TVSquad

Maury Povich and Connie Chung are giving back to their community in Montana by launching an online newspaper, The Flathead Beacon.

It sounds like one of the locations on Lost ("Jack, you have to lead everyone to the flathead beacon or we'll never be rescued!), but The Flathead Beacon is a new daily online newspaper that Povich and Chung have recently launched. It promises to be really focused on life and business in Flathead Valley. In addition to the online edtion, there will be a weekly print edition too.

This all sounds great, especially in this age where newspapers are dying. Let's just hope that Povich doesn't eventually change the newspapers focus to cheating husbands, fights, and paternity tests.

[via Romenesko]

Rumor has it that The Daily Show's Jon Stewart is in talks with the Washington Post to provide online content for the Post's 2008 election coverage. Neither Comedy Central nor the WashingtonPost.com's editor would confirm the story. As Daily Show followers may remember, Indecision 2004 was released as a DVD and garnered the show's writers and correspondents tremendous critical acclaim. Stewart's deal with the Post would have him providing written, not video, content to the site. It would be a huge coup for the paper and would make it much more difficult for Stewart to maintain his apolitical, "I'm an entertainer; I don't influence the news" claim.

(S02E07) I've said before that while Everybody Hates Chris doesn't stray too far from the sitcom template, it at least gives the genre its own funky twist, making it one of very few sitcoms I'll actually watch.

For example, have you ever noticed that when a person becomes class president on TV, they tend to wield more power than any class president in real life would have? Someone gets elected, and suddenly the whole school is changed. Chris actually believes he has this kind of power, but learns too late he can't keep all the promises he made while running (fall and winter vacations, book reports only for books based on movies, etc). Chris may be the first black president the school has ever had, but he's also the first president to be impeached.

Every time I write about a new reality show, a part of me dies. Literally, a body part shrivels up, falls off, hits the carpet in a cloud of dust, and is immediately sucked into my Roomba vac. This post is actually being written by half-a-head on a torso. That being said, Gregory Gittrich, who is deputy metropolitan editor of the Daily News, claims the new six-part program from Bravo about the inner workings of his newspaper is not your typical reality show, so I just might give it a chance. The series will follow reporters as they try to get the scoop before the New York Post does, and the daily problems they face trying to get the story.Gittrich further asserts that the show should debunk certain myths about all tabloids being sleazy super market rags. Tabloid Wars premieres Monday on Bravo at 9 p.m.

Mean-as-hell Chef Gordon Ramsay won a libel suit against a London newspaper that claimed he faked scenes for his British reality show, called Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. (He also scares the pants off wanna-be chefs in FOX's Hell's Kitchen) In Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay helps save failing restaurants. The newspaper, The Evening Standard, claimed that the restaurants were set up to look like health hazards and that Ramsay placed an incompetent chef in at least one restaurant. The newspaper admitted its defeat after a judge ruled against it. The paper will pay $138,000 in damages to Ramsay and print an apology.

Drat, our nefarious plan has been foiled! And by none other than Ben Bradlee, current vice president of The Washington Post, and former managing editor during the Watergate scandal.

In an interview for Editor and Publisher magazine, Bradlee states that, contrary to popular belief, newspapers are not dying, and it is due to television. He believes that newspapers currently are and will remain the main source for television news until they can get reporters out to cover the story.

Well, I guess we will have to switch to Plan B. Please alert the covert Black Ops helicopters. Set course for the nation's printing presses.

 

Most readers know I'm a lover of comic strips both new and old, and when I say "most readers" I mean those readers who are able to read my mind since I don't think I've ever mentioned it before. Anyway, one of the best comic strips out there is "Get Fuzzy" by Darby Conley. If you caught yesterday's strip, you might have noticed Robert's T-shirt features a familiar face. Yep, that's Stewie Griffin's flaming head gracing Rob's torso. Now if only they'd make an animated series based on "Get Fuzzy." That would be, in the words of Peter Griffin, "freakin' sweet."