Open Letter To News Directors of Channels 4, 5, and 11
Good persons,
The petty humorless grubs at Channel 8 don’t want me sending traffic to them any longer during weather events. Each of you knows the traffic we send (it’s why we’re begged for links all the time), so I’m asking which of your stations will grant me permission to put online a screen grab of your web site’s weather radar. I promise that every time I do so, I will include a link to the weather section of your station’s web site as well as a gratuitous praise of a recent report by your station.
I can be reached at ericc@dmagazine.com.
13 Comments to “Open Letter To News Directors of Channels 4, 5, and 11”
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Please let it be Ch. 4. Evan Andrews nailed today’s weather in his morning report. It was masterful.
Ch. 8’s decision is akin to the NFL not allowing bars and other venues to name the Super Bowl in advertising for their shindigs that day. I mean, come on, it’s one thing to make sure a company doesn’t use your trademark in a nationwide advertisement if they haven’t paid for that right. It’s another to turn down the free advertisement of thousands of venues by making them talk about a “big game” instead of the name of your premier event - when they’re going to host the parties and watch your event anyway. Brilliant - just like turning down free traffic. Any company advertising on Ch. 8’s site should berate them for denying them additional page views.
In WFAA’s defense, I didn’t see that you posted any credit to them for the radar image. I was trying to figure out where it was coming from… looked like it was from FrontBurner. Thanks for the heads up, that was a good radar.
This is surprising — Belo has distingushed itself as a trailblazing pioneer of the Internet. The savvy editors of dallasnews.com truly “got it” way, way ahead of the curve … visit their site for the very definition of “gee-whiz factor.”
Oh, wait –don’t.
petty/humorless
pot/kettle
they probably dont want you to tivo a news story for friends. Absolutely not show a newspaper front page story to somebody sitting next to you on a train.
no no no.
My guess is that it’s not so much an intellectual property issue, but the fact that their radar servers get hammered whenever there’s a threat of severe/icy weather, and the whole hotlink-bandwidth-theft thing wasn’t helping that problem.
f the locals if they dont want to share. find some people that understand the interwebs. i am sure an ad-revenue site such as weather.com would not mind. or the yahoo version, which is doing the same thing.
My sister works in the building with D, and said you guys were all raging A-holes. Guess she was right.
yea, hotlink, stealing, web.
If I am a company, any company, I would make sure not to be on the internet. That may lead to crime. bandwidth would be an issue too.
I have to pay for something to show people something about something I do.
still, its cheaper than paper. but its gonna mean I have to spend money.
I bet you if you had Alibaster K. Abthernabther write your plea, it would be granted.
It’s probably better that you use a different local news site…I can’t understand a thing Channel 8 tells me unless they use Barbie or board games.
Despite my co-worker’s accurate forecast of the weather this morning, I, for one, was quite disappointed in the traffic.
Are you kidding me? You guys at DMag take the liberty to “borrow” information off of Channel 8’s website and you give them absolutely no props. Then, when they ask you to take it off you get angry and call channel 8 names and get the other 3 networks to donate their info. Now, you are giving 4,5,11 all the credit. Sounds like a great way to do business to me. I hope DMag doesn’t mind if I rip off all the “pertinent” info from Dmag.com and post it to my mediocre website, in which my views are totally different than Dmags.