Media Business

Chuck Todd, who once favorably compared Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel to World War II heros Gens. Patton and MacArthur will soon be perched close to Field Marshal Rahm in the West Wing. That's right, NBC News has named Todd as the new chief White House correspondent, replacing the outgoing David Gregory:WASHINGTON - NBC News announced today that Political Director Chuck Todd has been named…

As media company after media company fall on hard times, the amount of handwringing within the journalistic community is reaching epic proportions. One point not often noticed, however is that there are many similarities between the American media business and our auto manufacturing industry as Tony Hopfinger points out in an excellent Alaska Dispatch post:There are many reasons for the downturn…

Rupert Murdoch has his critics - from those who think his papers are too tabloid-ish - The Sun, The New York Post - to those who find his cable television networks too right-leaning for their tastes. And back in 2007, there was a fear that his purchase of The Wall Street Journal would result in a hybrid of his newspapers and his cable news channels. However, a year after Murdoch's acquisition,…

Was Time magazine's Jay Carney hired by the Obama transition as Joe Biden's director of communications in order to keep a tight lid on the Beltway's greatest gaffe machine? Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reports, you decide:Time magazine's Jay Carney, who said over the summer that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is "incredibly prone to say the wrong thing," will soon be in charge of ensuring that…

It's official. Politico.com, a favorite of political news junkies on the Web, is partnering up with a British news wire that in November professed that media bias was "largely unseen" in the presidential race.:Politico announced a new partnership with Reuters on Monday that will provide political, government and business news from both organizations to newspapers across the United States. In…

How about Sean Hannity as editor of the New York Times op-ed page?  Maybe O'Reilly and Cavuto in place of Dowd and Krugman as Times columnists?  It might not be as far-fetched as it sounds.  At least, not if Michael Wolff is right.  The Vanity Fair media maven, appearing on CNBC this afternoon, not only said that Rupert Murdoch wants the Gray Lady, but predicted he would get her.  [H/t Gat.]View…

This news item led me to ask the question posed in the headline:(Reuters) - Newsweek magazine is planning staff cuts as part of a major editorial makeover likely to result in a slimmer publication, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people close to the magazine.The cuts are expected to be outlined in two companywide meetings on Thursday, and will come from an extension of voluntary redundancies…

Liberal-leaning Chicago Tribune columnist and blogger Eric Zorn is tired of politicians -- Democratic and Republican -- declaring that Gov. Rod Blagojevich's arrest was a "sad day" for Illinois.The sad day, rather, was Wednesday, when Blago returned to work:[I]n statement after statement, our gloomy pols were keening as though a great leader had fallen or an important factory had closed.…

Vice President for the Business & Media Institute, Dan Gainor, spoke with Gretchen Carlson, host of "America's News HQ," about the decline of media and particularly newspapers. "The model for media in general is not working. We had a great model for a long time for networks, great model for print, nobody's been able to come up with a way to deal with the internet and make a ton of cash just…

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) is intimidated by Oprah Winfrey's intellect and political acumen, writer Joanna Douglas hinted in her December 5 article for Shine.Yahoo.com entitled "Sarah Palin blows off Oprah Winfrey."While Douglas conceded that the Obama-endorsing daytime talk host refused to book Palin during the campaign, she neglected to mention that the decision at the time offended many a…