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Katie Couric was repeated asked by critics at press tour about reports that she will soon exit her position as anchor of "CBS Evening News." “We have no plans to part company anytime soon,” she says. “There were a lot of speculative pieces that have been spin out of control. I’m very committed to the people and here and the product. I think [the rumors are] dying down considerable. I can’t control what media writers write. Sometimes we live in a bit of an echo chamber. I think people in your room are more fascinated by these things than people...

Some of the BBC's most senior executives have been awarded pay rises of more than £100,000 in a year when the corporation has been dogged by fakery scandals and job cuts. Jana Bennett, the Director of Vision, who was heavily criticised for her role in the "Crowngate affair" where footage of a documentary about the Queen was wrongly edited for a trailer of the programme, saw her salary rise from £433,000 to £536,000 last year, an increase of 24 per cent. Jenny Abramsky, the outgoing head of Audio and Music, was paid £419,000 last year, a 27 per cent rise...

Some advertisers spooked by bad press over China By Kevin Downey Jul 8, 2008 In just one month, on Aug. 8, NBC will begin airing the Summer Olympics from China, but from the looks of things it's not shaping up all that well for NBC as it attempts to sell its remaining ad inventory. At the least, the Games are looking to be a disappointment for the network, say media buyers. A lot will depend on how viewers and advertisers respond to the Olympic trials now airing. Ad spending will most likely fall short of NBC’s goal of more than...

Journal Sentinel Inc., publisher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, will cut 10% of its work force by the end of the year because of declining advertising revenue and rising costs, the company said today. The company employs the equivalent of about 1,300 full-time workers. It said in a news release that it would reduce its staff through buyouts, layoffs and attrition. In addition to lower ad revenue, the newspaper has been hit by higher prices for fuel and newsprint, said Elizabeth "Betsy" Brenner, president and chief operating officer of Journal Publishing Group. The cuts mirror those at many metropolitan news...

KTLA-TV Channel 5 laid off a veteran reporter and one of its weekend anchors Monday, part of a handful of cuts at the local station that also included several executives. Weekend anchor Walter Richards and reporter Willa Sandmeyer were let go along with reporter Janet Choi, executive editor of planning Joseph M. Russin and morning news executive producer John Hensley. KTLA, like the Los Angeles Times, is owned by Tribune Co., which is struggling financially because of major shifts in the media business and the softening economy. John Moczulski, vice president of programming and marketing at KTLA, said the cuts...

The broadcast networks have grown older than ever -- if they were a person, they wouldn't even be a part of TV's target demo anymore. According to a study released by Magna Global's Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets' average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That's the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago -- and the first time the nets' median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo. Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox....

Barack Obama has weighed-in on the issue of reinstating the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.” After being repeatedly questioned about the candidate’s position, campaign Press Secretary Michael Ortiz stated in an email message that “Senator Obama does not support re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters.” This position could be yet another one of those “deeply-held convictions” that Obama believes in unequivocally, similar to his long-held position on campaign finance reform. In January of 2007, Obama stated in a CNN interview with Larry King that the public-financing system “works.” Later that year, Mr. Obama challenged Republican presidential candidates to join him in limiting...

Just call me an agnostic when it comes to the fever and the fervor SATC inspires among many women around the world. I simply don’t understand it, don’t get it, and wouldn’t want to have sex in any city with any of those four women. Ahhhh, but what do we straight men really know? We live by our double standards of wanting pretty women in the boudoir who can function as hyper-orgasmic frauleins and bump booty with the best of them, while on the outside, we like our women to be perky mom types, wholesome and sociable.

AS the cable channels that populate the television dial conclude their advance advertising sales, they have something to celebrate: they made much greater gains than the broadcast networks. Preliminary figures for advance sales indicate that the cable channels will collectively sell about $8 billion in airtime to advertisers this season, up 7 to 8 percent from last year’s total. By contrast, the broadcast networks sold about $9.1 billion to $9.2 billion, up about 1 percent over last season. The shift in advertising dollars from broadcast to cable is not new, but it is particularly pronounced this year. There are several...

