Users of the new Apple iPhone 3G are reporting problems with reception. I can vouch for that: I'm one of them. Apple bragged about how this new phone would use the faster AT&T 3G network. One problem: we keep losing the signal.

This is not an isolated event. There may be a problem with a chip inside the phone itself. With Apple selling millions of iPhone 3Gs this summer, you'd think this would rate as a top story. After all, we saw plenty of pieces on how the lines were really long when the thing went on sale, right? There was lots of great PR for the iPhone 3G. So why the lack of reporting on this significant development?

My guess? The pictures aren't as good. Long lines of excited people = good pictures. Bad reception on a phone? No pictures.

Online, there are plenty of stories. I found out about this from a Twitter posting by Steve Rubel, who pointed me to an obscure site that was writing about the story. Other sites began to pick up on it. iLounge and CNet have it now. But still - only a handful of mainstream media outlets are reporting this. If it weren't for the Web, I wouldn't know about the story, and I'd think I was the only one having reception issues.

The Media Reinvention has to be about the stories that affect people personally. Accidents and fires? How do those compare to a story affecting, possibly, thousands of... more »

Please don't tell me you are waiting until the NBC broadcast is showing in your local time before posting the results on your Website. Via Lost Remote, the LA Times writes:

What gives, American media?

Report the news. Cover the Games. But give us a warning before ruining the evening’s entertainment.

Websites and newspapers handled “American Idol” eliminations with extreme delicacy, so why no tact when it comes to covering a race in a swimming pool?

OK, before we move any further - did the LA Times just compare the Olympics to American Idol?

Now, then... the Olympics is a worldwide event, and with the Web you can get live results anywhere, at any time. Thanks to MSNBC's truly remarkable online coverage, you can watch 3,600 hours of live coverage online. This is more coverage than all the previous summer Olympics combined, since they started televising them in 1960. So forget this business about keeping secrets online. How foolish will you look if you don't have the results - especially of your local athletes - on the front of your site?

"John Smith of our Hometown competed 12 hours ago in the 100m Freestyle! Just three more hours until it's shown on TV! Or click through here to click through to the page that clicks through to MSNBC's online spoiler coverage. Don't say we didn't warn you. Also - don't go anywhere near the Smith house on Main Street where our live truck is with... more »

Way off topic, but funny for a Friday. A pest control guy showed up at my door this afternoon. He tells me he "just wants me to know" that he's in the area doing some work for my neighbors. (I know he's here to sell me, but fine.) He says my neighbors are concerned about the pests in the neighborhood. (My kids, I'm guessing.) They've seen - gasp - ants. Wasps, too. Silverfish. Earwigs, for heaven's sake! (Had to look that one up. Did you know they don't actually go in your ear?) He engages me in this conversation for a few minutes. Then he moves in for the sale. Normally, it's $280, but because my neighbors are all using him, it's $160.

"Thank you, that's a very generous offer," I say. "But I have an insect control guy I use, and I don't have any ants or earwigs."

"What's his name?" the salesman asks.

"That's a private matter," I tell him, not seeing where that's his business.

"Well you could have told me that before!" he says, impertinently.

"You didn't ask," I respond, as I thank him for his time and he walks away, steamed.

I can't think of a better example of how not to sell someone. Imagine - the onus was on me to interrupt him and tell him, before he asked, that I wasn't going to buy.

Now, about my damn neighbors and their

I think we're going camerablind, and I don't know what to make of it.

Let me explain.

I took the family out for one of my little town's "concerts on the common" Monday night. (Picture New England town, postcard, bandstand, ice cream, Norman Rockwell... the works.) The local cable channel was, impressively, doing a three-camera shoot. Because they're cable access, they have limited resources, so one of the cameras was fixed, about 25 yards from the center of the stage, on the lawn.

Everyone sits at these concerts. It's a picnic kind of atmosphere, save for the kids running around. But I'll tell you, it seemed like whenever someone stood to chat with a friend, they stood right in front of that camera. Two guys stood there for a good few minutes, probably five feet away. As a TV guy, I wanted to yell something - but what? "Down in front - of the camera?" The cable access guys simply switched between their other two cams until the guys were done with their chat.

Parents pushed their kids on bikes, occasionally hitting a training wheel on one of the tripod sticks. One person stood in front of the camera and just, well, sort of examined it, as though it were a museum exhibit.

Here's another example:

The family went to DisneyWorld earlier this month. Of course, the place is lousy with cameras. But what do you do when you see someone taking a picture of their kids or friend? You stop, right? Let them have... more »

I just want to take a moment to share the news of the passing of a great journalist and professor, Jim Thistle. Jim was the director of the Boston University College of Communications Broadcast Journalism Program, and I was a student of his in the early '90s. Jim conferred upon me my Masters of Broadcast Journalism, and occasionally invited me back to talk to the students. Jim worked in TV news for 30 years, serving as news director at the CBS, NBC and ABC affiliates here in Boston. Whenever there was a story about news in the news, the stations went to him for comment.

Not only was Jim a mentor - he was a mentor to those who are now others' mentors.

Even though his DNA was in TV news, Jim knew that the Web would change everything. We talked in 1992 about the changes that were coming. I remember he brought in speakers who, even before we had the World Wide Web as we knew it, spoke about how this nebulous thing known as "digital convergence" would change our jobs. Jim embraced the concept, and as the years went by held panels on the topic and eagerly taught students about the Web.

