FSN Prime Ticket Scores Touchdown With Prep Football

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More than 12,000 fans turned out to watch Long Beach Poly’s football team knock off unbeaten Notre Dame High of Sherman Oaks in a 31-21 thriller at Long Beach’s Veterans Stadium recently.


Thousands more caught the rebroadcast of the game on regional cable station FSN (formerly Fox Sports Network) Prime Ticket.


Capitalizing on the popularity of prep football in Southern California and the first state championship in 79 years, the network will air six post-season games. Prior to this year the California Interscholastic Federation crowned Northern and Southern Section champs, but awarded no overall titles.


The Poly-Notre Dame game was a Southern Section quarterfinal. A semi-final match between Edison and Santa Margarita is scheduled for Dec. 1. The southern section championship game airs Dec. 9.


The following day, FSN will cover the championship committee selection process, including the live announcement of the

six teams that will advance to the state

championships.


Finally, on Dec. 16, FSN will telecast the California State Football Championships in three divisions, with kick-offs at 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.


Local advertisers have long benefited from supporting school sports. This year Toyota has secured the sponsorship for the tournament, and one big-box retailer will get plenty of mentions thanks to the name of a stadium in Carson.


“As for SoCal, we’re going to have those three games back to back, about 11 and a half hours of programming in one day,” said Jennifer Johnson, communications director at FSN. “It will be great exposure for the Home Depot Center and all the events that happen there.”


While FSN has an exclusive with the championship games, other broadcasters have moved into high school sports. KABC (Channel 7) has Sports Zone, KCAL (Channel 9) has Sports Central, KNBC (Channel 4) has bulked up its prep coverage and cable franchise-holders often air local games.


There is one somewhat annoying side effect to the increased coverage for fans attending the games.


“They have TV timeouts for commercials just like the big guys,” said Notre Dame fan Dominic Manente of Burbank.



Strike Up the Banda


Telemundo affiliate KWHY-TV (Channel 22) in Burbank has signed up “Zona 22,” a Spanish-language show featuring artist interviews, music videos and entertainment segments shot on location around L.A.


The one-hour daily “Zona” will focus on regional Mexican music. Erika Garza of KLAX-FM (97.9) and Kaiman, formerly of the bilingual “Mex 2 the Max” show on LATV, will host the show.


“Zona 22” plans on taping at venues with Latino content such as Huntington Park, Plaza Mexico and along Broadway in downtown L.A. Luis Barreto, a former producer on ABC’s “Extreme Makeover,” will also serve as an executive producer on “Zona,” which airs weekdays at 2 p.m.



Savvy Shopping


Two L.A.-based Web sites are cashing in on the expanding online holiday shopping sector.


PriceGrabber.com, a comparison shopping site owned by Experian Group Ltd., estimates it generated leads to merchants worth $248 million on the Friday after Thanksgiving, normally the busiest retail day of the year.


Electronics dominated the five top-selling categories of the day: Digital Cameras, plasma & LCD TVs, MP3 players, electronic toys and notebook computers. But for the month of November, the biggest percentage gainers included toys (an uptick of 225 percent since last year), sporting goods (178 percent) and apparel (128 percent).


“The force behind this momentum is savvy shoppers, more of whom use the Internet for their research and holiday shopping,” said Kamran Pourzanjani, president of PriceGrabber.com.


The other L.A.-based site, ThisNext.com, tries to make product research fun. At the social shopping network site, visitors recommend products to each other in 22 different categories. Users can organize their favorites into play lists called “shopcasts,” based on lifestyle, activities or the products themselves.


In addition to personal recommendations, ThisNext has professional recommendations from interior designers, small business owners, chefs, artists, Olympic athletes, authors and “fashionistas.” According to Chief Executive Gordon Gould, the site “helps consumers wade through the 60 million products available out there to discover new products of interest in a natural and legitimate way from their peers.”


Both PriceGrabber and ThisNext work off the advertising-based Web model. PriceGrabber refers shoppers to 8,800 vendors, while ThisNext works the same way with affiliate programs to move shoppers to e-tailing sites.


Like catalogue shopping for a previous generation, online shopping offers convenience but demands foresight, since shipping and processing time have to figure into the purchase decision. As a result, PriceGrabber’s Holiday Shopping Survey, released in early November, indicated that 60 percent of online shoppers started their gift gathering before Thanksgiving. However, 70 percent still expect to be shopping during the last five days before the holiday.



News & Notes


Cutbacks at the Los Angeles Newspaper Group cost Los Angeles Daily News Publisher Tracy Rafter her job recently. Now the group is losing another publisher, on different terms. Ron Wood, group publisher in charge of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star News and Whittier Daily News, will leave on Jan. 1 to become chief executive of the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership. In late October, Los Angeles Newspaper Group, a division of MediaNews Group, announced the elimination of 21 jobs in conjunction with new data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations showing an 8.2 percent decline in readership. TiVo, the manufacturer of digital TV taping machines, has signed a promotion deal with Hollywood talent agency International Creative Management. Under the agreement, ICM’s celebrity clients will provide TiVo with personal recommendations for movies and TV shows. TiVo subscribers can select to automatically record the recommendations on their TiVo boxes. The pioneer in the digital video recording field is facing stiff competition from cable and satellite TV providers who have built similar recording functions into their offerings.



Staff reporter Joel Russell can be reached at

[email protected]

, or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 237.

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