With Oprah Winfrey scheduled to run her new cable network in a joint venture with Discovery beginning next year, there is increasing speculation she may discontinue her daily talk show strip when her contract with CBS Television Distribution expires in 2011. The speculation increased when Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav revealed in an earnings report a few days ago that […]
Forget the goat, it’s this guy’s fault the Cubs didn’t win. There’s only one Floptober… Remember when I said Darkmane (from those X Games spots) couldn’t foil the X Games but could show up at Wrigley to foil the Cubs chances at going to the World Series? Not only he succeeded, but he also managed to find time to show […]
If you think radio stations in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are worrying about Arbitron’s Portable People Meters – then you haven’t seen anything yet. Television executives in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Cleveland are sweating it out over the next several months as Local People Meters – or LPMs, become the standard of measurement for television ratings measured by Nielsen. […]
According to an article from Robert Feder in today’s Sun-Times, CBS-owned WBBM-TV GM Joe Ahern threw himself a big birthday party at a trendy Loop restaurant two months ago. Guess who got the tab…. some of the station’s employees. After Ahern sought reimbursement from CBS, Channel 2’s controller turned him away. So, he made the department heads and managers pick […]
(Editor’s Note: A rough draft appeared earlier here by mistake, resulting in an error in the second paragraph which has since been corrected. In other words, the word “repeat” should have been where “new” was. – T.H.) Maybe yesterday’s White Sox-Royals brawl may serve as an indication people in Kansas City (and certainly Minnesota) may be sick of anything coming […]
Music awards show is also gone -for now. But a Soul Train Movie is in development In the post below, I mentioned the fate of U.S. Farm Report, one of two programs which were left hanging after the shuttering of Tribune Entertainment. Now the other shoe has dropped for the other show. The Soul Train Music Awards was canceled this […]
All right, the strike is finally over. Now comes the toughest task of all: trying to win the viewers back. When Major League Baseball went on strike in 1994 and when the NHL players were locked out twice in the last fifteen years, it hurt both sports tremendously, and some teams are still feeling the effects. Locally, the Chicago White […]
This week’s issue of Crain’s Chicago Business details the continuing ratings struggle of CBS-owned WBBM-TV. Joe Ahern, who helped rocket competing WLS-TV into a ratings powerhouse in the ’80’s and ’90’s, is finding it a difficult task to repeat the same feat at WBBM. At issue is the station’s poorly-rated newscasts, which places behind not only ABC-owned WLS and NBC-owned […]
Law & Order: Criminal Intent — Coming soon every night to a broadcast television station near you. For the first time in a long time, an off-network hour-long drama is being sold in broadcast syndication for airing in daily (strip) syndication. (That’s right! You heard me!) NBC Universal announced it was selling Law & Order: Criminal Intent to Fox-owned stations […]
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