Press Releases: 10/12/11

CNN (1)

Western States, Issues Take Center Stage for CNN, WRLC Debate

Anderson Cooper to Moderate the Oct. 18 Face-off among Eight Presidential Contenders in Las Vegas

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper will moderate the Tuesday, Oct. 18 debate presented by CNN and the Western Republican Leadership Conference (WRLC). The debate, which will air live from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. (ET), will be broadcast from The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Voters from the 16 states and territories that make up the Western region of the United States will be in the audience and will have an opportunity to pose questions directly to the candidates. Nevada will be one of the first states to vote in the Republican presidential primary process in 2012, as chosen by the Republican National Committee.

The following eight presidential contenders will participate in the debate: Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, businessman Herman Cain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

September Numbers: CNBC Digital…

CNBC Digital is noting its September ratings…

CNBC DIGITAL SETS NEW SEPTEMBER RECORDS

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. – October 12, 2011 – CNBC.com, the online destination for global business news and expert analysis, had its best September ever in terms of both uniques and page views. According to the latest data from comScore Media Metrix, the site was visited by 6.6 million unique users last month, a 37% increase compared to the same time period last year, and recorded 371 MM page views, a 44% increase year-over-year.

CNBC Mobile also scored records for September. CNBC Mobile Web recorded 84 MM page views which represents a 59% increase year-over-year (Source: Omniture). CNBC’s Real-Time iPhone App posted 73 MM page views, representing a 101% increase year-over-year, and also saw unique visitors increase by 18% compared to the same time period as last year (Source: Omniture). CNBC’s Real-Time Android App saw a 97% increase in page views year-over-year (Source: Omniture).

Additional September 2011 highlights include:

Dylan Ratigan Profile…

The New York Observer’s Ken Stoeffel interviews Dylan Ratigan…

Mr. Ratigan was down at Zuccotti Park most of last weekend, interviewing participants and chatting them up about his new crusade on behalf of campaign finance reform. Late last month, Mr. Ratigan established a foundation called Get Money Out with the goal of amending the Constitution to forbid private campaign contributions. Since September 27, he’s racked up more than 170,000 signatures.

“Some love it, some hate it,” he told Off the Record of the protesters.

But he’s not asking them to organize around his cause, or any other one, for that matter.

“The desire to create a list of demands is a function of those who are threatened, trying to put them in a box,” Mr. Ratigan explained.

Free for All: 10/12/11

What’s on your mind?

Crossover-itis?

Postmedia News’ Misty Harris writes about anchors that branch out or “cross over” into realms that anchors aren’t normally associated with…

Crossover acts are not new. Barbara Walters, Geraldo Rivera, Julie Chen and Katie Couric have all traversed the line between serious news and more superficial entertainment.

Thompson notes that even the great Edward R. Murrow – a newsman whose name was synonymous with stoicism and integrity – saw his highest ratings with Person to Person, a pop culture show that pioneered the celebrity interview.

However, thanks to the combined forces of lowered attention spans, greater competition and vertical media integration, Thompson says the trend “has never been more blatant, or unapologetic.” And with YouTube allowing otherwise fleeting moments to endure forever, the strategy can backfire as much as it can boost.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Newscasters+celebrity+undermining+journalism+credibility/5536994/story.html#ixzz1aZbnRiit

Bloomberg/Washington Post GOP Debate: Your Reactions…

Post your reactions to tonight’s Bloomberg/Washington Post GOP debate here…

Inside Tamron Hall…

The Atlantic Wire’s John Hudson interviews Tamron Hall…

What I present on air and what we present on our show is information. I don’t want to be a pundit. I don’t want to be a partisan. I have no desire. Obviously, I know MSNBC is associated with being liberal. I look at it this way: a) that’s not a bad association, b) if you watch our program you would clearly see that there’s a difference between our show and primetime. I admire Lawrence O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Reverend Al Sharpton. I have great admiration for them. But it’s not something I am interested in. I know why I’m a journalist and why I chose to enter this profession. I was raised in the red state of Texas and I love my state. I also enjoy living in New York and going to gay pride parades with my best friends.

I remember being on a plane chatting with this off-duty pilot who started railing against MSNBC and how it’s liberal. I asked him what he watches and he said Fox News. I refrained from giving him a little dose of tough love. But he clearly chooses to subscribe to a certain perspective that he believes. MSNBC provides another important piece of the puzzle in this country.

Free for All: 10/11/11

What’s on your mind? Mine’s on getting my Palau 2010 dive videos on YouTube. Here’s one of them…

Lori Rothman Profile…

Palm Beach Woman profiles FBN’s Lori Rothman…

”All through school I was passionate about history and storytelling,” Rothman said. “I loved to interview and write articles.” She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcast journalism and history from the University of Southern California and went on to anchor the news for television stations in Alaska, Colorado and New York.