The liberal press crowed loudly when cable TV’s Keith Olbermann beat out Bill O’Reilly in a key demographic during a recent week, but Olbermann’s ratings success has been isolated and press reports about it have been much overblown, Newsmax has learned. MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” did average 477,000 viewers in the age 25 to 54 demographic during the first week of June, narrowly edging out Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” which averaged 472,000 in that demo, according to Nielsen Media Research. “This marks the first time that MSNBC has beaten Fox News in O’Reilly’s 8 p.m. time slot,” the...

WHEN the NBC News host Tim Russert died on June 13, NBC tried to hold back the news from going public for more than an hour to notify his family vacationing in Italy and presumably to prepare for what became six hours of coverage on its cable news outlet, MSNBC. And King Canute, ancient legend has it, tried to hold back the tide. Mr. Russert collapsed from a heart attack in NBC’s Washington newsroom around 1:40 p.m.; he was treated there and then taken to a hospital, arriving at 2:23 and being pronounced dead shortly thereafter, according to press accounts....

As Hollywood recovers from a tumultuous writers walkout that ended in February, U.S. television networks are bracing for a possible actors strike that could delay the upcoming fall TV season. Jitters over renewed labor unrest have mounted in recent days as contract talks between the Screen Actors Guild and the major film and TV studios have grown increasingly rancorous with little or no sign that a settlement is near. The three-year labor pact covering film and prime-time TV work for 120,000 SAG members is due to expire in two weeks. SAG leaders triggered an outcry from the studios late last...

Broadcast networks are starting to experiment in giving makegood inventory in digital streaming episodes in lieu of traditional TV commercial time. This past season, a handful of advertisers took makegood inventory from ABC on its ABC.com video player during episodes of specific shows. Mike Shaw, president of advertising sales for ABC, would not name those marketers, but noted that in many cases digital inventory was more valuable than on the traditional network. For instance, Shaw said advertisers got the benefit of higher price, cost-per-thousand viewers (CPM) digital episodes--prices that can be anywhere from one-quarter to one-third higher on network's respective...

Still reeling from a long strike by screenwriters this past winter, Hollywood is bracing for the possibility that the entertainment industry will grind to a halt again -- this time because of a dispute with actors. The studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild expires June 30, and talks are getting contentious. Already, film and television producers are holding back on new projects, fearing the talks will fail, even as they rush to complete existing projects before the end of the month. The two sides have made little progress on key issues including compensation for actors when their work is...

A flurry of big-name layoffs marks the reinvention of the local TV news business. By Deborah Potter Deborah Potter (potter@newslab.org) is executive director of NewsLab, a broadcast training and research center, and a former network correspondent. Anyone who's been in the television news business for a decade or more has seen it before. A tough economy always means cutbacks, so it wasn't a surprise when the ax fell at stations across the country this spring. But the buyouts and layoffs this time around signal something more than a predictable reaction to a looming recession. Prominence and longevity — and the...

As I was 'channel surfing' at my grandmother's house in San Juan this past weekend, I came upon TeleSUR, the new Hugo Chavez T.V. venture, live from Caracas. The programming I saw -- after enduring a cooking show featuring how to make 'arepas', the equivalent in Venezuela of 'pancakes' -- started with anti-U.S., anti-'Imperialists', anti-Bush, et.al. from their news proogramming dept. and then, in the entertainment dept., a segment featuring a musician named Rene Calle 13, who basically told the audience: "F*ck George Bush, he's the worse president ever". Here in the U.S. we have Al Jazeera and other international...

