Every day, there seems to be a new story about one company or another trying to get in to the old television game, but not on the talking box (as Forrest Gump called it) — rather on the web, where all the cool people play. 

In some cases, TV networks are trying to take the Web and turn it into television. Good luck to them I say. 

News Roundup

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the latest online television news:

— News Corp. unit Twentieth TV is working with Yahoo on a “Web on TV” show, which will no doubt feature the latest hilarious clips of skateboarders hurting themselves or kittens on an icy pond.

— Lifetime Networks is launching a TV-style platform as part of its relaunched website, and will create new shows just for the Web as well as streaming Lifetime content.

— Newsweek says it is going to create a political talk show that will run weekly on its website, and the magazine has hired the former producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC to put it together.

MSNBC Redesign & More

In other media-related announcements, MSNBC’s redesign is live (just in time for Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz to leave and an old friend of mine to arrive) and it has a very cool Ajax-y feature that lets you move chunks of the page up or down depending on your interests.

And in the old-time newspaper world, a number of chains have done a deal with real-estate site Zillow to put their ads on the Zillow site and use Zillow features on their newspaper websites. 

For more, see this piece of commentary on CNET about newspapers and the classified conundrum, and see Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing for a post on the Zillow deal.

Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.

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