Other than at NBC, prime time ratings of network television are down this fall â€" in the case of Fox and CBS, sharply down, Bill Carter writes. Programmers can come up with a number of reasons why it has been hard for the networks to grab audience attention, what with all the big news distractions of an election and Hurricane Sandy. But, still, these executives concede, the shows themselves have failed to entice: the only new series to crack the top 30 among 18- to 49-year-olds is the NBC drama “Revolution.†Lately, cable has been doing a better job of making the kind of programs that can break through.
- Univision, already the dominant Spanish-language network in the United States, has its sights set on No. 2 as well, Tanzina Vega reports. It plans to rebrand its second-largest network, TeleFutura, as UniMás, hoping to give it a boost by linking it more closely to the Univision brand. The goal is to challenge Telemundo, currently the second-most-popular Spa nish-language network in the United States.
After seeing independent movies take top honors at the Oscars for five consecutive years, the major movie studios are campaigning especially hard, Michael Cieply writes. While there are best-picture contenders from Oscar powerhouses among the independents, like the Weinstein Company, each studio appears to have a credible candidate for the Academy Awards, which are to be handed out on Feb. 24.
It has been mostly seven lean years for John Huey, who is retiring as editor in chief of Time Inc., where he oversaw a stable of magazines including core titles like Time, Fortune, People and Money, David Carr writes. Those magazines have lost almost a third of their employees, and the future still appears dim. “Google sort of sucked all of the honey out of our business,†Mr. Huey says. “When it was good, it was really good, but there were a lot of rough patches,†he said. “But I neve r wondered why I got into journalism during any of it. I still believe in the kind of storytelling we do here.â€
What appeared to be a case of bold reporting on Sunday by a number of state-run newspapers in China on the abusive practice of rounding up petitioners from the provinces before they could reach offices in Beijing to file a complaint ended with those articles disappearing from most Web sites, Andrew Jacobs writes. Such a retreat raises awkward questions, he writes: “If the news was indeed untrue, why did tightly controlled media outlets, including People's Daily and the Xinhua news agency, publish it?†More to the point, the article that disappeared highlights the conflicted attitude at the government's highest levels about the efforts of local political leaders to prevent complaints from being lodged against them through what amounts to kidnapping.
The journalist and adventurer David Oliver Relin, who was acclaimed as co-author of the best seller “Three Cups of Tea†and later criticized when basic facts in the book were called into question, died on Nov. 15 at age 49, Leslie Kaufman writes.
Pope Benedict XVI has joined Twitter, the Vatican announced on Monday, under the handle @pontifex, which means both “pope†and “bridge builder†in Latin. His first Twitter message will arrive on Dec. 12, Reuters reports, adding that the pope came to the social-media service with 1.2 billion “followers.†(Well more than Justin Bieber has, it should be noted.) The Dalai Lama has been on Twitter for a while now, using it to send words of counsel like Monday's message: “Scientists are discovering that while anger and hatred eat into our immune system, warm-heartedness and compassion are good for our health.†Like the Dalai Lama, the pope follows no one on Twitter but himself.
Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.
