 |
| Brownsville, TX |
 |
| Helena, Montana |
 |
| Marysville, CA |
 |
Newark, NJ |
 |
| And The Best Of The Day Goes To The New York Daily News! Newspaper covers courtesy of newseum.org And on the radio...kudos to CBS Radio's WOCL in Orlando. 105.9 Sunny took "Last Requests" all day. You can't do that if you're voice tracking! |
Several veteran and prize-winning journalists who covered presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush say that the current crop of White House correspondents are too timid and deferential and have played a role in killing the impact of presidential news conferences.
"If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president," says Sid Davis, the former NBC Washington bureau chief who covered nine presidents. "It looks like they are watching a funeral service at [Washington funeral firm] Joseph Gawler's and it shouldn't be that way."
Ed Wexler for USN&WR
Adds Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Haynes Johnson, "It's all very stale, very structured, very pale."
And longtime NBC and ABC reporter Sander Vanocur: "You want to know what's wrong with the press? The press is what's wrong with the press."
They and others anchored a media panel Monday night organized by the White House Historical Association to herald the 50th anniversary of the first live televised news conference, conducted by JFK. Former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry moderated the discussion from the very same State Department Dean Acheson Auditorium where Kennedy eventually conducted 60 televised news conferences with ease and humor.
 |
| Alberta Prime Time photo |
Chris Licht, the behind-the-scenes member of the “Morning Joe” band, is leaving MSNBC and becoming the vice president of programming at CBS News.Read More.
Mr. Licht’s hiring was announced by CBS News on Thursday morning. At CBS, he will try to inject new energy into the network’s long-troubled morning show, “The Early Show,” and develop other programs and projects. Though the morning show will be his “first focus,” Mr. Licht said in an interview, “I will be doing whatever I can to help.”
Washington Post photo
Mr. Licht is part of a reboot by CBS News — the third-place network news division — at a time when Katie Couric is leaving and Scott Pelley, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, is replacing her on the “CBS Evening News.” Along with a new anchor, the news division has a new chairman, a new president, new bosses on several of its programs, and a plan to pump up its hard news credentials.
A departure from MSNBC by Mr. Licht has been the subject of much speculation in the television news business for several weeks. He was a creator and is the executive producer of “Morning Joe,” the free-wheeling talk show that is envied by competitors for its A-list bookings and for the chemistry between Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and the regulars that join them on their set at Rockefeller Center.
On “Morning Joe,” Mr. Licht often pops up on camera in the control room to read viewer e-mails and joke with Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski. Inseparable is an apt word to describe the trio.
The death of Osama bin Laden continued to dominate the news last week, but the narrative finally began to shift from dissecting the May 1 raid to more controversial topics, such as politics and Pakistan.
From May 9-15, the bin Laden saga filled 24% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That represents a drop off of nearly two thirds from the previous week (69%), as measured by PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index, but it was still nearly triple the attention to any other story.
A week earlier, the bin Laden story was the biggest ever measured in a single week by PEJ, since it began this research in January 2007.
The bin Laden saga generated the most coverage last week on cable news—41% of the airtime studied. But there were dramatic differences among the three major channels. While CNN devoted about two-thirds of its airtime (65%) to the subject, that dropped to about one-third (35%) on MSNBC. Fox meanwhile, devoted only one-fifth of its newshole (20%) to bin Laden.Read More.
Our data from the last few years reveals that cable news, particularly MSNBC and Fox, tends to focus on topics about which there is more inherent ideological divide.
Aside from the drop in overall coverage, there were significant changes in how the story was covered last week. The story line that had stood out above all others the first week after the raid, reconstructing what happened at bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad Pakistan, accounted for less than 10% of the coverage after representing more than one-third the week before.
[Thursday] marks Katie Couric’s last night at the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News. Five years ago, CBS executives were so excited about the Today show star taking over, her September 5, 2006 debut was preceded by a massive publicity campaign. Outgoing interim anchor Bob Schieffer vouched for his replacement: “She’s tough, she’s fair, she’s a straight shooter....Just watch.” Long-retired anchorman Walter Cronkite even lent his voice to a new opening segment, announcing: “This is the CBS Evening News, with Katie Couric.”
