Sirius to Air ‘Barbara Walters Special’ Interviews

Sirius Satellite Radio continues to exercise its dedication to bringing in top talent, as it has just announced that it will air a weekly, two-hour series, beginning next year, that will replay many of the interviews Barbara Walters has conducted for ABC News specials since 1976, the AP reports. Walters, who owns the rights to the interviews she conducted for the Barbara Walters specials, is quoted in the article as saying, “So many of them are classics. It’s everything from Lucille Ball and John Wayne and Bing Crosby and George Burns to Matthew McConaughey and Julia Roberts.”

Jupiter: Corporate Blog Deployments to Double in 2006

Some 35 percent of large companies plan to initiate corporate blogs this year - and combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of such companies will have deployed corporate blogs by the end of 2006, according to a JupiterResearch report, “Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement.” According to the report (via MarketingVox), 64 percent of executives say they spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate blogs.

Illegal Billboard Replacement Amendment Stripped from Bill

As city dwellers across the country move to more rural areas, billboards tend to follow, making rural America the next topic in the billboard debate, particularly now that a proposal to allow the rebuilding of noncomforming billboards in states that suffered billboard losses during last year’s storms was attached to a Senate emergency-aid bill earlier this month, writes the Christian Science Monitor.

paidContent Parent Gets Funding from Patricof’s Greycroft

ContentNext Media, the parent company of paidContent.org (also MocoNews.net and ContentSutra) has received an undisclosed amount in first-round funding from Alan Patricof’s new venture capital firm Greycroft Partners, paidContent’s Rafat Ali writes (via MarketingVox). ” I look at blogs as the hyper-interactive magazines of the future, only with far greater ability to create communities and expand into new areas,” Patricof is quoted as saying.

DoubleClick: Keyword Costs Fell in Q1

After the holiday surge in 4Q05, the average “cost per keyword” (CPK, the total monthly cost of a keyword, determined by the sum of the click costs) fell significantly in the first quarter of the year, according to DoubleClick’s most recent Performics quarterly search report, writes MediaPost (via MarketingVox). CPK fell nearly by half in Q1, to around $30, from the 4Q high of around $59 last December, according to the report. CPK was relatively flat year over year, however.

Issue-by-Issue Magazine Measurement Launching This Fall

A new service called Readership.com provides audience accumulation data for magazine readership, effectively “doing for magazines what Nielsen has always done for telelvision,” says Rebecca McPheters, the magazine audience researcher who officially launched the service, in an article in MediaPost. The service uses a combination of online and print-based surveys to measure how - and how quickly - people read the 200 top consumer magazines, as well as the top newspaper magazines and the newspapers in which they are distributed. The new print ratings service is scheduled to begin continuous measurement of publication audiences this fall.

Spike Hoping for Elusive Male Audience with ‘Blade’

So-called ‘men’s’ network Spike (formerly TNN) may finally have a series that really appeals to the elusive young male audience with its upcoming new show Blade: The Series, which opens with a two-hour premiere on Wednesday night at 10, writes Media Life. The show takes up where the three-film series, inspired by the Marvel comic book and starring Wesley Snipes, left off.

Slow Network Upfront Affects Syndication, Cable

The broadcast industry has recently seen a downturn in the upfront market due to budget cuts, a glut of inventory and deliberating by advertising conglomerates, according to Media Life. Media buyers report that the upfront for syndication has barely begun, with budgets just now being registered. The market is proving to be less successful than previously thought. In May, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen projected a 4 percent increase, to $3 billion, and Miller Tabak, an investor with a New York-based investment firm predicted a 4.5 percent increase, to slightly over $2.9 billion. Merrill Lynch was forced to revise projections last week, predicting a flat to minus 1 percent increase.

The rise in digital media has also fueled the reduction in upfront pricing, writes AdAge. Increased digital options give media buyers bargaining power.

Subscriber List for ‘Every Day with Rachel Ray’ Available

Readers Digest recently released a subscriber list for Every Day With Rachel Ray, a food and lifestyle magazine launched in October 2005, according to Direct Magazine. The bi-monthly magazine is named after the Food Network star, who is the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

Horror Entertainment to Air on Sirius

Dee Snider

Fangoria Entertainment and Sirius Satellite Radio recently announced the launch of the first national horror radio show. Fangoria Radio, a live three-hour radio show, targets fans of the horror-genre underworld.