”I just wanted to get my feet wet and get some on-air experience before committing to a long term career in TV,” Rothman explained. “Those initial years showed me that TV often demands long, tough hours, and it’s tough to have a personal life. So it wasn’t that I aspired to be on national news as much as that I wanted a stable and balanced life. If I’d achieved the latter in a local market, I would’ve been thrilled. But I did get an opportunity in New York City that I couldn’t turn down, and I’m incredibly fortunate that, with that, came the balance I wanted.”

Rothman had been at Bloomberg News for 10 years when a conversation with a colleague inspired her to speak with the people at FOX. ”It turned out to be the best career decision,” Rothman said. “Here at FBN, my range as a broadcaster is constantly challenged, and I’m given so many opportunities on various platforms and subjects. And with the news flow and volatile markets lately, it’s never dull!”

FNC Unveils Modified Set for “Studio B/Fox Report”

The Fox Files has a nice image collection of the new changes to the set that hosts Studio B and The Fox Report with Shepard Smith… (via J$)

Free for All: 10/10/11

What’s on your mind?

Hank Williams Jr. vs. Fox and Friends?

The AP’s Chris Talbott writes about Hank Williams Jr. writing a new song after his controversial appearance on Fox and Friends last week that resulted in his “All my rowdy friends” song getting yanked from ESPN’s Monday Night Football…

Williams wrote the topical third verse of “I’ll Keep My …” when he woke up Friday morning and he and a group of players laid it down in a Nashville studio by Friday afternoon. It could be on iTunes late Monday or early Tuesday.

In the song Williams, son of country music icon Hank Williams, says “Fox & Friends” hosts twisted his words: “So Fox ‘n Friends wanna put me down/Ask for my opinion/Twist it all around.” He finishes the verse: “Well two can play that gotcha game you’ll see.”

Early in the song, he says the U.S. is “going down the drain” and says it’s becoming “The United Socialist States of America.” He mentions keeping “Fox & Friends” and ESPN out of your home toward the end of the song.

CNBC Expands Squawk on the Street to Three Hours…

Not sure how I missed this Friday but Talking Biz News has the internal memo from Senior Vice President Nik Deogun announcing that Squawk on the Street will be expanding to three hours…

What’s Hot/What’s Not: 10/09/11

What’s Hot:

OutFront – Erin Burnett’s CNN show debuted this week and immediately made headlines for its Occupy Wall Street segment. Whether those headlines were a positive or a negative…only time will tell.

Occupy Wall Street – I’m not going to weigh into whether this is the Left’s “Tea Party moment” or not. But whatever it is, it was making news, good and bad, on all the networks.

FNC’s 15th Anniversary – A reason to celebrate being the leader in cable news in such dominant fashion for a very long time. I guess we can expect a moving retrospective of how FNC’s evolved over the last 15 years…

What’s Not:

FNC’s 15th Anniversary Special – Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll get that but have it also double as a big middle finger to anyone who possibly doubted the network would get there. Gracious winner? Not in Roger Ailes’ playbook apparently.

Side Note: When I wrote about what Cable News is doing wrong for Mediaite I noted cable news’ embrace of all things political could be trace its roots back to the Clinton/Lewinski scandal but at the time I didn’t offer any proof to back up that point. The FNC 15th Anniversary special provided such proof when it noted that Special Report with Brit Hume launched when the Lewinski scandal broke wide open. Coincidence? No way.

4 on 1 The Five Becomes Permanent – Do I really need to give a reason?

HLN infects CNN – HLN was supposed to be the network that was the one that covered the murder trial of Dr. Conrad Murray. But apparently CNN didn’t get that memo because two weeks ago Don Lemon was staked out in California covering the trial and this week Randi Kaye was staked out in California covering the trial.

Steve Jobs’ death coverage – Can you say “Overkill lacking in proper perspective”? Cable news can’t apparently…

Neil Cavuto Profile…

The Orange County Register’s Peter Larsen profiles Neil Cavuto…

“We had tapped something here with my daily show, ‘Your World,’ and the four weekend business shows,” Cavuto says. “Those happened to be the top five shows on business in America, and we felt that if that hit a chord with people, maybe a channel that followed on that, in English, not wonky, (would succeed).

As with Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network took a little time to build its audience, facing the usual growing pains of gaining spots on the rosters of cable carriers and educating viewers that they were there to be watched.

“For all its limitations and limitations getting launched, we have become a force,” Cavuto says of FBN. “I think that when people are exposed to us and see us they like us.”

He’s now on the air for approximately 11 programs a week, two a day on weekdays and one on the weekend, though special programs often bring him back into the studio. As for what’s different between his two main programs, “Your World” on FNC and “Cavuto” on FBN?

