Jessica Guynn - FishbowlLA

LA Times Expresses Its Condolences to the Greeting Card Industry

Richard Horgan — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:00:23 +0000

In the form of a pair of November 24 posted articles by reporters Rosanna Xia and Jessica Guynn, the LA Times essentially sent the greeting card industry the equivalent of a prank item. Watch out for the carving knife and don’t trip over the bone-chewing dog on your way out, the paper might as well have written.

Turkey doomsday Exhibit A was titled “Internet to Greeting Cards: Sorry for Your Sales Loss”, while Exhibit B came with the equally concerning headline, “New Smartphone Apps Let Users Create and Send Greeting Cards.” However, despite a steep decline in annual U.S. Christmas season greeting cards, there are still a few glimmers of hope. Per Xia’s piece:

“The biggest change we’ve noticed is that more people are now willing to buy a $3 to $5 paper product online,” said Susan January, president of the Greeting Card Assn. “For a long time, greeting cards were considered a personal tangible experience–people felt like it was a product you had to hold and choose in person. You actually had to feel the card.”

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LA Times Posts Snapshot of Instagram Co-Founder

Richard Horgan — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:00:26 +0000

Are you ready to be sickened? It took 27-year-old Kevin Systrom (pictured) and a colleague just eight weeks to put together Instagram, the online platform that enables Apple device users to share digital photos. In short order, the service has attracted five million users and $7.5 million in venture capital.

Via boxed out profile put together by San Francisco based LA Times technology reporter Jessica Guynn, Systrom also proves that indoor summer camp electives can be as key for future tech nerds as those outdoor basketball workouts are for fellow would-be future NBA stars:

Systrom came to appreciate digital photography after taking a Photoshop software class at summer camp. Photography remained a hobby while Systrom attended Stanford University. There he created a service called Photobox, which caught the attention of Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg and one of his top lieutenants, Adam D’Angelo.

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Hollywood Thinks Twitter Could Predict BO

Tina Dupuy — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:54:37 +0000

There’s a story in the LAT about Silicon Valley nerds who think they can more accurately predict how movies will do by the tweets about the films.

Jessica Guynn and John Horn write:

Want to know how “Clash of the Titans” will fare at the box office this weekend?

Check Twitter.

So say two Silicon Valley researchers who claim they have discovered a way to use the popular social media service to gauge real-time interest in movies and accurately predict how they will perform at the box office on opening weekend.

Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, two social computing scientists at HP Labs in Palo Alto, contend that computational formulas using Twitter feeds can predict with as much as 97.3% accuracy how a movie will perform in its first weekend of release.

That’s all fine. But according to some other number crunchers, the average Twitter user is a 39.1 year old – 65% of Twitter users are over 35. And the age group who’s most likely to go to the movies? Not them. It’s 12-24 year olds making up the bulk of the seat filling.

So this new Twitter “oracle” thing will work if they track which movie the Twitter users are dropping their kids off at.

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Newspaper Blogs Most Popular List by Simon Owens

Tina Dupuy — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:06:09 +0000

Media blogger, Simon Owens over at Bloggasm…how can we put this gently…has a lot of time on his hands? In a good way…he could be putting his time toward something destructive…more so than media blogging…

Anyway, he ranked the top 50 newspaper blogs:

To determine this, I combed through the hundreds of blogs at the top newspaper sites and calculated each of their Technorati rankings. A Technorati ranking is based on the number of inbound links from separate blogs in a six-month period, and is a decent indicator of a blog’s popularity. Once I determined the rankings, I ordered them from popular to least popular. Below, you will find the 50 most popular newspaper blogs.

LA Times has nine in the top 50. In the top half are Andrew Malcolm and Johanna Neuman at Top of the Ticket, group blog LA Now, Alana Semuels, Alex Pham, Chris Gaither, David Sarno, Jessica Guynn, Jim Puzzanghera, Jon Healey, Mark Milian, Michelle Maltaisare at Technology and Sal Morgan and Elizabeth Snead at Dish Rag. Now when you see these people at cocktail parties you can intro them as a ‘high ranking blogger’ and see if they won’t try and correct you. Email us if they do.

Whole list is here.

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LAT In 90 Seconds

Greg — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:04:11 +0000

50 Cent: Not the rapper, the price tag. In the face of cuts and other awful things, Steve Lopez reminds readers what they’re getting for 50 cents: “Although that money doesn’t buy you the same-size staff that was in place when I arrived seven years ago, those two quarters still buy you the biggest, best, most ambitious news-gathering operation west of the Hudson River.”

In Demand: Want to know how to make money off of articles, images and videos? Richard Rosenblatt, a guy you’ve probably never heard of, figured it out. “With blinding speed and little notice, Rosenblatt’s 2-year-old Demand Media Inc. has become one of the largest buyers of articles and video clips for the Web. It expects revenue of nearly $200 million this year and, more surprisingly, a healthy profit.”

YouTube, YouWin!: From Jessica Guynn: “Google said late Monday that it has reached a deal with Viacom to protect the privacy of tens of millions of YouTube viewers. A judge had ordered Google, YouTube’s corporate parent, to hand over user data as part of the $1-billion copyright infringement case brought by Viacom.”

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LAT In 90 Seconds

Greg — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:46:36 +0000

Power To The Bloggers: Jessica Guynn profiles TechCrunch creator/blogger Michael Arrington who “decided to parlay his considerable clout into a different kind of currency. He thrust Silicon Valley onto the national political scene in December when he took the unusual step of mounting a campaign of his own: a ‘tech president primary.”

Tell Us All About It: Wanna know what LAT reporter Michelle Quinn thinks of the new iPhone? She doesn’t hide much with this lede: “Apple Inc. is giving iPhone customers more for less.”

Memorial Service: From the obit page (we think — it’s hard to tell online): “A memorial service for writer Elaine Dundy, a novelist and memoirist who wrote about her stormy marriage to critic Kenneth Tynan and their life among the rich and famous, will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday at Pierce Bros. mortuary, 1218 Glendon Ave., Westwood. Dundy died of a heart attack May 1 at her Los Angeles home. She was 86.”

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We (Heart) LAT Tech Geeks

Greg — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:33:34 +0000

The PR department at the L.A. Times just sent us an e-mail (see below) promoting the Business Section’s new blog — as if we needed the introduction!

We have already become addicted to the musings and findings of Alex Pham, Chris Gaither, Joseph Menn, Michelle Quinn and Jessica Guynn.

From schadenfreude (or to use a newspaper term “breaking news”) about Henry Nicholas‘ indictment to that YouTube-as-marketing-tool issue we told you about yesterday, Technology never seemed so … digestible. (We were going to say “cool,” but then we’d lose our spot in the Mean Girls clique.)

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