Intrigued by the publicity, more than 13 million Americans tuned into that first night, according to Nielsen research, but Couric’s honeymoon was brief. CBS had been in third place for years under Dan Rather and Schieffer, but the slide worsened after Couric took over. By August 2010, the CBS Evening News was recording its lowest ratings ever — fewer than 5 million viewers.
Under Dan Rather, the CBS Evening News was the poster-child of liberal media bias, with the broadcast’s reputation suffering its worst hit after Rather’s almost-comical attempt to sabotage President Bush’s 2004 re-election. Couric’s years at NBC’s Today, however, were marked by a similar liberal tilt that made her a questionable choice to rebuild the damaged network. In the end, the reputed $15 million per year that CBS spent on its new star was just money down the drain.Read More.
For a flavor of the liberal agenda that marked Couric’s tenure at CBS News, the Media Research Center has assembled, in no particular order, ten of her most biased moments, showcasing her infatuation with liberal politicians and her chirpy promotion of left-wing policies.
Read More.For more than a year, coverage of the New York Times as a business has been relentlessly about its “metered model” pay wall and other digital matters. But without any media news notice, the newspaper has engineered a coup on the legacy side of its operations.
Essentially, it has replaced telemarketing as a source of selling new subscriptions with “events marketing” — pitching a booth at a well-trafficked venue like the U.S. Open tennis tournament or the South by Southwest conference in Austin and trying to sign up passers-by.
The new sales channel has grown from a handful of local events like the U.S. Open in the mid-2000s to 850 last year, a little over a third in New York and the rest national.
Ray Pearce, the Times’s vice president of circulation, declined in a phone interview to say just how many new subs the program is yielding — but it is surely in the tens of thousands. Pearce said that events have become the second largest sales channel after the Web and that the program will expand further in 2011.
Like the rest of the industry, Pearce said, the New York Times found that selling subscriptions by phone became less effective and much more expensive as the federal “do-not-call” registry was put in place.
 |
| NBCSports.com photo |
Chances are, your local country radio programmer isn't thrilled with the prospects of the two teen singers from American Idol headed his or her way this summer. Especially with one of them being Scotty McCreery.
"I'm calling in sick the day they bring Scotty by on radio tour," Toni-Marie, music director for Bakersfield, Calif., station 107.9 FM KUZZ, tells Radio-Info.com's Phyllis Stark in her latest Stark Country newsletter.
"I wish people would quit comparing this kid to Josh Turner. He attempts to sound like him, but the only thing he is successful at is looking like the kid on MAD magazines ... Maybe Scotty does have some potential. I don't see it, but he needs someone to teach him to be who Scotty is. Quit doing JT covers and doing that weird eye thing that only Queen Reba can get away with."
I've known all along that many people who spend a lot of time listening to country don't think Scotty's a particularly good singer -- yet. And it's hard to remember now, but there was a lot of skepticism surrounding Carrie Underwood when she came off the show. Still, I was surprised at the level of vitriol programmers aimed at the 17-year-old in Stark's column.
 |
| Bill Rose |
 |
| WAFF.com photo |
Read More.You could say [Tuesday night] was Chicago's version of the Oscars. That's because some of the biggest names in Hollywood are expected at the United Center when Oprah Winfrey taped "Surprise Oprah! A Farewell Spectacular."
Chicago Tribune photo
[Arroyave] was in attendance and updated the blog throughout the night, letting you know which celebrities showed up.
TV news honcho Chris Licht was used to calling the shots as executive producer of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, but that changed one day when something popped inside his skull.
Washington Post photo
Instead of prepping for another episode of the successful morning show with hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the author, not yet 40, landed in the emergency room. There, he learned that his brain was bleeding—and no one knew exactly why. Licht, who up until then was the picture of health, found that he was no longer in control.
What followed was a harrowing ordeal that, even if it didn’t ultimately kill him, was destined to change him in ways that he could never have dreamed of before. As a “stop and smell the roses” parable, Licht’s tale of sudden life-threatening illness covers familiar ground. Still, hearing how this classic type-A personality was forced to confront some hard truths about himself in order to survive makes for a compelling exercise.
Readers might not care much about how attentively Scarborough and Brzezinski buzzed around his bedside, or that Vice President Joe Biden personally got on the phone with the hospital in an effort to ensure his recovery. But other candid observations, like the impact the author’s steady-as-a-rock father had on his son’s healing, are right on the money.
