Tangled Web

Here are some of the LA-flavored stories making headlines today on our sister blogs:

Knicks Roll Out Blue Carpet for the Lakers Friday Night
[FishbowlNY]

KTTV’s Lauren Sanchez Goes Skydiving on Live TV
[TV Spy]

California Budget Cuts State Funding for Libraries
[Galley Cat]

Breitbart Lets It Rip on Eve of CPAC
[FishbowlDC]

[Photo of Knicks play-by-play announcer Spero Dedes, formerly a 710 ESPN Radio Lakers man, courtesy @SperoDedes]

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

The overriding takeaway from Ken Doctor‘s look at the radical economics of California news gathering is already obvious to anyone doing the gathering. It’s all about digital synergies.

From Russ Stanton‘s jump to a public radio station on a Tony Pierce-led Internet blog blitz, to the confirmation this week that the Bay Citizen is merging with California Watch, print is warming up the deathbed. Doctor also takes the California temperature of Patch, which currently operates 132 hubs across the Golden State:

Many of the sites are lively, with good features, calendars, and lots of local, if episodic, bloggers–even if the sites don’t come close to living up to Patch’s tagline: “Hi there, we’re Patch, your source for local knowledge you can’t live without.”…

Read more

It never gets old. More than 42 years after successfully sending a message from one host computer to another, UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock (pictured) still occasionally does media interviews about that historic October 29, 1969 day.

The latest reporter to reminisce with Kleinrock is Australian afternoon radio show host Bernadette Young. The professor recalled that the first-ever Internet-like message was LOL… without the second “L”:

“There was one programmer upstairs… All we wanted to do was to log in from our computer to their computer. In order to log in, you have to type L-O-G, and that other computer was smart enough to add I-N…”

Read more

Motor Trend parent company Source Interlink Media has launched a new YouTube channel. Though the channel bears Motor Trend‘s name, it will incorporate content from other SIM mags like Hot Rod, Motorcyclist, Lowrider, FourWheeler, Dirt Rider, Car Craft, Automobile and Import Tuner. SIM is producing eight new shows, including two 22-minute feature-length TV shows–Roadkill and Epic Drives.

“Automotive is an extremely popular category on YouTube,” says YouTube’s head of original programming Alex Carloss. “We’re excited to bring a company like Motor Trend to our platform where millions of fans around the world can tune in and watch some of their favorite Motor Trend content.”

Release after the jump:

Read more

And Harrelson, perhaps smarting from the most embarrassing “Ask Me Anything” in Reddit history, was a total jerk to Vice‘s Annette Lamothe-Ramos. She writes about what she witnessed on the press junket for the film Rampart just prior to her own interview:

Before they went into Woody’s hotel suite, I met the girls who were conducting the AMA. They seemed sweet, so I didn’t mind the additional wait—imagining that they might butter him up with a light-hearted Q&A before Woody and I got down to business.

Ten minutes later, a stampede charged the waiting room, each person whispering furiously and cupping their mouths in horror. I didn’t hear everything but I knew it wasn’t good. The only fragments I could make out were something about “de-virginizing a high schooler” and “really angry.” I immediately broke out in hives and my mind went blank. Seconds later I was called into the next room to chat with a visibly irritated Woody Harrelson.

The interview was not a success. Harrelson was rude, dismissive, and more than a little inappropriate. After a few minutes, he stopped answering questions and just sat staring Lamothe-Ramos up and down. The two were alone in his hotel room, and Lamothe-Ramos was so uncomfortable she ended the interview early.

There’s nothing quite like the wrath of reddit.com users.

As reported today by techeye.net, a Friday reddit PR stunt to promote Woody Harrelson‘s new drama Rampart has thoroughly backfired. In concept alone, the idea of squeezing the former Cheers star’s wisdom into a 15-minute reddit answer window was doomed to fail. Per techeye.net, sailormooncake may well have said it best:

Mr. Harrelson/Mr. Harrelson’s PR agents:

You answered a total of four questions here today, and when I say “answered,” I mean that loosely. You have also embarassed Mr. Harrelson in the process. Please inform the rest of Hollywood that reddit is not a publicity outlet and that redditors don’t tolerate this kind of crap.

Read more

AOL/Huffpost is taking a serious plunge into the video content business with their Huffington Post Streaming Network. By this summer, HPSN plans to host 12 hours of daily weekday programming. According to the New York Times, four of those twelve hours will be produced in LA. Arianna Huffington describes her vision for the new site below.

We promised ourselves we would stop posting these “shit such and such say” videos. But dammit Eric Stonestreet and Bryan Cranston, you won us over with your jalapenos.

The well-worn journalism template of chronicling the rocket-rise to stardom of a YouTube performer gets another workout today via the Wall Street Journal. In this case, the piece is about Ray William Johnson. Since relocating to Los Angeles, the affable comic has racked up millions of faithful twice-weekly viewers and become the most popular attraction on Google’s online channel.

There’s a lot of Tosh.0 in RayWJ’s videos, without the troublesome Comedy Central overhead. But how much the 30-year-old (pictured) makes from these broadcasts remains unclear. The Journal quotes two people “familiar with the situation” to suggest RayWJ earns about $1 million a year. But via email to reporter Emily Glazer, the Oklahoma native hinted at a more modest balance sheet:

Johnson disputed the idea that he is making a lot of money. “I run advertisements and sell T-shirts to cover overhead costs and pay the few people who help me out behind the scenes,” he says. “Anything left over is spent on production costs, animation costs, etc.”

Read more

Looks like Poynter has found its replacement for Jim Romenesko. Director of Poynter Online Julie Moos announced today that TBD writer Andrew Beaujon has been hired to cover the media beat for MediaWire–as Romenesko is now called–and Poynter.org.

Interestingly, in writing up Beaujon’s hire, Moos went out of her way to point out that traffic at Poytner has never been better.

That dual focus brought 483,000 unique visitors to Poynter.org in January, more than any month we’ve tracked, other than May 2011 when Osama bin Laden died. That’s a 76 percent increase in unique visitors over the website’s audience in January 2011. And 25 percent of last month’s audience came between 9 and 201 times, a loyal core of visitors.

In other words: “We’re doing just fine without Jim Romenesko.”