Getting an internship in Boston is easy - all you need to say is "Jim Thistle sent me."  That's how I landed at this startup in 1992 called "New England Cable News," where I launched my career.

There are... more »

"Optimists are nostalgic about the future," or so the quote goes, widely attributed to the Chicago Tribune. It's a good quote for the times we're in - heck, even the week we're in. The publisher of the LA Times and the editor of the Chicago Tribune both quit, no doubt due to the Sam Zell takeover. Ad bucks are down and there's no dispute they're going lower. It costs a fortune to travel anywhere this summer.

And soon, you won't even be able to buy an American-owned Bud.

Plenty to be pessimistic about.

But I'm nostalgic about the future. I can remember, vividly, saying to a friend in 1984 "This is 'the future.' We have cool cars, we have computers, we have ATMs that give us money whenever we want, we can call across the seas, we've been to the moon, we can fly - all the things than man has dreamed of." I swear. Ask Jen Harris. OK, she may not remember it. But I had the epiphany. It was in a Toyota Camry. And I can admit this because I was wrong. 1984 wasn't 'the future'. It was almost 25 years ago.

I am nostalgic about the great things yet to come, because I can see walls coming down. I started to preach convergence media in 2000. Nearly all the practices you see in newsrooms now weren't allowed under the rule "TV first, Web second." The decade isn't even out, and the mindshift has at least changed, even if the... more »

ADDENDUM: Yes, they lined up like the Apple nuts that they (OK, we) are. And AT&T had glitches activating all the phones, once again frustrating the most loyal consumers:

A spokesman for AT&T Inc., the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., said there was a global problem with Apple's iTunes software that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned.

Instead, employees are telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, spokesman Michael Coe said.

 "Hey, thanks for waiting seven hours for this. Now go home, and finish the work for us. There's no way we could have anticipated this much demand. We're only AT&T after all..."

There is a price to pay for being early adopters: the glitches get worked out on you.

(Original article below...)

The true test of fanaticism will come on Friday when Apple releases the second iteration of its iPhone: will people line up like crazy, just as they did when the first iPhone was released last year?

The iPhone 3G seems to offer some significant improvements over its predecessor (battery life, however, doesn't seem to be one of them - According to Walt Mossberg:

...the iPhone 3G’s battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks. This is an especially significant problem because, unlike most other smart phones, the iPhone... more »

For years, Icann, the overseer of all things .com, .biz, .org, etc., has held a tight grip on top level domains - those letters that can appear after the dot. This has led to some very awkward URLs, with people and companies trying to squeeze variations on their name into the most common .com category.

 Now it looks like any dot goes.

Icann has changed its stripes - er, dots - and is going to permit virtually any word to follow the dot. As in Coca Cola will be able to get .coke if it wants. Your station will be able to purchase .wxxx if you so desire. Icann will still review the applicants, with first preference going to the trademark and copyright owners. It's the control over the URLs companies would have wanted in the first place. A dot landrush.

But what about more generic TLDs? Who gets .hotel, .restaurant or .airline? Those will be settled by auctions - and some are predicting the numbers will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And if your mind is going where the Internet inevitably goes - to the dot dirty word, Icann has a plan for that, too. Sort of. From the New York Times:

Icann officials said any applications for the new domains would have to go through an independent review process. Third parties will be able to challenge applications on the grounds that a particular suffix could threaten “morality and public order.”

So what could possibly go wrong there? An international body deciding... more »

I made my usual rounds this morning, checking my email, social nets and Twitter. It was on Twitter that I first found out about the death of George Carlin. In fact, others had posted that they, too, found out about Carlin's death via Twitter or Facebook or other social nets.

Local media outlets need to pay attention to this phenomenon. The old saying was "news is what I say it is." Then it was "news is when I say it is." Neither fly anymore. Instead, we have to be a part of the river of news.

Have a Twitter account for your station.Break the news wherever the audience is.

Recently an employee of a station asked me what I thought about how her channel wanted to promote how their website had a local story before anyone else. Should they promote that?

"Just on the site?" I asked. So? What if I didn't visit their site?

How do we shake this broadcast braggery? It's not about beating the other two or three guys in town. It doesn't work that way anymore. It's about being consistent and being ubiquitous. It's about breaking barriers.

Just like George did.

Now that we've had the site lauched for a couple of months, we're in the process of fine tuning. We want ar-d.com to be a place where people return to every day for news and information about our industry. We have imported feeds from sites we respect, and we are building out more blogs from our own staff.

Recently, this would have been unthinkable - at any company. But we preach how "sending people away" is the surest sign they will come back. Be the place where people start looking for information and they will always return. This is Google's entire business model.

We'll also hear "You're just saying that, you're consultants." I can't argue with the former, but really - have you ever received so much free advice from people who were only in it for the money? Yes - this is my job. But I haven't strayed so far from my believe that journalism can be made better by bringing it online, either.I wrote about convergence media for six years before being paid a penny to help anyone about it.

Consultants tell. We listen. So please, share with us your success stories. One thing we do very well is share great stories. Leave out your station name, if you wish. However, keep in mind that the better you look and the better your station looks, the more likely it is you will be hailed as industry leaders.

Share your name and your story, right here. We're in the MediaReinvention together. I'm... more »