whole blog I’ve selected, I want to go to the story. Argh. /vent

David Binkowski gives some kudos to ESPN’s “cockatoo” spot, and I can’t help but concur. I had seen this a few days ago, and thought it was a riot how the voting went awry, so to say, but that the end result said exactly what a lot of us who work with consumer generated media all the time say - that it’s not always the best option, no matter how funny it might seem. Head over to David’s and take a gander at his clip.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz this weekend surrounding Prince Harry’s removal from Afghan deployment after that was “leaked,” as some are portraying it, on the Drudge Report on Thursday. Leak or not, some of the issues that have come up are surrounding the British ministry of defense having “urged the media to maintain a news blackout” in that country in return for some journalists having access to him while in Afghanistan right now.

This morning, CNN’s “Reliable Sources” had the Times‘ Washington Bureau Chief, Sarah Baxter, on to speak about the “deal” and what that looked like.

Howard Kurtz surprisingly doesn’t really push too hard on the “leak” issue regarding Drudge, and it seems that Baxter wasn’t exactly concerned about the “carrot” that was used to keep the British media quiet on what had been going on all along. Ethics issue, or are we all just making a big deal about this only because it’s about the prince?

As I was flipping through my Gmail a few minutes ago, I caught an ad featuring “breaking news” from USA Today about a shooting that claimed four victims. (screenshot below)

Thinking that I’d heard the story before, but that maybe this was a very cool addition to Gmail’s RSS clips with new news, I clicked through. As it turns out, it was a story from four days ago that was, for some reason, still up there. While I can understand keeping things like that queued up, I found it kind of off-putting that it’d still be there when it wasn’t actually breaking news. Just my two cents.

• How did I manage to miss Comcast’s admission that it paid people to attend an FCC hearing where net neutrality was discussed. The company says these people were “merely saving seats for employees,” while others disagreed. Either way, it just comes off as odd, no? [via John Gruber]
• The WaPo’s Paul Farhi details how WMAL host Chris Core’s longtime presence on Washington’s WMAL ended on Friday with the station telling him just after his program that he was all done there. The move was part of station owner Citadel Broadcasting’s “massive cost-cutting campaign.
• New York’s Newsday publication is cutting ~120 positions due to “poor advertising revenue,” the Associated Press reported on Saturday.
• The Tennessean’s Don Jeffrey writes that Universal Music Group is set to buy the music assets of Univision.