STALLED FOX
 As
the cable noise networks gear up for this fall's general election
campaign, Fox News, the most dominant cable news channel for
nearly a decade and a political force in its own right, has watched its
once formidable advantage over CNN erode to a narrow margin.
Jacques
Steinberg reports in the New York Times that
second-quarter Nielsen numbers due out this week will show that Fox
News holds just a sliver of a prime-time lead among viewers
aged 25 to 54. Fox has an average nightly audience of 440,000,
compared to CNN's 420,000. MSNBC has 303,000 nightly
viewers in the demo.
The last time America elected a president
(2004), Fox News more than doubled CNN's viewership —
530,000 to 248,000. Times have changed.
“I don't think it’s that Fox
has slipped,” said Republican strategist Scott Reed. “I just
think MSNBC and CNN have risen to the occasion in a far
more creative way, with better guests, cooler maps and more interactive
shows.”
Fox News's growth has effectively
stalled, while CNN and MSNBC have both grown by more than
50 percent this year, thanks, in large part, to their focus on
politics.
 MSNBC
plans to accelerate its political coverage in the months
ahead and will go wall-to-wall from the Democratic and Republican
national conventions later this summer. Chris Matthews and
Keith Olbermann will be the prime-time ringmasters working on
outdoor sets in St. Paul and Denver.
"The difference I see in MSNBC
is that it used to cling to the idea of `just the facts, ma'am' for all
of its broadcasts," said veteran news executive Richard Wald,
now a Columbia University professor. "Now it's gotten into
much more edge and a much more aggressive kind of talk rather than
reporting."
<<<>>>
AMORAL ORGANISM
 Ivor
Tossell admits, "I killed Tim Russert (on
Wikipedia)."
"There's something poignant about
how simple it is, the act of killing someone on Wikipedia," he
writes in Friday's Globe and Mail. "It's no great song
and dance. Really, it just comes down to adding a second year after
their birth date, and then going through the rest of the piece, changing
everything to the past tense. It should be poetic, but in practice it
feels more like being a teller closing a bank account."
Tossell explains how NBC
held off on reporting the news of Russert's death for almost two
hours so that his family could be informed. The network asked its
competitors to do the same, and most complied.
"But the online swarm is an
amoral organism that doesn't have much use for clubby gentlemen's
agreements," he writes. "What is it about breaking news
that can turn bemused onlookers into frothing fan-boys?"
<<<>>>
Scratch the surface of all those
glittering tributes to Tim Russert, and you might find an
undercoating of journalistic insecurity, writes
Howard Kurtz in today's Washington Post. The
emotional farewells to Russert, which ultimately came to feel
excessive, seemed rooted in journalism's crisis of confidence.
<<<>>>
With Tom Brokaw at the helm, NBC
tried to give Sunday's "Meet the Press" an entirely
different look and feel.
<<<>>>
STILL A MESS
 Wikipedia
finally flagged the
entry for former Chicago news anchor Diann Burns on Friday,
after a mention in the Chicago Sun-Times, and Wiki editors
have been busily rewriting the "unsourced or poorly sourced
controversial claims" about Burns. One editor noted that
some of the "unreferenced material may actually be slanderous."
More
than 15 rewrites were logged Friday, and one exasperated editor
noted, "It's hard to know even where to begin with this obviously
grossly self-promoted entry. This thing is still a mess."
Burns, who began the week as
"Chicago's best-known, most-loved and highest paid TV news
personality" is now simply "a former Chicago TV news
personality."
<<<>>>
BATHROBE JOURNALISM
Howell Raines, former executive
editor of the New York Times, writes
about blogger Jim Romenesko in the July issue of Condé Nast's
Portfolio.
 Romenesko
began his MediaGossip blog about newspaper journalism in 1998,
the same year NewsBlues started writing about television news.
The following year, Romenesko was embraced by the Poynter
Institute, journalism's think tank in St. Petersburg, FL. He's now Poynter’s
highest-paid non-executive employee, at more than $170,000 a year.
And Raines can't ignore the irony
of it all. Romenesko, "a shy journalism nerd from
Wisconsin," rose to prominence...and a salary few newspaper writers
can even dream of today...on the back of an industry he helped sink
with his daily leaks and revelations.
"Hard times have hit the newspaper
business," admits Raines, "and today, many editors are
grousing that Romenesko’s blog at poynter.org feeds
gloom and doom in the nation’s newsrooms with its instantaneous
reporting of layoffs, declining ad revenues, and fire-sale prices being
paid for metropolitan dailies."
