Treme is a purposely uneasy look at the Big Easy. Like The Wire was to Baltimore, Treme is both a love letter to the rich musical and culinary culture of New Orleans and a lamentation on its civic decline -- and if you haven’t watched it yet, FAIR WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.  After Season One wrapped with the suicide of Creighton Bernette, the English professor, novelist, and outraged blogger played by John Goodman, this season has dealt similarly tragic hands to two beloved characters.  LaDonna Batiste-Williams, the strong-willed, street-savvy saloon keeper played by Khandi Alexander, ends up beaten and raped in an unspeakably vicious moment.  Then, Harley Watt, a guardian angel street musician played by alt-country rocker Steve Earle, is shot dead in a street robbery gone wrong. 

If Simon ever had misgivings about subjecting his finely drawn characters to such cruel fates, you wouldn’t know it. He has been criticized in the past for his apparent lack of sentimentality for his creations—Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz was particularly upset by the rape episode.  Writers who’ve toiled for Simon bristle at his willingness to kill off characters they’ve invested so much in. Just before the fourth season of The Wire premiered, I moderated a discussion between Simon and the novelist Richard Price, who wrote for the series and harbored some serious resentment toward his boss’s nihilism. (In an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Earle joked that Simon blames novelist George Pelecanos, another Wire veteran and Treme scribe, for being the “Dr. Death” behind many of the offending episodes.)

As a viewer who’s invested emotionally in Simon’s characters, I share that outrage over their fictional fates. But I also believe that outrage is something Simon himself feels and wants to inspire in others. At heart, he is still a crusading journalist who’s outraged by injustice and knows that it’s the rare story that ends up happily ever after.  And as someone who has publicly lamented the decline of the newspaper industry and criticized the Fourth Estate for putting fiscal priorities ahead of civic responsibility, he knows that crusading reporters who strive to take down corrupt politicians and criminal conspiracies are an endangered species.

So instead of practicing watchdog journalism, Simon is in the business of watchdog fiction. In that sense, he’s on the other side of the coin from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who use humor and satire to fill the void left by actual news outlets. It’s an unstinting brand of agitprop TV, though, that demands a lot of viewers. Kudos to HBO for supporting it -- at least for a third season.

That's how the FCC's Steven Waldman summed it up yesterday at the Media + Technology Funding Outlook conference, held here at the Paley Center for Media. Presented by the organization Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media, the conference brought folks from foundations including Knight, Ford, and Mozilla together with the likes of New America Foundation's Steve Coll, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, ProPublica's Paul Steiger, and others dedicated to ensuring a future for quality journalism. And it offered a perfect forum for Waldman, a veteran journalist himself, to discuss the FCC report he authored.

Released June 9, “Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age" presents an abundance of research and stark conclusions about the state of the Fourth Estate, with a clear goal of spurring innovation and investment. The report acknowledges the extent to which technology has brought incredible vibrancy to the news and information landscape, providing ways to keep government more transparent and the public more informed. But as Waldman reiterated yesterday, that technological revolution has also upended traditional business models and left serious gaps in news coverage, particularly in state and local government and related issues like education and the environment. The result is what he calls the "hamsterization" of news (a nod to Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman), wherein technologically-enabled reporters scramble to produce greater quantities of lesser quality content on multiple platforms. Meanwhile, those costly stories that advertisers don't like to pony up for -- what the report calls “accountability journalism” -- has taken a severe hit, as newspapers and TV news departments have endured years of deep staff cuts. "There's no app for that," quipped Waldman with dark humor.

The FCC is not the first government agency to identify the precarious state of the watchdog press. A year after the Senate held hearings in 2009, the Federal Trade Commission floated the idea of federal subsidies for the press. The idea of government subsidies for a beleaguered press was also proposed in the 2009 report “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” which suggested, among other things, that the FCC set up a fund derived from various taxes to dispense to worthy local news organizations.  

Waldman's report wisely stops short of such recommendations. Pushing some sort of Marshall Plan to rebuild a decimated local news landscape would be foolhardy given the current political climate and the realities of keeping our news outlets as free as possible from government intervention.