The struggling youth-oriented CW, reflecting its entrenchment after a bruising season, said Friday that it had sold nearly $375 million in prime-time advertising for next season, about 40% less than it did last year. In 2007, the network sold about $600 million in ads during the "upfront" market, when the broadcasters sell the bulk of their commercial inventory. This year's total was lower, in large measure because the CW plans to field only 10 hours a week of programming -- five fewer hours than in the just-completed season. Ratings at the 2-year-old CW, which has failed to get traction with...

With just two months until the Beijing Olympics, NBC is scrambling to sell out ad time for its broadcast of the Games. The Peacock network is said to be aggressively pushing advertisers and their agencies to buy spots during the Olympics as part of the "upfront" sales negotiations that started in mid-May. Ad execs estimated NBC was anywhere from $150 million to $300 million shy of its sales target. Officially, though, an NBC spokesman said sales were on track. "We're about 80 percent sold and on pace with past games," said NBC's Brian Walker. In April, NBC Universal chief Jeff...

Viacom Inc.'s stock hit a 52-week low Thursday -- adding to the previous day's slide -- after President and Chief Executive Philippe Dauman said second-quarter advertising growth will be slower than originally expected, at a conference on Wednesday. Viacom shares dropped 4 percent on Wednesday after Dauman's remarks. On Thursday, they lost an additional 94 cents to $35.79, after hitting a 52-week low of $35.78 during the session. The stock has fluctuated between $36 and $45.03 during the past 52 weeks. At a Sanford Bernstein conference, Dauman said the company now expects second-quarter domestic ad sales growth in the 3...

What has happened to the America we once knew? Indeed, much has changed and not all for the better. For instance, changes in the American culture have deeply affected the presidency, our institutions, and our democratic process. On a positive note, mass communication through the Internet and talk radio has been a blessing, not a curse. America's rich ethnic and cultural diversity has offered us more positives than negatives. But can a country that is more modern, technologically unsurpassed and richer in its ethnic mosaic keep its core values? That notion is under siege today, and the presidential race is...

With the exception of Fox's surprisingly strong "American Idol" finale on Wednesday, the May ratings have been pretty atrocious across the board, in a strike-shortened year that's already shaping up as the TV executives' annushorribilis. The worst part is this may be no temporary hiccup. Increasingly, the shutdown and aftermath of the writers strike that ended in February is beginning to look like a signal moment in the slow, painful meltdown of the broadcast-TV industry. Broadcasting, simply put, isn't casting broadly anymore. As the sweep suggests, the TV networks are losing not just their viewers but also their sense of...

NBC is limping to the close of the prime-time TV season. Only one of the network's shows, "Law & Order: SVU," finished among the 25 most-watched shows last week, ranking No. 16, according to Nielsen Media Research. "Shark," a drama that CBS is canceling, was seen by more people last week than any other NBC show but "SVU." The network's prime-time average of 5.5 million viewers last week, was just more than half of first-place CBS' average. The showing during a ratings "sweeps" month points to the challenge NBC has in the next few months. One advantage is the network's...

Presidential candidate Barack Obama used a Florida fundraiser to attack conservative media personalities Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh for their militant stand on immigration policy. Appearing Thursday at the Westin Diplomat near Fort Lauderdale, Obama lashed out at critics of illegal immigrants and migrant workers. During his speech, Obama said, "A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year.” Who is behind the rise in hate crimes? Obama left no doubt who he believes to be the culprits. “If you have people like Lou Dobbs and...

Media General reported weak April newspaper financial results Thursday, largely on plunging revenues in Tampa and its other two metro markets -- which drove help-wanted classified revenues down 42% and real estate down 40%. Overall revenue at the Richmond, Va.-based publisher and broadcaster fell 10.9% to $78.7 million in April. The Associated Press now reports that Media General says it will cut 750 jobs by the beginning of the third quarter to reduce operating costs. "The Richmond company says the reductions by October are in response to an overall slowing of the U.S. economy and a deepening recession in Florida,...

