CBS News made official today what had been unofficial for a while: Scott Pelley will succeed Katie Couric as anchor of The CBS Evening News, starting June 6.
The announcement is pretty much the opposite of everything Couric’s was: it’s not groundbreaking, risky or surprising. He’s a competent, well-known CBS fixture—and falls into a …
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When Osama bin Laden sponsored the attacks against America in 2001, there was no YouTube, blogs were just rising as a medium, and TV was shaped by the aftermath of the mass killings. But the news of his death was broken last night on Twitter, a medium that didn’t exist on 9/11. Keith …
Maybe the best weddings to be invited to are those thrown by distant but rich acquaintances. You get to attend the bash and enjoy the digs, but without the family drama or personal investment. Just so, the attraction of a British royal wedding, for an American audience, is that it’s a freebie. It may be the international celebration of …
Over two months after she was badly beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, CBS’s Lara Logan is recounting the ordeal for Sunday’s 60 Minutes (I can’t embed the CBS video in our blog template, but here’s a link). She’s also done an interview with the New York Times’ Brian Stelter, now online, in which she details …
Today, with a precarious economy, rising gas prices and three wars under way, the President of the United States of America held a press conference to announce the release of his original birth certificate, to prove that he is eligible to hold his office and quell a controversy fomented by a reality-show judge who by some polls is the …
The Great Katie Experiment is over: Katie Couric has announced, via an interview with TIME sibling People magazine, that she is leaving CBS as evening news anchor.
CBS brought Couric on in 2006 to bring in star power, generate buzz and grow the audience. She accomplished the first two. About her third-place struggle at the House of …
Current TV, the earnest-but-little-viewed cable channel founded by Al Gore, has announced the new title for its version of Countdown With Keith Olbermann: It will be called Countdown With Keith Olbermann. It launches June 20.
If there’s news in the new/old title, I suppose you could interpret it as a signal of purpose for the new show: …
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It was too soon. Dammit, they took him from us too soon. So it was that, with the announcement that Glenn Beck would be leaving his Fox News show, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers took what they must have assumed would be the years’ worth of Beck material they would have in …
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Donald Trump‘s appearance on the Today Show this morning was a trifecta of self-promotion for NBC Universal. It gave a platform to the star of Celebrity Apprentice, one of NBC’s few minor hits. It gave Today a buzzed-about interview …
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An Associated Press press report cites an unnamed CBS network executive as saying that Katie Couric, as long rumored, is leaving the CBS Evening News as anchor to launch a talk show. The departure—which official network reps and Couric’s people met with non-denial …
This afternoon, the digital paywall goes up at the New York Times. The Times’ effort to charge online has begun to be treated like the Helm’s Deep of journalism: a last, best stand by the forces of light against the ravening hordes of aggregation and bankruptcy. (Last week’s 30 Rock, about the decline of writing, was a kind of indirect …
Having given the Internet public 15 years to get good and hooked on reading it free online (excepting the brief TimesSelect foray into partial online subscriptions), the New York Times will start charging for digital access to its news March 28. (Except in Canada, where our lucky northern neighbors get to test out the pay system …
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It has become a cliché by now to declare that any awful event is “the first YouTube disaster,” “the coming of age of Twitter,” “the desktop-video tragedy,” &c. But clichés are sometimes true, and the endless supply of videos coming from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan have had …