Instead, the report rightly lauds -- and lobbies for continued support of -- public broadcasting and the admirable job public radio and statewide C-SPAN networks have performed in picking up some of the slack in local coverage, and lobbies. It also applauds journalism schools nationwide for increasingly taking classrooms into the street to address the coverage gaps, training a whole new cadre of news professionals to take advantage of the technologies that are at their disposal. And it suggests cutting red-tape for news organizations to become non-profits.

There’s much in the recommendations section of the report that shows a keen understanding of the marketplace and a willingness by the FCC to spur innovation, including pushing for universal broadband deployment and online entrepreneurship (further indication of the FCC's aggressive stance on freeing up unused broadcast spectrum). Most importantly, the report identifies where there is opportunity in the marketplace. Now it’s up to those in the business of news, and those in the public and private sectors, to find innovative ways to capitalize on that opportunity. It was a message well received by the attendees at the Media + Technology Funding Outlook conference.

A longtime friend of the Media Council here at the Paley Center for Media, Schiller is a savvy news executive who headed CNN Productions, the Discovery Times Channel, and later NYTimes.com before joining National Public Radio in January 2009. At The New York Times, she famously championed the dismantling of the TimesSelect pay wall in favor of building an online audience for a free, ad-supported NYTimes.com -- a position she defended at a 2009 Media Council "Free vs. Paid" debate with Steve Brill. (At a recent Media Council breakfast in April, she discussed how her thinking has evolved since then.) And in her short tenure at NPR, she was lauded for her progress in making the public broadcaster into a truly multiplatform enterprise with initiatives like the Argo Project and the Public Media Platform, which created an open digital-content sharing platform for member stations.

In hiring Schiller, Capus is sending a message to his new bosses at Comcast -- primarily a technology company prior to its acquisition of NBC Universal this year -- that he knows growth for his news division depends on exploiting the digital frontier. Capus has adroitly overseen a portfolio of channels and digital properties that's been a consistent cash machine for the company since he took the reins in 2005.

NBC News has long pushed a culture of innovation dating back to the early 1990s, when it started an affiliate news service in Charleston, N.C., and pioneered newsroom automation and the use of small format cameras in the field. Moreover, it's succeeded on cable where competitors CBS and ABC have failed, with CNBC and MSNBC, which established an early beachhead for the network online. Given the maturity of broadcasting and cable businesses, the legacy news organizations that flourish going forward will be the ones that are best positioned to take their quality brands and news-gathering capabilities. Schiller gets that about as well as anybody in the business.

It doesn't mean that she doesn't join NBC News without any baggage. Her exit from NPR came after a combative several months sparked by the firing of NPR commentator Juan Williams for seeming to violate a code of political correctness during an appearance on Fox News. In the midst of renewed calls early this year from Congressional Republicans to zero-out funding for public broadcasting, a right-wing sting operation caught NPR's development director appearing to confirm critics' characterization of public media as a cabal of pandering liberal elites.

Given the political climate and potential harm to NPR, Schiller understood there was little choice but to fall on her sword-even as the video of the sting was revealed to be edited misleadingly. She spoke candidly about the experience at the Media Council breakfast in April. She also talked about how she now believes the time is right for The New York Times and other news organizations to give pay walls another shot. Far from an ideologue with an agenda, Schiller is a seasoned journalist with a record of bringing hidebound institutions boldly into the present.

She may yet be a lightning rod for accusations of bias already being hurled at NBC from the right. But it's Schiller's bona fides as an innovator, not any perceived liberal sympathies with Rachel Maddow or others in her MSNBC cohort, that attracted Capus and NBC News.

What a sense of community and fun there was in that auditorium. During commercial breaks, TV Guide Editor-in-Chief Debra Birnbaum invited people on stage for Karaoke. There were trivia contests and swag distributed. The crowd had a ball.