A dominant Fox is set to be crowned the winner of the 2007-08 television season, one that the broadcast biz -- and perhaps even Fox -- would just as soon forget. The writers strike, along with the rising popularity of DVRs and the increased availability of programming on multiple platforms, conspired to make this season the lowest-rated on record for the broadcasters. There was also a dearth of breakout hits, with no new show emerging as the biz's savior. Of course, the broadcasters have been losing audience share to cable for years -- but this season saw the most troubling...

The Times Union, the largest daily newspaper in the Albany, N.Y., area, is offering voluntary buyout packages to all employees. Mark Aldam, publisher of the Times Union, said the Hearst Corp.-owned newspaper is hoping to trim 30 jobs, in any of the newspaper's departments. This represents about 6 percent of its workforce of 485 people. "Every employee is eligible," he said. "This is a graceful way for employees who are considering a career change to transition out of the paper." Aldam said that if enough people do not accept the buyouts, which he described as "lucrative," the paper may have...

And The Winners Are....

Jimmy Kimmel knows how to deliver an industry joke with some sting, as he proved to advertisers getting a first look at ABC's fall schedule last week. "Here at ABC we are very excited about both of our new shows," Kimmel said to knowing laughs. Both. One is a game show produced by Ashton Kutcher, the other an adaptation of a series done by the BBC. It's hardly a burst of creativity from a network that proudly introduced eight new series last fall. The fall schedules rolled out with limited fanfare provided evidence of how deeply network television was hurt...

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are making it official. Hours after Thursday's landmark ruling by the California Supreme Court striking down a state law banning gay marriage, the 50-year-old daytime host announced during a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show that she and the 35-year-old former Ally McBeal star plan to swap vows. In the episode scheduled to air later today, studio audience members greeted DeGeneres' news with thunderous applause and a standing ovation as De Rossi watched from the sidelines. The show's publicist was unavailable for comment. Separately, in an interview with The Advocate Thursday, DeGeneres said she...

Time may be running out for the CW network. Two years after CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc. combined their second-tier networks UPN and WB into the youth-oriented CW to pool young viewers prized by advertisers, the network's hopes of surviving are looking increasingly bleak. Despite the buzz about "Gossip Girl," a prime-time soap opera about a group of rich kids on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the network has lost about 28% of its target audience of 18 to 34 year olds so far this season. Its ratings during this month's "sweeps" period -- the all-important measure upon...

Hillary Clinton is to MSNBC what teenage girl-fights are to Fox News. They're obsessed and preoccupied with her. They may know better -- the attention Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann give her may be focus-grouped to snag some demo we can't even imagine. But we're obciously not hat demo: the endless speculation as to why she's still in the race: the ponderous surmising and apprising of her wile and guile is just bad teevee. You don't know why she's still in the race, boyz? You think she (and Bill) are so self-deluded they don't know she's not going to get...

For decades, this has been the week for network television to strut its stuff. But not everyone is in the mood to party this year. Typically, the major broadcast networks -- Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC -- have spent about $5 million each to whip up excitement among advertisers for their new fall schedules. They would fly hundreds of stars and executives to New York for extravagant presentations at tony Manhattan venues, followed by lavish parties. The five networks, including the upstart CW, rounded up $9.3 billion in prime-time commercial sales in the weeks after last year's "upfront" presentations. But...

Broadcast TV networks' upfront advertising sales will be down this year, posting a drop of between 2% and 14%, a leading Wall Street analyst said. A "material decline is probable given ratings declines, the disruption in the development cycle due to the recent writers' strike and economic woes," Jessica Reif Cohen of Merrill Lynch said in a report published yesterday. Next week, the broadcast networks will meet with advertisers, presenting their fall schedules in what are expected to be less lavish circumstances than in past years. Production disruptions from the 100-day Writers Guild of America strike, as well as uncertainty...