“One is more fine-tuned the other is big picture,” Cavuto says. “You have the liberty at Fox Business News to be a little more business hardcore. You can go longer on interviews. I think with a general news audience (on Fox News Channel), an extended CEO interview can get a little taxing.”

What’s Hot/What’s Not: Submissions…

Post your nominations for this week’s What’s Hot/What’s Not. I’ll post the finalists Sunday night…

Occupy Wall Street = Left Wing Cable TV Moment?

Politico’s Keach Hagey smartly writes about Occupy Wall Street and how it’s drawing Progressive TV…

The enthusiastic coverage from Current and MSNBC at times has seemed like a mirror image of Fox News’s cheerleading for the early tea party rallies, giving credibility to those who argue that the movement could be the left’s tea party. But those who are running the coverage deny that they have stepped over the line from journalism to activism.

“We were there covering the event to find out what the story was all about, not to promote a specific agenda that any of the protesters had last night,” said Rich Stockwell, the executive producer of “The Ed Show.”

In fact, they had not even planned to anchor the show from the protests on Wednesday night, but after going down to shoot some interviews that afternoon and seeing the size of the crowds — ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 — and hearing complaints that echoed many that Schultz makes nightly on his show, they made a last-minute change.

Stockwell said that the show had been monitoring the protests for weeks but did not cover them until Monday, following the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday

Press Releases: 10/07/11

Bloomberg (1)

LINKEDIN JOINS BLOOMBERG AND THE WASHINGTON POST FOR FIRST ECONOMIC DEBATE ON OCTOBER 11th

Insights from Professionals Play a Role in Shaping Questions

New York (October 7, 2011) – LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with more than 120 million members, is joining Bloomberg and The Washington Post next Tuesday, October 11th at 8pm ET for the first, and perhaps only, debate of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign focused solely on the economy. LinkedIn will tap into their U.S. members, compiling data and insights to help inform questions asked at the debate.

“With over 14 million unemployed Americans, and the unemployment rate averaging at 9.2 percent over the last 12 months, jobs and restarting the economy will be the hot topics of this debate,” said Andrew Morse, head of U.S. television for Bloomberg. “Who better to bring into the conversation than LinkedIn, the company that truly has its finger on the pulse of today’s modern workforce.”

The Case of the Mystery CNBC Tape Lines…

Anyone care to venture a guess about what these new lines at the bottom of the screen are? I don’t watch CNBC docs much but an emailer says this is something new. But what?

Update: Mystery solved courtesy of Newscast Studio…

It’s part of the new CNBC “Smart” brand, complete with a crawl and new promo graphics.

Free for All: 10/07/11

What’s on your mind?

Bloomberg TV’s Politics Expansion…

The LA Times’ Joe Flint writes about Bloomberg TV moving into the political arena…

A strong performance from the debate may help Bloomberg bolster its efforts to get better carriage from cable and satellite broadcasters. Currently, Bloomberg is in about 70 million homes while CNBC is in around 100 million. Bloomberg is in a particularly nasty fight with CNBC parent Comcast Corp. over where it is carried in relation to the placement CNBC gets.

Bret Baier Interview

TV Guide’s Stephen Battaglio interviews Bret Baier…

V Guide Magazine: So many of the Fox News on-air anchors have been there since the launch. Why is there such longevity and loyalty?

Baier: There is a family aspect to it. The company really takes care of people if you go through a tough time. [Fox News chairman] Roger Ailes was one of the first people I received a call from when my son was diagnosed with a heart condition and had to go into surgery. That’s one reason. Two is, even when we became number one, we had the scrappy start-up mentality that unified folks from the beginning. When you’re number one, you come under fire a lot, and we have. That also unifies folks, especially when you believe in the journalistic stuff that we’re doing.

Trashing Erin Burnett…

My eyebrows were raised last night when I read David Zurawik’s epic trashing of Erin Burnett for her Occupy Wall Street segment. After all, Mediaite’s Frances Martel thought Burnett was in her zone. So I wondered how this segment would play out as time passed by.

Well time has passed by and most of the reactions I’ve seen have been more along the lines of Zurawik’s than Martel’s. Variety’s Brian Lowry trashed her. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald piled on as did The Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins, Daily Bail, and The Atlantic’s Adam Clarke Estes.

It’s early days yet in Burnett’s show but people are now going to be watching to see whether this was just an early stumble or a sign of things to come?

Ragitan vs. Schultz…

It’s not like we haven’t had this happen before, but Ed Schultz got into it with Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC today and the end result was Schultz (figuratively) stormed off. The Huffington Post reports…

“You’re not gonna do this overnight,” Schultz said, adding that Obama had been honest about this and that Ratigan seemed to want to wave a “magic wand.” Ratigan tried to cut in, causing Schultz to angrily push back.