The Paley Center does lots of these screening parties, and after attending Tuesday's Idol/Glee double bill, I had to wonder why the networks aren't pushing big event TV on the big screen to their core audiences more often. Communal TV viewing is a rich experience that doesn't have to be the sole province of beer-soaked bars, where sports fans hoot and holler at gargantuan HD flat-screens. Great narrative series and competition shows have a whole new dimension on a theatrical screen in a group-viewing environment.

HBO knows this and has long used cinematic "influencer" screenings for critics and industry swells as an effective marketing tool. There's something really thrilling about hearing the theme music to True Blood or Entourage pound out on the sound system in a packed Radio City Music Hall or Ziegfeld Theater or any cineplex in any town. I can't think of a better way to cement the bonds among your most ardent fans by bringing them together under one roof.

Programmers are more challenged than ever to cut through all the competition out there--at last week's upfronts, the broadcast networks introduced more than 40 new series. And that's on top of the dozens of shows on the cable slates unveiled in recent weeks. One way networks can boost their new shows is to turn series premieres into events outside the home that bring a community together to sample what's new. And do the same with returning favorites, too. The Paley Center and other venues already do this in New York and Los Angeles, but networks should be going to the 20 biggest markets and university towns. Make talent part of the road show, either live or via telepresence.

Meanwhile, the advertisers that foot the bill for all this programming want more engagement. They love seeing those spikes in Twitter mentions and check-in platforms during event programs like the Emmys and the Oscars (for more on that, check out the presentation Twitter's Chloe Sladden gave last month at the Paley Center in L.A.). Imagine how much more engaged those uber-fans could be if you got them all together in the real world, not just the virtual one.

Back in TV's Paleolithic Age, the 1970s, the legendary NBC scheduling whiz and TV theorist Paul Klein promoted the idea that network needed to be in the event-TV business if they wanted to stand out. Splashy mini-series, with great production values and marquee names, were the way to cut through the clutter. That was in an era when there were only three major networks--no in-home recording devices, no YouTube, Netflix or Hulu.

Decades later, big-event TV is still an important tool in the programmer's arsenal. Communal viewing can turn most any program into a real event.

Tried-and-true formats, from police procedurals to sitcoms to talent competitions, abound. ABC and NBC, looking to ignite moribund prime-time schedules, will attempt to launch more than 11 new shows each. Fox and CBS look relatively stable by comparison, but their respective new slates seemed to say, "We're playing it safe."  

That's not to say that the broadcast networks aren't to be applauded for spending big this development season, fueled by the promise of significant increases of what they will be able to charge for their prime-time ad inventory. Estimates have the Big Four networks raking in north of $9 billion. And if Spanish language giant Univision is figured into the mix, as it certainly should be, the figure climbs north of $10 million.

But the perennial upfront question remains: Does it really make sense to spend all those millions to launch so many new shows -- more than 20 in all on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox? If the broadcast nets were truly taking a page from the cable playbook, they might consider making fewer judicious bets and funneling more money into promoting the hell out of select shows--both new shows and the returning ones that could become hits given that extra push.

Watching NBC's upfront presentation on Monday, I was particularly struck by how retro everything felt. Comedies like Whitney and Up All Night seemed to hearken back to a time before 30 Rock or The Office. A remake of the British cop drama Prime Suspect is also in the works. Clips from two of the network's most ballyhooed dramas -- The Playboy Club, a Mad Men-esque period piece, and Smash, a Glee for grown-ups -- played like transparent attempts to mimic edgy shows that worked elsewhere. That's seldom a good sign.

Much the same could be said about ABC, which put forth a slate that was really back to the future. A sitcom with Home Improvement's Tim Allen, a remake of Charlie's Angels, and its own play for Mad Men success, Pan Am, about swinging pilots and flight attendants from the 1960s, pretty much tells the story at the Alphabet Network. ABC brass unabashedly refer to their slate with phrases like "escapism" and "candy." Sometimes viewers crave a sweet prime-time escape, but in the early analysis, nothing leaps out like back in 2004, when the network reignited its prime-time with two innovative hits, Desperate Housewives and Lost.