AS REAL-LIFE broadcasters get set to announce their fall schedules next week in New York, they're still scratching their way out of a trench, otherwise known as the worst season in the history of the network TV business. Not a single one of the new fall series broke through to a big audience, even the ones that looked can't-fail on paper, such as ABC's spinoff "Private Practice" and NBC's now-dead revival of "Bionic Woman." Every network except Fox has posted significant ratings declines for the season. Even as existing series have gradually returned from the three-month writers strike, viewers have,...

Many top shows are back but ratings continue to fall By Toni Fitzgerald Apr 30, 2008 The writers’ strike is long over, but broadcast ratings have yet to return to their pre-strike levels. A number of shows have fallen to season or series lows following their return after the strike, and most are down from last fall. It’s a pattern seen across every network as the May sweeps kick off. Last week ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Ugly Betty” posted their second-lowest ratings in adults 18-49, averaging a 6.5 and 2.5, respectively, in their first original outings since January. Fox’s “American...

For the second week in a row, “The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric” has notched record low ratings. The newscast dropped some 50,000 viewers to average 5.34 million total viewers for the week of April 21, according to data from Nielsen Media Research. “Evening News” had averaged 5.39 million viewers the previous week. Finishing first in the broadcast network flagship news race for the week was “The NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” with 8.01 million total viewers. ABC’s “World News With Charles Gibson” averaged 7.79 million viewers, a quick rebound of some 280,000 from 7.51 million viewers the...

The WB brand, born as a broadcast network in 1995 and closed in 2006, will return as an online video Web site, combining short original series with classic shows, the Warner Brothers Television Group announced Monday. TheWB.com, and a complementary site for children called KidsWB.com, are part of a “digital destination” strategy by Warner Brothers, a subsidiary of Time Warner, to tailor Web sites to specific audiences. In trying to compete for consumers’ time, Warner and other media companies have sought new outlets for content, sometimes bypassing the traditional network structure and creating broadband Internet channels. “My 20-year-old daughter and...

Decreases in Ads and Viewers Mean Change Is in the Air for Big Three NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The big three TV network newscasts lost about 1.2 million viewers last year, and advertising on their three big morning news shows fell to an estimated $1.03 billion. The average viewer is 60 years old, and the demographic marketers most want to reach is more likely to be facing a computer screen than a TV screen when the evening news comes on. Collectively, ABC, NBC and CBS's network newscasts lost about 1.2 million viewers in 2007, according to an analysis of Nielsen...

Is there still money to be made from “Matlock”? Within the last few months, television distributors have opened up their libraries of classic content online, making thousands of episodes of programs like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” available free. On Monday, Warner Brothers is expected to add a new twist, announcing the rebirth of the WB broadcast network as an Internet destination and offering programs like “Everwood” online. In putting old episodes online, broadcasters are tapping into the “long tail” of niche content that the Internet has monetized. While executives are reticent about the costs involved,...

Our parents told us TV would melt our brains. While it's possible "Punky Brewster" and "A-Team" did just that, along the way we saw some genius art. Television can't play 90 minutes on the big screen and vanish into the bargain bin. And it lacks one author to take it from introduction to the final page. Yet within these boundaries, there are a small number of shows that capture our attention, our obsession, and create enduring stories. How many? 35. They're listed here.

Local television stations across the country are suffering a decline in advertising revenue in the tough economy, despite a blockbuster political season. Buffeted by the faltering real-estate market and shrinking auto sales, total ad revenue for local stations nationwide fell 2.3% in the first quarter compared with the year-earlier period, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising, a trade group for local stations. And the second quarter is on pace for a 3% to 5% decline... These figures follow a flurry of downbeat earnings reports and disclosures from television groups in recent weeks. Gannett and Journal Communications this week reported...

