What's Happening at CNN

Last night, Olbermann featured her as one of the "Top 3 Newsmakers Of The Day", a segment profiling three individuals or entities that have made news for rather notorious reasons. Specifically, he pointed to the criticism that she was "fast and loose".

But could one reason for including his competition in that segment be due to the ratings? On Tuesday night, Grace had 409,000 viewers while Olbermann only had 301,000. Furthermore, her 10pm EST. replay received 374,000 viewers compared to Scarborough Country which saw 247,000. While I concur that reporting the Grace story is relevant due to the legal ethics aspects of it and the fact that she is a public figure and commentator, there are several conflicts with Olbermann reporting this story on his show. First, an entire segment could have been allotted to discuss legal ethics both generally and specific to this case. His referrence was unfair because the facts were ignored and the segment was used only to make her look bad. And second, the comparative ratings both total and demographic reveal the underlying reason for this recent assail. Olbermann continues to get hammered by Grace and there are only sporadic incidents where the reverse occurs.

Nancy Grace is performing almost as well at 10pm as she is at 8pm. She averaged 409,000 viewers at 8pm last night, and 374,000 viewers at 10pm. Her # of demo viewers was the same at both hours: 123,000.

“All of our networks are doing very well,” Bewkes said. “Probably as a result of all this, we’ll probably lead the marketplace negotiations and have very strong revenue growth for the entertainment division
in the upfront.”
Bewkes also expected strong upfront performance at Time Warner’s news networks, adding that Cable News Network should better the 10% to 11% growth expected from its peers.
“The reason we think CNN will outperform that is because broadcast evening-news operations are turning over their anchors and we think that is diminishing ratings and advertiser commitments,” Bewkes said. “And news viewing is continuing to shift from broadcast over to cable.”

"We are going to miss her not only as a first-class newswoman but a first-class person. You can't replace a person like that. I'm glad she's going to play at least an occasional role on our air over the next few years."

"What we've done is throw down the challenge to our political producers to come up with a new way of covering politics that matches the many new realities of politics. You know the blogging and the values vote and direct marketing and even fears about personal safety and homeland security have all changed the political landscape 180 degrees, and yet the mainstream media is still covering politics the way it has for the last 30 to 40 years since the Kennedy-Nixon debate. So we've got to come up with new forms. We're going to take our time and make sure that we select the best approach for us," he said.

"I love Candy," Mr. Klein said. "Candy's such a great reporter and storyteller. So was Theodore White. So it's good company ..."

Woodruff has been a little island of sanity on CNN, a Time Warner property. She delivers the news in a conversational (but never flat or monotone voice). She doesn't preen, flail, intimidate, threaten, wheedle or bellow.
Who's kidding who? Woodruff is a calm, firm, reassuring presence on television. The lady clearly has no future in network news.

You'll find the complete article on JW HERE.

# posted by ATN @ 12:08 AM

"All I'm asking them to do is better journalism," Klein said. "Who could be resistant to that? Now that Fox has pretty well cleaned their clock for a few years, there's a real desire to win, a real thirst."

"I don't agree with him on everything," said John King, a veteran Washington hand just appointed a CNN national correspondent. "But I will say that this place was desperately lacking in leadership, someone saying `This is what this place is going to be, this is what I'm going to do.'"
"If you want to get things going in a different direction, you cannot start compromising things right away," King said, "especially in a place that has a history of trying to undermine the leader." There's some nervousness about whether an emphasis on storytelling will crowd out hard news, King said. Washington news may get less attention under a Klein regime; he hasn't said whether "Inside Politics" will continue without Woodruff and virtually scuttled the long-running debate show "Crossfire."

Former CNN Washington bureau chief Frank
Sesno, now a professor at George Mason University, has come back to do some part-time work at CNN and is impressed with what he sees in Klein. "I think he has energized the place," Sesno said. "I think he has been very creative and smart and has a lot of new ideas. He believes that news and storytelling can work, can be compelling and can attract an audience."

"The political landscape has changed radically, but political coverage on television has not changed in 40 years," Klein said. "It's time to change the way we cover politics."

"Our focus is on beating the broadcast networks," said Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti. "We wish Jon well in his battle for second place with MSNBC."