The upfronts weren't totally devoid of savvy programming moves. There's still plenty of appetite for well-produced talent competitions. NBC showed that with its successful spring launch of The Voice, which will be coming back, as will its other singing competition show, Sing-Off, which had a successful short run earlier this year. In addition, Fox's X Factor, a format that's already a hit in England and which will reunite American Idol icons Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul, looks as close to a sure thing as any new show. (Interesting to note that those shows, as well many other successful competition series, have incredibly diverse casts, something that is lacking in most of the new scripted series, especially the comedies.)

The savviest play came from CBS, a network that prides itself on playing it safe. Its 11th-hour deal landing Ashton Kutcher to replace Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men just might save that billion-dollar franchise. Reportedly, Kutcher was signed to a package worth $1 million an episode, although CBS denies the 7-figure sum. Whatever his hefty payday is, it ain't about his spotty post-That's 70 Show film oeuvre. Kutcher, among the first celebrities to popularize Twitter, has some 7 million followers -- who just might be worth a rating point or two.

Wise champions of innovation are bemoaning the deal, given the company's spotty record of making acquisitions work within its culture. On his blog, Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson lauded Skype and its innovative founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis for bringing video calling to the masses. He echoed the views of many in the tech community by calling the acquisition a disappointment and doubting that "Microsoft will do something great with Skype." A friend of mine at a major telco said he felt like popping the Champagne when he heard about the Skype sale, "because Microsoft is sure to screw it up like it's done with about everything else in telecom."  A testy "Heard on the Street" column in the Wall Street Journal employed standard earnings analysis and gave the acquisition a big thumbs-down.  

Since its launch, Skype has been predicated on an ethos of openness, making its technology available across platforms.  Innovation has been key to building the company.  To say the least, massive Microsoft operates in a much different manner. "Multiplatform" is hardly the mantra at the Redmond campus.  Often the company seems to lumber along, enjoying huge market share with its Windows products that appear outpaced by innovation elsewhere.

This isn't to say that Microsoft hasn't shown the ability to innovate and reach the consumer with new products. It may have taken six years to get Xbox right, but eventually it did, and millions of Xbox owners worldwide agree.

Perhaps what we're seeing in the Skype acquisition is the Microsoft of Xbox, not of Zune, Microsoft’s sputtering play into the digital music space. Marry Skype to Kinect, Microsoft's motion-capture technology for Xbox, and you've got one kicking mainstream telepresence product.  Skype brought VoIP to the masses in an elegant manner -- closing in on 700 million users worldwide is no small feat.  It's not just a magnificent brand name, it's a verb!

People who've been part of any Skype beta test sing the praises of the company's research and development capabilities, calling its Estonia-based developers "world class" and on par with those in Silicon Valley. Well, they work for Microsoft now (and we all know Steve Ballmer's famous appreciation for developers). If the company can embrace that culture and let it inject new life into the technology behemoth -- and that's a big "if" -- then the Skype acquisition could truly be a transformative thing.

Barack Obama and the White House Communications Team

The president had a great story to tell, and he and his team revealed the heroic mission with perfect modulation.  From the first tweet alerting the press corps and priming the media nation for big news to come, Team Obama showed a command of social media not seen since its successful 2008 campaign. With President Obama’s first speech to the nation and the calculated briefings that followed, unwinding an action narrative worthy of a John Clancy novel, the White House got maximum boost and so far has avoided any “Mission Accomplished” missteps.

Twitter

Given the dramatic cascade effect that followed the tweet from former Donald Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn, which was first to report bin Laden’s demise, nobody need question the value of 140 characters or less anymore.  Twitter had the biggest night in its five-year history on Sunday, recording 3,000 tweets per second.  Daily news outfits used to publish the first draft of history; now Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users are drafting it in real time—not least of whom is Sohaib Athar, the bin Laden neighbor who tweeted about inexplicable noise and loss of power in Abbottabad the night of the Navy SEALS’s visit. (In an interview with the conservative website DailyCaller.com, Athar revealed that he doesn’t own a TV set.) And new platforms like Storify, which automatically compiles social-media feeds into narrative forms, are advancing the evolution of how news stories can be created.