To judge by the ads, the most loyal adherents to CBS' quasi-journalistic programming are impotent and incontinent. It so happens that they share these afflictions with the network's actual news division. Katie Couric is reportedly itching to bolt her gig as the anchor of broadcast TV's worst-rated evening newscast. Last month, Shelley Ross lost her job producing The Early Show, the worst-rated morning newscast, after problems concerning temper tantrums and tequila parties. Most weeks, the perfectly decent Bob Schieffer, who will retire after the 2009 inauguration, sees Face the Nation to a finish as the third-rated Sunday show. And the...

Either the years haven't been kind to veteran actor Peter Falk or he wasn't having a very good day. The 80-year-old former Columbo star looked dazed and confused as he walked near his Beverly Hills home on Tuesday afternoon.

One week after media reports cast doubts about Katie Couric’s future on the “CBS Evening News,” the third-place broadcast set a new record low for viewership. The “CBS Evening News” attracted an average of 5.39 million viewers last week, placing the newscast more than two million viewers behind the second-place “World News with Charles Gibson” on ABC (7.51 million). The “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” ranked No. 1 for the week with 8.17 million viewers. While the network nightly newscasts have posted audience declines for more than two decades, a new record low for the “Evening News” will likely...

Thousands of Chinese Americans protested outside CNN's offices in Hollywood this morning, calling for the dismissal of commentator Jack Cafferty, whose recent remarks about Chinese goods and the Beijing government inflamed a community already angry about international condemnations directed at the host country of the upcoming Olympics. The protesters lined Sunset Boulevard from Cahuenga Boulevard to Wilcox Avenue chanting "Cafferty, Fire," and singing patriotic Chinese songs. "We understand free speech," said Lake Wang, 39, of Thousand Oaks. "But what if Cafferty said this about other racial groups? I think he would be fired. I think he's jealous of China." The...

CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves gave his embattled anchor and her news division a vote of confidence yesterday, telling a staff meeting that Katie Couric "is my anchor today, tomorrow and in the future." But the public display does not change the reality that Couric is likely to relinquish the anchor chair after the election, according to two top network executives who declined to be named discussing a private meeting. Moonves asked to address the Friday staff meeting, held at the CBS News offices in New York and broadcast to network bureaus around the world, out of concern that Couric...

So just how badly is Katie Couric doing ratings-wise, anyhow? That seems to be the big question following word last week that the “CBS Evening News” anchor would be eased out following the presidential election. The answer is pretty bad. Couric has seen viewer declines in just about every category except for median age, where “Evening News” has grown slightly older. That’s the one place CBS wasn’t looking to rise. While ABC and NBC have seen modest declines this year among total viewers and adults 25-54, Couric is down by double digits in each, after seeing double-digit declines last year...

Katie Couric may be the least of Leslie Moonves’s worries. While the fate of Ms. Couric and the “CBS Evening News” is in the headlines, the entire CBS News division represents only a fraction of the CBS broadcast network’s revenue. More perplexing is the prime-time schedule, where no new hit has emerged this year, and as a result, CBS is likely to lose the crown of most-watched network to the Fox network. And there are concerns over other parts of the CBS Corporation. The radio division is lagging. Pressure to make a digital acquisition is intensifying. Advertising revenue is softening....

If a journalism class of the future is asked to identify low points in the vaunted history of CBS News, it might do well to examine the second week of April 2008. Hours after word seeped out that CBS News and Katie Couric, the fresh face who was supposed to restore it to greatness, had discussed ending her contract more than two years early, a New York State judge ruled on Thursday that Dan Rather, the now craggy face who was synonymous with the CBS eye for a generation, could continue to pursue a lawsuit against his former employer. Only...

A wide-ranging discussion in February about Katie Couric’s future as the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” threatened on Thursday to turn her into a virtual lame duck in the job. The discussion took place in New York on Feb. 28 and involved four people: Ms. Couric; her agent, Alan Berger of the Creative Artists Agency; Sean McManus, the president of CBS News; and Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. The meeting took place in Mr. Moonves’s office. The conversation included what one participant said was some “idle talk and musings” about the big question hanging over CBS News: should...