Here are some of the day’s stories about the media industry:

Amazon Patents Detail Kindle Advertising Model (Mediapost)
Laurie Sullivan writes: “The patents clearly note that Amazon would insert advertisements throughout the ebooks, from the beginning to the end, between chapters or following every 10 pages, as well as in the margins.”

> In-Book Ads Coming to the Amazon Kindle? (Fast Company)
> 6 Reasons Why Ads On The Kindle Don’t Work (Business Insider)

Deadline for Globe bids postponed (Boston Globe)
“The New York Times Co. has postponed tomorrow’s deadline for prospective buyers of The Boston Globe to submit preliminary bids for the newspaper, people briefed on the sales process said. No new date has been set for the bids,” writes Robert Weisman.

ESPN to relaunch UK channel in August (Reuters)
“The Walt Disney-owned (DIS.N) sports network ESPN said on Tuesday it would launch a new channel in Britain in August to show its 46 Premier League soccer matches and other international sports programming.”

NYC announces initiatives aimed at strengthening media industry (Romenesko)
“One of Mayor Bloomberg’s eight initiatives: Establishing a Media and Tech Fellowship to be awarded to approximately 20 “rising star” media and technology entrepreneurs on an annual basis.”

Google’s Gmail says bye-bye beta (Reuters)
Alexei Oreskovic writes: “The change is part of a broader move that Google announced on Tuesday involving Google Apps, the company’s suite of online software products that includes Google Docs and Google Calendar, among others.”

In other news:

• Pittsburgh Clears Way For FiOS TV (Multichannel News)
• Michael Jackson Funeral: 500,000+ Facebook Updates Posted (Mashable)
• Music Labels Reach Royalty Deal With Online Stations (NYT)

Ah spring. Opening day. Stolen bases. Hot dogs. Rain delays. Fresh baseball commercials flashing across your TV set.

Major League Baseball has just taken the wraps off its new 2009 campaign, “The is Beyond Baseball,” supported by 20 TV spots running through the World Series.The spots will run on ESPN, Fox, TBS, MLB Network and MLB.com.

The idea, developed by McCann Erickson, is that baseball is more than just a game; it’s part of the fabric of our culture. In trying to get that message across, the spots will play up the stories behind star players like Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants and Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies.

And what’s an ad campaign without a web element? Here’s how the release describes baseball’s effort: “In addition, MLB.com will host Beyond.Baseball.com, which will feature interactive elements of the campaign including the campaign commercials, the MLB Network special, highlighted player profiles, a photo gallery, production outtakes, online vignettes and a detailed campaign description.”

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The big story in the media for the rest of the week is the annual National Cable Telecommunications Association Show, or “the cable show,” as its commonly called.

This year’s primary topic looks like it will be how the big, traditional operators in the business will adapt to an age when the Internet is giving people more options to watch shows, and not always in a way that feeds the bank.

Here is our own take on the show from the Reuters wire:

Both sets of companies will be brainstorming on how to cope with or benefit from disintermediation: consumers can now watch decent-quality video online whenever they want, and often for free.

“Last year, cable companies were in a more probelgradetectionist mode but now they’re facing up to the inevitable trend, because online video is really here to stay,” said Tuna Amobi, equity analyst at Standard & Poor’s.

Executives will also have the economy on their minds.

“The current recession has cut into consumer spending for household TV and telecommunications, while also causing most marketers to reduce their advertising budgets,” said Collins Stewart analyst Thomas Eagan.

Longer term, the industry hopes to forge new tie-ups to capitalize on the online trend.

Broadcasting & Cable approaches the same topic, but with the requisite “it’s still early days” comment:

But with online viewing still amounting to a tiny fraction of actual viewing (not to mention revenue), the debate over a viable business model may be a lot louder than it needs to be. Cable networks, however, have to work with their pipelines to protect everyone’s interests.

“We’re constantly looking at evolving our economic models on our shows to ensure that we’re protected well into the future,” says Andrea Wong, president and CEO of Lifetime Networks. “I don’t think anyone has the magic answer yet. I think that we’re all trying to experiment and find new ways to do business together. I think we have to.”

Those last two sentences could have been taken from a newspaper executive.

MarketWatch reports on operators freaked out about the economic recession causing people to simply give up cable and do something else with their time.

Since last May’s Cable Show in New Orleans, the price of cable stocks have dropped by an average of 31%, with most of the declines coming after the September collapse of Lehman Brothers that triggered a worldwide financial meltdown.

The phenomenon of “cord-cutting” has been a concern of some cable executives, most notably Time Warner Cable (TWC) Chairman Glenn Britt, who has voiced his belief that the wide availability of free, ad-supported television shows online through sites like Hulu, Veoh and others has made it feasible to stop paying for cable or satellite service.

