Terry Heaton on Katie Couric's defection from NBC: "The CBS decision to hire Katie Couric to replace Dan Rather was not a closely-guarded secret, which ought to give you some insight into its ramifications for the broadcast news industry. It will either go down in history as the smartest move of the century or the dumbest; there's no middle ground.

Meanwhile, the Center for Media and Democracy has issued a new multimedia report on the widespread use of unedited, undisclosed public relations materials by television newsrooms: "Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)—a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety."

Paul Conley: "Every once in awhile someone says something about the differences between magazines and the online world that I find to be shockingly out of touch. That's my reaction to a new essay by Bruce Sheiman in min onlin. Sheiman seems to be defending print magazines from some unseen enemy..."

From a letter he sent to a colleague who asked him for his take on the piece: "I mean really, [Sheiman] says a business person's identity is reinforced by reading BusinessWeek in print. Sure. OK. No kidding. But has he seen what has happened to BusinessWeek in the past year? It's become the single most interactive magazine on the Web! Its print edition has become an afterthought. And most interestingly, BusinessWeek has talked about these changes in a public blog. But I'd bet that he hasn't even seen it..."

Also see Paul's take on the finalists for American Business Media’s Neal Awards for 2005.