\'Walking Dead\' Ratings Eclipse Even Those of Top Broadcast Shows

Underscoring how potent cable programming has become, AMC's zombie series “The Walking Dead” completed its fall season Sunday night with higher ratings in the most important audience category for advertisers - viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 - than any show on the broadcast networks.

Over all, “Walking Dead” averaged a 5.3 rating in that 18 to 49 age group, for its first airing of each episode, a number that topped the initial rating for that category for such network hits as “The Big Bang Theory,” “Modern Family” and “The Voice.”

The show's finale Sunday night averaged 10.5 million viewers, just short of the record that the show set for cable television with its premiere this season, 10.9 million viewers. Either total would rank as a hit number by any television standard.

But “Walking Dead” has proved to be especially valuable for his appeal to younger viewers. Sunday's finale was seen by 6.9 million viewers in that 18 to 49 segment of the audience. By comparison, the top network series “Big Bang” has averaged 6.3 million for its first day of exposure.

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.

At Halftime, Costas Put Spotlight on Guns. By Morning, the Spotlight Was on Him.

Bob Costas recognized that he was likely to be walking into a minefield with his commentary during halftime of the Sunday night National Football League game on NBC. Prompted by the horror of a  murder-suicide carried out the day before by a Kansas City Chiefs football player, Mr. Costas quoted approvingly, and extensively, from a sports column that decried Americans' easy access to guns.

But Mr. Costas says he has been given the freedom by NBC to editorialize on subjects related to football and sports - views that the network neither specifically endorses nor opposes. And he was convinced, he said in a telephone interview on Monday, that “it was likely that these two people would not be dead” if there hadn't been a gun available that made it easy to take a life in a moment of anger.

After a flight overnight Sunday back from Dallas, where the Cowboys hosted the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday night, Mr. Costas said he woke to “a zillion text messages and phone messages” about his commentary. Most of them were supportive, he said, but there was also a torrent of harshly critical comments from defenders of gun ownership, whether online or on TV shows like “Fox and Friends” on the Fox News Network. Some of those critics called for NBC to fire him.

In the Monday interview, Mr. Costas said, “I am emphatically not backing off from anything I said.” But he noted that in the commentary he had quoted from a column posted on the Web site of Fox Sports by the writer Jason Whitlock. Since he was not able to reach Mr. Whitlock before going on the air on Sunday, Mr. Costas said he did not feel it proper to edit or add extensively to those comments.

What he sought to do in his comments the day after, Mr. Costas said, was not to clarify his remarks but to expand on them. Chiefly, he said, he wanted to emphasize that “I do not think the Second Amendment should be repealed and I do not think, under reasonable circumstances, that people should be prohibited from having guns.”

But he said, “I think most reasonable people think we do not have sufficient controls on the availability of guns and ammunition.”

He called for “a combination of enlightened legislation and controls, coupled with an adjustment in our attitude toward guns.” He added, “Common sense tells us the culture is overrun by guns and that many people who possess them are dangerous or careless.”

Many of the harshest reactions to Mr. Costas's comments charged that it was inappropriate to use the platform of an NFL telecast to make arguments concernin g a hot-button issue like gun control.

Mr. Costas noted in response that N.F.L. coverage on many networks had talked about the incident all day on Sunday. Jovan Belcher, a linebacker for the Chiefs, killed Kasandra Perkins, the mother of their 3-month-old daughter, Zoey, and then drove to his team's stadium, where he killed himself in front of his coach and general manager.

Mr. Costas added that he had routinely used his time during halftime coverage to make personal observations and comments on a number of football-related subjects, including the level of violence displayed on the field.

He said the criticisms of his commentary “hold no weight with me” because the same people saying that that was an inappropriate time and place to talk about the gun issue “would have thought it was fine if they agreed with what I was saying.”

The issue of guns has come up far too often in sports already, he said, with athletes seeming to be among the groups w ith the most gun owners. “Do you think the place guns have in sports is appropriate?” Mr. Costas asked. “That it's healthy?”

He added: “I defy anyone to give me one example when an athlete having a gun averted trouble, defused a situation, protected someone from harm. But we can think of countless situations where an athlete having a gun led to tragedy.”

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.

Howard Stern to Return to \'America\'s Got Talent\'

Howard Stern will return to NBC as a judge on its summer talent competition “America's Got Talent,” the network announced Monday morning.