Keep an eye on:

• Speaking of cable and the Internet, Google’s YouTube signed a deal with Disney to offer ABC and ESPN clips on its Web video service. Disney might also put full-length shows on the Hulu joint venture betwen News Corp and NBC Universal. This is something that the cable guys mentioned above are watching with some alarm because, as we noted above, this stuff would be free, and no one wants to wind up like newspapers who gave away the store online for the past decade. (PaidContent and The Wall Street Journal)
• Speaking of newspapers, the Journal and The New York Times had the same bright idea: Profiles of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News on their first day of delivering the news without a print newspaper. It was either genius, dumb luck or just plain dumb, depending on how you lookat it; big events in the collapsing auto industry, not to mention some other noteworthy stuff, made for a huge news day. That either spurred online interest or made readers scream because they had no paper to read about it. (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times)
• More from newspaper land: The New York Times cut its staff and sought pay concessions on Thursday. Now the axe is swinging at the Times-owned Boston Globe. Thirty buyouts, 20 layoffs. (Boston Business Journal)
  Also, online ad growth “screeches to a halt.” Sigh. (Silicon Alley Insider)
• Google commits $100 million to its venture capital fund, according to unnamed sources, like it’s some kind of scandal. Google also names folks who will run it, fortunately showing its confidence in them by saying so on the record. (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times)
• Google Maps is good at catching cheating husbands for free, if you can believe this report. (The Sun)

(Photo: Reuters)

The divisions are deepening out in Hollywood – and we’re not talking about the standoff between the Screen Actors Guild and major studios. No, we’re talking about Tom Hanks vs Mel Gibson, George Clooney vs Martin Sheen. Actor against actor, start against star. Good stuff.

To be fair, it’s not as though they are hurling rocks at one another. But there are divisions within the ranks of the SAG over whether to authorize a strike. In a petition yesterday, 130 actors — many A-listers — sought to have the union halt the strike authorization vote. The way they see it, the economy is so bad that a strike right now would be too devastating to the industry.

Perhaps they have a point. Hollywood, after all, is still recovering from the writers’ strike. TV ratings are way down, advertising dollars are drying up and consumers are keep a close watch on their budgets. It could be a terrible time for a strike (And we should note that a strike authorization vote is different than an actual strike).

On the other hand, if the SAG fails to pass the strike authorization vote then it will find itself in a very tough negotiating position. More than likely, it would have to accept the studios’ latest offer and hope that it can achieve better terms in the next round of negotiations.

What to do? Fortunately, we don’t have to decide. But let’s hear from you, just for fun.

Would you authorize or oppose a strike vote?

Keep an eye on:

• ESPN.com is counting on less clutter and more advertising options to bolster revenue at a time when its sister cable channels are battling rare weakness (NY Times)
• Employees of CBS Entertainment and CBS Paramount Network TV were let go Monday at the company’s Studio City and Television City lots in California (Adweek.com)
• Apple witnessed flat year-over-year overall sales in the United States for its Macs in November, while sales of rival Microsoft Windows PCs were up 7 percent (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

On the slim chance that this year’s political television juggernaut has not penetrated the homes of devout sports fans, the campaign trail will lead Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama to ESPN’s Monday Night Football just hours before next week’s presidential election.

In pretaped interviews set to air during halftime of the Pittsburgh Steelers-Washington Redskins game, Obama and McCain will face probing questions from ESPN anchor Chris Berman about — sports.

“We are obviously primarily a sports network so the questions you are going to get here are going to be different than you would get with ABC News,” says ESPN spokesman Bill Hofheimer.

In 2006, Obama appeared in a Monday Night Football opening sequence ahead of the Chicago Bears-St. Louis Rams that played on speculation that he would announce his bid for president.  The Democrat and pick-up basketball enthusiast has since appeared in other ESPN coverage.

McCain has appeared on ESPN talk radio show ”Mike & Mike in the Morning” and sat down for an interview with ESPN sportscaster Bob Ley about sports legislation. His wife Cindy revealed her passion for “drifting” on ESPN’s E:60 news magazine program. 

ESPN, owned by the Walt Disney Co, will follow the McCain-Obama contest through election day by including election returns from sister network ABC in its “BottomLine” scores crawl along the bottom of TV screens.

(Photos: Reuters)

Quarterly results arrived today from Interpublic Group and Publicis. Guess what? Advertising spending held up in the second quarter, at least for the two ad companies.

You would think — given all the doom and gloom — that corporations would have sharply cut back on spending in the second quarter. Indeed, just about every expert out there has cut spending forecasts.

Yet Interpublic, home of DraftFCB and McCann-Erickson, posted revenue that raced right past expectations and said it was well on the way to achieving its goals for the year.

And the economy? They said they’re watching it and keeping an eye on costs.

“While the growth that we posted during the first half demonstrates that we have yet to see retrenchment on the part of clients, we will continue to monitor the broader economic situation closely,” CEO Michael Roth said in a statement.

French advertising group Publicis also seemed to weather the storm in the second quarter, increasing organic sales in all areas, including the United States. It did say, however, that it expected marketing investments to fall in some areas, citing the automotive and financial sectors, because of the credit crisis and rising commodity and food prices.

Of course, solid spending by clients in the second quarter may not tell us much. Many see advertising spending as a trailing economic indicator, meaning that we could very well see clients cutting budgets for the second half of the year.

“We are not immune to the macroeconomic environment. We will certainly see some client areas affected,” IPG’s Roth said on a conference call. But so far clients see the downturn as an opportunity to build brand, he added.

“We haven’t seen a major pullback.”

On the other hand, clearly everything isn’t sunshine in the advertising world. Just check out Meredith, whose earnings fell because of lower advertising revenue at its magazines. Or take a look at Viacom Inc, whose earnings showed weakness in retail and automotive advertising crimped hurt sales for its cable TV networks.

Keep an eye on:

• Dell is testing a digital music player that could go on sale as early as September in a challenge to Apple (WSJ.com)
• Social networking site MySpace announced a series of new senior executives (paidContent.org)
• Billionaire oil investor T. Boone Pickens has sold all his Yahoo shares in frustration over Yahoo’s failure to reach a deal with Microsoft (San Francisco Chronicle)
• ESPN will unveil a new online network that will encompass a cluster of Internet sites aimed at action sports (LA Times)

(Photo: Reuters)