Legacy Media

While Twitter and other social media platforms may be compiling the first draft of history, blue chip news organizations like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are still the ones packaging it up expertly with background and context.  Other news organizations, widely available in the digital world, such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, have aggressively reported the story from a more global perspective. Taking full advantage of social media tools at hand, they are crowdsourcing news, encouraging comments from readers, and doing great work to keep us informed and engaged.

Al Jazeera

The Qatar-based news organization continues to build on its success from its much lauded coverage of the upheaval that’s been engulfing the Middle East since the uprisings began in Tunisia and Egypt.  Al Jazeera English is now a go-to destination online for breaking news from the region, much as we flip to CNN when a tornado or hurricane hits closer to home. (As for the domestic cable news competition, CNN handily bested Fox News and MSNBC on Sunday night.)

Conservative Columnists

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity may have had trouble giving the president his due, but a raft of conservative columnists heaped praise on the administration that couldn’t have been more positive had it been written by Michelle Obama.  Those pundits from the right who called it as they saw it, praising a president who is usually a target for editorial abuse, added to the credibility of their brands. For example, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages could have been mistaken for the New York Times's.  A headline for WSJ columnist Bret Stephens read “Obama’s Finest Hour.”  On that same page, William McGurn wrote that the Obama’s mastery of the mission was a challenge to Republicans to put forth a coherent foreign policy.  “Going after bin Laden as forcefully as he did, Mr. Obama undermines one of the primary narratives against him—that of an indecisive president who worries more about the rights of our enemies than the freedom and safety of our citizens.” In short, see Winner #1 above.

A longtime Media Council member, Zelnick frequently hosts evening gatherings for the city's digital-media players. On April 25, he generously opened his home to the Paley Center team and some 75 guests to help us launch Generator, a new membership community for emerging leaders in media (learn more about Generator and see party photos). NBC Universal's Lauren Zalaznick and Thrillist.com's Ben Lerer co-hosted the evening--along with with Zelnick--and will serve on the Generator advisory board along with other guests at the gathering including Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, Gawker Media's Nick Denton and Gaby Darbyshire, and former MTV and MySpace exec Jason Hirschhorn.

After dinner, Zalaznick led a discussion about the way viewers through the decades have connected emotionally to TV programming. When she asked how the web is different as a medium for those emotional connections, several in the room pointed to the interactive and communal nature of online consumption. Denton pointed to writer/programmer Paul Ford's recent assertion that the web is essentially a customer-service platform where the default question is "Why wasn't I consulted?"

An essential take-away from the discussion was that the more social media is integrated into our lives, the more vested we are in the programming, and the more we demand is delivered in terms of quality narrative. This is the age of Social TV and the audience wants those who make and distribute the content to acknowledge their voices.

How we watch that quality programming was key to the conversation. "How many of you are cutting the chord?" Zalaznick asked. A third of the hands shot up in the air, breaking along predictable generational lines. Zalaznick--whose new corporate parent, Comcast, has joined other cable operators in watching subscriber numbers erode as programming becomes increasingly available online and via mobile--seemed unfazed.

How could she be? That same day Netflix announced quarterly earnings that revealed the service had 23. 8 million subscribers domestically, which is equal to Comcast, and that it was sending out more programming via the web than those little red envelopes.  

Zalaznick is savvy enough to know that ultimately any technology that provides more ways to distribute content is a potential opportunity to reach a wider, more engaged audience and give more value not only to consumers, but to advertisers. And as others in the room pointed out, digital access to on-demand programming has only fed the hunger for--and the emotional connection to--quality programming. It's a point I've made often, and I believe that digital connection has raised the stakes for incumbent networks like those in Zalaznick's NBCU portfolio, as well as upstarts like Netflix. Make good shows, make them easy for us to watch when and where we want, and we will.

I also saw these encouraging signs recently at my alma mater, Columbia University School of Journalism, where Sree Sreenivasan had organized a forum with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. As dean of student affairs and a professor of digital media, Sree has been instrumental in bringing the often-hidebound J school boldly into the present. Last month, he participated in our Media Council Dialogue on the fourth estate and digital democracy, and joined others in the room--including Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Rasiej, and Josh Marshall--in expressing optimism about the role of digital innovation in creating new journalistic institutions.

