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December 23, 2006
Lazy Pre-Christmas Eve Media Links
A few links before my last-minute dive into the holiday shopping madness:
First, via Michael at Zigzagger, Virginia Heffernan's multimedia year in review, which is pretty interesting. As Michael points out, Heffernan pronounces reality TV, network news, and parent-child bonding shows such as The Gilmore Girls dead, while seeing a glimmer of hope for the sitcom. Related: Heffernan's NYT article.
A mildly interesting AJC article about Ted Turner's decision to purchase MGM/UA in the 1980s, which famously gave the media mogul access to MGM/UA's massive film library, which included Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, and Wizard of Oz, as well as RKO's Citizen Kane and the now annoyingly ubiquitous A Christmas Story (a movie I used to like before it was sampled in pretty much every Christmas commercial this year).
Finally, McChris linked to a post offering some interesting Nielsen Top Ten lists, including a list of the ten most time-shifted shows. The most time-shifted show happens to be Studio 60, followed by Heroes and Gilmore Girls, suggesting that these shows have prestige audiences but that these audiences are likely zapping through the commercials. Scroll down the Nielsen entry for other goodies such as the ten most cited Wikipedia entries (Web 2.0 is number one) and the top ten advertisers in "traditional" and online media (interesting to see where certain advertisers target potential customers).
Blogging will almost certainly be infrequent until after Christmas now that all the local coffeehouses (and their high-speed internet service) will be closed for the holidays. And then I'm off to Philly for MLA (where I may have some time to blog the convention).
Update: The Nielsen post also has the ten programs with the most occurences of product placement and the ten brands with the most cases of product placement on network TV. Perhaps unsurprisingly, reality TV shows dominate the first list.
Posted by chuck at December 23, 2006 12:31 PM
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Comments
Chuck - to clarify, the Nielsen list of timeshifted programs is by increased percentage of viewers. This means that Studio 60's viewership rises by 10% when you add in DVR viewers, but that CSI and Grey's Anatomy still get far more raw numbers of DVR viewers overall (go to TiVo.com for their rankings of most popular programs). Hence NBC and CW dominate this list because their 'successful' shows have much lower ratings than the ABC & CBS hits - a dubious distinction, if you care about such things...
Posted by: Jason Mittell ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://chutry.wordherders.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 26, 2006 4:35 PM
Thanks for the clarification. I probably should have read that more carefully. I wondered why so many CW shows appeared in teh top ten in that category.
Posted by: Chuck at December 27, 2006 11:53 PM