The Morning Fix: Comcast and NFL near peace, ABC banks on stars, EDS ads under fire and Google fights brain drain
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After the coffee. Before the gym.
Ready for some football? Comcast and the National Football League are near a deal to end their long-running dispute over the league’s NFL Network cable channel, says The Wall Street Journal. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, has resisted carrying the channel on its most widely distributed packages, which the NFL has argued is discriminatory. Meanwhile, there will be some changes in the booth at ESPN’s ‘Monday Night Football’ this season, with ex-coach Jon Gruden replacing Tony Kornheiser. But The New York Times speculates that it won’t be long before Gruden returns to the sidelines.
In the wake of a few high profile departures, Google is conducting research on its staff, salaries, and employment history to see if it can develop a formula to determine which workers are most likely to quit. The company is working on an algorithm to ‘get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave,’ said Laszlo Bock, Google’s human resources chief who runs human resources for the company in The Wall Street Journal.
ABC, which is a few years removed from its last smash hit, is banking on star power for its new fall lineup, says USA Today. Kelsey Grammer, Courteney Cox and Patricia Heaton are among the former sitcom standouts returning to television on the network.
Notice a lot of empty shops around The Ivy? So did The New York Times, which writes on how Hollywood is trying to cope with the recession. One of the biggest challenges is skipping the valet and learning how to parallel park.
Broadcasting & Cable’s Paige Albaniak critiques the strengths and weaknesses of NBC’s Ben Silverman while dissecting the most recent of the hundreds of profiles written about the NBC Entertainment big shot over the last year.
Lastly, researching the art of the twitter. The Washington Post offers a much longer than 140 character piece on the age of Twitter. Besides investigating what makes for a good tweet, the piece also reports (warns?) that several books are in the works about Twittering.
In today’s Los Angeles Times: Ads for erectile dysfunction products are under scrutiny from the FTC and may be pushed from the airwaves. 3-D movies are hot at Cannes. Fox gets aggressive on Thursday.
--Joe Flint
