I'm old fashioned. I grew up in an era when Thanksgiving dinner was a time not only for food but also for lively family conversations and catching up; but not today in the age of the internet.

At a recent Thanksgiving gathering, I noticed the younger people were more engrossed...

The marriage between Oprah and national broadcast television was made in show business heaven, but after 25 years she's going to abandon the aging broadcast TV dinosaur, which will help push it into extinction.

TV made Oprah the most famous, most influential, most beloved, most generous, richest (about $2.3 billion)...

This is a good Monday. I'm sitting at my computer listening to the new Norah Jones album I downloaded, I got my appointment letter for teaching at NYU's Stern School next semester, and I got a timely response from the Lincoln Center Theater giving me a refund on two...

Ken Auletta has written another enlightening book that explains what's going on in the media: Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. If you want to understand the new world, buy it and read it.

Auletta explained how the three major television networks lost viewers...

New York Yankee World Series MVP, designated hitter Hideki Matsui, and the incomparable closer Mariano Rivera were models of mature, professional dignity in the final game of the World Series -- behavior rarely seen in the trash heap of commercial television.

Matsui, the calm, taciturn Japanese slugger drove in a...

Last week when I blogged about CNN falling into fourth place in the cable news channel ratings, I became a victim of my blogging - I had to watch CNN and HLN to see why HLN might beat CNN in the 25-54 ratings.

Watching CNN was numbingly boring, but not...

On Tuesday, October 27, New York Times reporter Bill Carter wrote an article titled "CNN Last in TV News on Cable" in which he gave 25-54 ratings and rankings in prime time for the four cable news networks. He did not indicate where he got the numbers.

Sarah Rabil...

The media today are like the visitor (a dybbuk?) in the opening scene of the Coen brothers' new movie, A Serious Man - no one knows if it's alive or dead. Or, it could be, like Schrodinger's Cat, (a mathematical problem referred to in the Coen movie) in a...

Rush Limbaugh was thrown for a loss by the NFL players union when NFL Players executive director DeMaurice Smith "made a move to solidify the union against a bid by conservative talk show radio host Rush Limbaugh as part of a group that aims to purchase the St. Louis Rams,"...

A vast majority of people use Google to search for information, and those searches can contribute to group polarization and extremism.

In the October 12 issue of the New Yorker, Ken Auletta, in an article titled "Searching for Trouble" about Google, quotes from Nicholas Carr's book The Big...

One of the 6,387 themes in Dan Brown's new best-seller, The Lost Symbol is that God is not an external force or being, but is within each of us. The same might be said of content.

In my last blog, titled "Content Is Not King," I made the point...

Content in not king, unless your first name is Stephen.

In an article in the October issue of The Atlantic titled "The Moguls' New Clothes" authors Bruce Greenwald, Jonathan Knee, and Ava Seave write:

Media executives lament what the Web has done to their business. But...

I watched Jay Leno's prime time debut Monday night and learned: 1) Don't watch Jay Leno's new prime time show; it's dull and overly scripted. 2) Don't watch prime time terrestrial network TV entertainment programming; it's not entertaining. 3) Don't read about TV in the New York Times; its coverage...

I watched Jay Leno's primetime debut Monday night and learned: 1) Don't watch Jay Leno's new prime time show; it's dull and overly scripted. 2) Don't watch prime time terrestrial network TV entertainment programming; it's not entertaining. 3) Don't read about TV in the New York Times; its coverage is...

Monday night I watched the Yankee game on the Yes network in New York. It was an exciting game highlighted by good pitching, timely hitting, excellent base running, and savvy managing. It was great television because it was unscripted and, thus, had an unknown and surprising outcome.

During commercials and...

My BlackBerry 8830 died a painless (to me) death this summer, so I went to a Verizon wireless dealer in Rhode Island to see if it could be fixed. No. So I got a new BlackBerry 9630, which I really like, especially because I got a $100 rebate - until...

This week, as I prepare to teach my first graduate class, Media Sales and Sales Management, I'm recording the first two presentations I give to students: "What Is Selling" and "Sales Ethics."

I begin the semester with the ethics presentation/lecture to reinforce the vital importance of being honest...

Liberal readers were outraged and conservative readers were supportive of my blog post advocating that advertisers not pull their advertising from Glenn Beck's program on the Fox News channel in response to a proposed boycott of their products.

The comments and debate have been filled with intelligent...

In the lead post Wednesday on Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget wrote a blog titled "News Corp. Should Fire Glenn Beck."

I'm a regular reader of SAI and think that Blodget often has penetrating insights into and analysis of internet and media companies. However, I think his emotions...

Last week commentator Glenn Beck lost several advertisers in his Fox News program after he said President Obama was a racist with a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," according to the NY Times.

According to THR.com "Color of Change, an African-American online political...