The decision came after some doubt about whether Mr. Stern, who joined the series with much fanfare last summer, would walk away after one season on the series. Auditions for the next edition of the show have already begun.

The network had hoped Mr. Stern, with his large following built during his long radio career, would spark some ratings lift for the series.

That did not happen, though the series still performed well and NBC executives said the addition of Mr. Stern most likely prevented a sharp falloff in the show's performance after many years as the summer's only true ratings hit for network television.

NBC also agreed to move the live portions of the show to New York (they were actually shot in Newark) to accommodate Mr. Stern's radio schedule - he still performs most morning on SiriusXM satellite radio .

NBC will have to replace at least one of the other long-time judges: Sharon Osbourne has announced she was leaving the show.

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.

The Breakfast Meeting: Network TV\'s Struggles, and the Pope to Add \'Followers\' on Twitter

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.”

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.

News Corp. Announces Its Corporate Split, and the Closing of The Daily

News Corporation announced additional details about its upcoming split on Monday, including a plan to cease publication of The Daily, its standalone tablet newspaper.

The publishing company, which will keep the name News Corporation and will include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, HarperCollins and Australian television assets, will be led by Robert Thomson, the current editor of the The Journal. (He will be succeeded at The Journal by his deputy, Gerald Baker.)

The entertainment company will be called Fox Group, and will include Fox Broadcasting, Fox News and the 20th Century Fox studio. Chase Carey, currently president and chief operating officer at News Corporation, will remain in that role at Fox Group, with James Murdoch serving as his deputy.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, will continue to serve as chief executive at Fox Group and will be chairman of the publishing company.

A company news release that announced the changes also mentioned the shuttering of The Daily. The first tablet-only daily publication was introduced with much fanfare by Mr. Murdoch and Apple as a way to revolutionize the news business. But the publication struggled to gain readers and relevance.

Jesse Angelo, executive editor of The Daily and The New York Post, will become publisher of The Post. Some members of the staff of The Daily will be absorbed into The Post's newsroom, the company said.

In June, News Corporation said it would split into two separate, publicly traded companies.

In a nostalgic memo to staff, Mr. Murdoch praised the idea of a separate company devoted almost entirely to newspapers. “Many of you know that a belief in the power of the written word has been in my bones for my entire life,” he wrote. “It began as I listened to my father's stories from his days as a war correspondent and, later, a successful publisher.”

Amy Choz ick is The Times's corporate media reporter. Follow @amychozick on Twitter.

New York Times Seeks Buyouts From 30 Newsroom Managers

Aiming to cut costs in an increasingly troubled advertising environment, The New York Times announced on Monday morning that it would offer buyout packages to newsroom employees. While the primary goal of the buyout program is to trim highly paid managers from its books, the company is offering some reporters and editors in the newsroom the chance to volunteer for buyout packages as well.

In a letter to the staff, Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times, said she was seeking 30 managers who are not union members to accept buyout packages. She stressed that the paper had been reducing as many newsroom expenses as possible, like leases on foreign and national bureaus. But the hiring The Times has done in recent years to help make it more competitive online has restored the newsroom to the same size it was in 2003 - about 1,150 people.

“There is no getting around the hard news that the size of the newsroom staff must be reduced,” Ms. Abramson said in the letter.

Employees must decide by Jan. 24 whether to accept a severance package. Ms. Abramson pointed out in her note that the business side had cut its staff by more than 60 percent in recent years. The company recently announced that it was offering buyouts to 30 employees in the advertising department. The newsroom had its most extensive cuts in 2008 when it eliminated 100 jobs through buyouts and layoffs. Ms. Abramson urged employees to consider “whether accepting a voluntary severance package at this time in your life makes sense.”

She added: “I hope the needed savings can be achieved through voluntary buyouts but if not, I will be forced to go to layoffs among the excluded staff.”

These buyouts are not being offered to members of the editorial department. Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, wrote in a note that “we, too, have made reductions to our expenses to meet our share of this burden, but we are not going to be offering buyouts in the Editorial Department at this time.”

The newspaper industry as a whole is confronting a drastic falloff in advertising revenue. For The New York Times Company, print advertising at the company's newspapers, which include The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, shrank 10.9 percent, according to the latest earnings report. Digital advertising across the company fell 2.2 percent.

“These are financially challenging times,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the chairman of The New York Times Company, said in a statement. “While our digital subscription plan has been highly successful, the advertising climate remains volatile and we don't see this changing in the near future.”