“I didn’t interrupt you!” he said. “I just want to address–” Ratigan started to say. “I don’t care what you want to address!” Schultz shouted back. “I didn’t interrupt you!”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Ratigan said. “I apologize.” Roberts tried to calm everyone down, and Schultz continued, saying that the jobs bill would create “several million” jobs. “1.2 million,” Ratigan cut in. This led to more crosstalk, until Schultz had had enough.

“I gotta go back and do my radio show,” he said. “I’m not going to be interrupted by Dylan.” With that, he left the discussion.

Free for All: 10/06/11

What’s on your mind?

Rachel Maddow Profile…

The Hollywood Reporter’s Marissa Guthrie profiles Rachel Maddow…

Maddow — AIDS activist, Rhodes scholar and defense nerd (she’s writing a book on the military, and her father is a former Air Force captain) — is something of an anomaly in the old boys club of cable news punditry. She approaches her show as an advocate, dedicating extensive coverage to an anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda that sought to criminalize same-sex relations, prisoner abuse in the Los Angeles County Jail and frequent segments on AIDS policy in the U.S. She runs the daily 2 p.m. editorial meeting like a graduate seminar, challenging her young staff of a dozen producers to defend their segment pitches. A recent meeting on the afternoon the Obama administration announced that a drone strike had killed radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an Al Qaeda leader and American citizen, revolves around due process but also the “cognitive dissonance” of the Republican narrative that Democrats are soft on terror.

“It’s hard to have due process with a drone. And Jesus Christ, who is Obama not going to kill? I feel like we could do the whole show on al-Awlaki,” says Maddow. “I don’t know if we should.”

Executive producer Bill Wolff votes yes. “It’s not like anybody’s flocking to cable news right now. It would be a brand play,” he says.

“It has to pay off though,” says Maddow. “I think the key is to not stretch to do it, but to be qualitatively rigorous.” But while she earnestly stands up for pet causes, she’s also just as comfortable launching zingers at right-wing foes. She compares New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — who was being urged to enter a bereft Republican presidential field — to Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. “He’s Christie, the Insult Comic Governor,” she says.

Press Releases: 10/05/11

CNN (2)

Maria Cardona and David Frum Join CNN as Political Contributors

Democratic strategist Maria Cardona and conservative columnist David Frum have joined the network for the 2012 election season, it was announced today by Sam Feist, CNN senior vice president and Washington bureau chief.

“Having spent all of my professional career in communications, public policy, and politics, I’m thrilled to join CNN as a political contributor, especially as we are entering the excitement of the upcoming 2012 presidential election cycle,” said Maria Cardona.

“CNN is where the national conversation starts,” said David Frum. “In this exciting election year, I am truly honored to join that conversation.”

Cable News Polarization?

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson writes about comments Steve Capus made today at the Washington Ideas Forum…

Competition among cable news outlets can create an environment that is “harmful to journalism,” NBC News president Steve Capus said Wednesday at the Washington Ideas Forum in Washington, D.C. Responding to a question about the increasing polarization of politics, Capus said the “cable side” can sometimes amplify the national rancor.

NBC News is the home of political cable news network MSNBC, which has staked out a left-of-center viewpoint in recent years.

“So are you getting out of [cable news]?” asked David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, who was also on the panel with Ben Sherwood, president of ABC News.

“I don’t think the mandate of Brian Williams is the same as Rachel Maddow on MSNBC,” Capus responded. “Nor do I think what Fox News does tonight is what Chris Wallace does on Sundays. I think there’s a place for all three cable outlets.”

Free for All: 10/05/11

What’s on your mind?

Roger Ailes Interview…

The AP’s Frazier Moore interviews Roger Ailes in conjunction with FNC’s 15th Anniversary…

At Fox, there’s also a consistency in leadership — consistency in Ailes’ laser-focused vision for the network — that other networks can’t come close to matching. From them, “there have been 14 or 15 senior executives thrown at me,” Ailes says. “So part of their problem is, the corporations lost confidence in their own senior executives. I think that helped me some. I think their screw-ups may have been corporate in nature, in the sense that if they had great executives in there, they didn’t back ‘em. And some of them WEREN’T great executives.”

While he allows that, in the beginning, he “underestimated a little bit” how hard it would be to seize the ratings mantle from his rivals, “I had not counted on them screwing up as much,” he hastily adds.

Ailes, who calls himself “a television producer by trade” and understands TV in his bones as well as anyone alive, points to CNN’s “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer” as an example of how the competition falls short.

“Wolf Blitzer is an excellent reporter, but he’s not a star,” says Ailes. And since the format of the show calls for Blitzer to highlight visuals on the “news wall” behind him, “he spends half of his time with his back to the camera. I like Wolf. I think he’s a good journalist. But I get offended that his back is to the camera.” (CNN declined to respond.)