<<<>>>
 One
word used too often, and usually incorrectly, by TV news people is
"tragedy." Most of what is called a tragedy is
really a calamity or a catastrophe. A tragedy occurs when
an individual causes his own downfall.
But the case of Larry Mendte is a
true example of tragedy, says
columnist Neal Zoren.
<<<>>>
The Aristo-cad. Why does Earl
Spencer
treat his women so badly?
<<<>>>
Chrissy
Russo, who anchors the morning weather and traffic on Grupo
Televisa's XETV-6-Fox in San Diego (Market #27), reportedly left the
station last week and is expected to resurface across the street at Tribune's
KSWB-69-CW in August, when the station switches to Fox and
debuts its new morning show.
 <<<>>>
Sports guy Marc Soicher, whose
contract expires July 18 at Tribune's KWGN-2-CW in Denver (Market
#18), will
not be renewed and his position will not be filled. Soicher's
younger brother Drew remains the main sports anchor across the
street at top-rated KUSA-9-NBC.
 <<<>>>
Sports guy Scott Garceau is out
the door after 28 years on the air in Baltimore. He's leaving Scripps-owned
WMAR-2-ABC on
Thursday to "pursue other broadcast opportunities."
<<<>>>
 Marla
Weech, once the grande dame of Orlando TV personalities, was let go
from Post-Newsweek's WKMG-6-CBS on Friday. GM
Henry Maldonado cited "tough economic times." 
Maldonado neglected to mention
that the station continues to pay Mark McEwen, who hasn't
anchored on WKMG since November 2005 and does only occasional
personal appearances on the station's behalf.
<<<>>>
 Cynthia
Kaump, a reporter at Local TV's WITI-6-Fox in Milwaukee
(Market #34), says
she's leaving the station after four years to "take a LONG
vacation, take it easy and enjoy this wonderful time in my life." A
cancer survivor, she is expecting her first child in December.
 <<<>>>
Michelle Smith is
leaving as anchor at WRGB-6-CBS in Albany, NY (Market #56),
to prepare for the birth of her second child. Her husband, Morgan
Hook, left the station earlier this year for a job in state
government.
<<<>>>
 Dan
Ball, morning news anchor at Desert Television's KPSP-2-CBS
in Palm Springs (Market #144), has been hired to report and anchor
weekends at KVBC-3-NBC in Las Vegas (Market #43)...a 101 market
jump (and a 280 mile drive), if you're keeping score.
Ball was among those questioned in
May about sexual harassment claims brought against then-news director Tony
Ballew, who later left KPSP.
<<<>>>
Steve MacDonald, longtime
assistant news director at KTUU-2-NBC in Anchorage (Market #150),
has
been promoted to news director, filling the gap left by his boss John
Tracy, who leaves tomorrow for a new career in pee-ahr.
<<<>>>
ENGINE DONE BLOWED
Don
Evans, traffic reporter and pilot for WKYT-27-CBS in
Lexington (Market #64), was flying a small plane on vacation, headed to
Florida, when
it had a catastrophic engine failure near Gadsden, AL, Friday night.
He was able to land the single-engine
plane safely in a farmer's field...then sat sipping iced tea on the
man's porch as they waited for emergency officials to arrive.
Evans is a cool customer with more
than 5,000 flight hours and a commercial rating in both fixed-wing
aircraft and helicopters. He's been a Lexington cop since 1990.
<<<>>>
 MRS.
BLUEZETTE'S GRAMMAR YAMMER
"A PBS mind in an MTV world."
Mrs. B thinks it may be time for a
refresher myself lesson.
Take a look at part of a message one of Mrs. B's readers received:
We invite you to try out Google Site
Search for your website and start improving your customer experience
today! Myself and other Site Search sales representatives are also
available to answer any questions you may have.
The second sentence should read:
~I myself and other Site Search
sales representatives are also available to answer any questions you may
have.
Or, more politely:
~Other Site Search sales representatives
and I myself are also available to answer any questions you may
have.
The only way to use myself
correctly is intensively or reflexively.
Look at these examples:
~I myself will take care of the
scheduling this week. (intensive)
~I told myself I had to get an
interview with the mayor. (reflexive)
Mrs. B herself encourages her readers to
pay attention to their pronouns today.
She told herself that this is an important lesson.
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