Sree's timing in inviting Dorsey was prescient. The guest of honor was enjoying his Steve Jobs moment just the day before his triumphant return to Twitter had been made public. Revealingly, when asked about Twitter's biggest challenge, Dorsey said it was to make sure that there is a shared vision and a supportive culture within the company so the team can compete in the marketplace, not with one another. That was the message from the guy who was pushed out and then invited back to reignite an operation in a crucial period going from red-hot start-up to finding a way to monetize a social network that sees "close to 500,000 accounts created every day." Dorsey's talk seemed more in line for a group of business grad students, than a bunch of aspiring journos. And it was clear this crowd didn't consider "monetization" a dirty word.

About 150 people were there, primarily students; a live Twitter feed was up on a screen, and the assembled were tweeting up a storm, in full embrace of social media as an essential reporting tool. Dorsey, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal's Julia Angwin, was talking with clarity and passion about both Twitter and his latest start-up Square, a smartphone plug-in and downloadable app that enables your iPhone or Android to process credit card transactions.

Many in the audience asked obligatory questions you would expect from journalism students, like queries on the influence of Twitter and Facebook in the uprisings shaking the Middle East. (Dorsey responded that they were tools that had been wisely used but that the bravery of a lot of people was the key factor.) But tellingly, there were as many or more questions asked about Square than those about Twitter. The tone was much different from the J school I remember.

These students wanted to know about raising money, what made a successful start-up, what to be wary of in the digital minefield. Dorsey gave plenty of encouragement to the students. The message was that so much of what has driven Dorsey's success -- a passion to connect people and give them the tools to better understand and traverse a complicated world -- was akin to the passion the best journalists have to put their labors toward pretty much the same thing.

Clearly, what I witnessed during Dorsey's visit to Columbia signals an important positive change underway in journalism education. Of course, many of the values that Columbia and other journalism programs teach still apply; accuracy, clarity, and fairness are still as essential as ever, perhaps more so in our 24/7-perpetual-news-cycle universe. But that's not enough to sustain a career in journalism in a post-digital-revolution world.

Sree and his colleague Emily Bell, formerly of The Guardian, get it at Columbia, as do Jarvis at CUNY, and Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky at NYU. Journalism schools must be laboratories of innovation, where students are encouraged to embrace technology and not fear their inner entrepreneurs.

Back in December 2004, when I was editor-in-chief of Broadcasting & Cable, I got a tip from an impeccable source that Couric was being courted by CBS boss Les Moonves to leave NBC's Today show and move to the Tiffany Network to become the first solo female anchor.

At the time, I thought it was an inspired choice and that Couric truly had a shot at raising the Evening News from a long stretch in the basement of the nightly-news race. I was wrong.

Of course, that won't stop me from leaping in to offer my take on why it didn't work.

While much of the handicapping early on focused on the question of whether America was ready for a woman anchor at 6:30, I think gender ultimately was a non-issue (it clearly didn't prevent Diane Sawyer from slipping seamlessly into the chair vacated by Charles Gibson at ABC World News in 2010). Couric's inability to effect sustained ratings growth has more to do with over-promising and under-delivering on efforts to revitalize the evening-news format and a badly bruised news organization.

The truth is, Couric inherited a tarnished franchise. Long-mired in third place in the nightly-news race, CBS's flagship newscast was ably kept afloat by Bob Schieffer before Couric came over.  The longtime Face The Nation host entered in the wake of Dan Rather's stormy departure over a flawed 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush's National Guard service, a scandal that had turned the news division upside down.  Moreover, CBS News didn't have nearly the resources to draw on compared to its competitors, most notably NBC News, with the long dominate Today, its robust cable networks, and its thriving MSNBC.com site.  (ABC may have lacked the cable presence, but Good Morning America provided a strong promotional platform, as did the relative lead-in strength of its stations and affiliates, thanks to Oprah Wnfrey and strong local news.

Enter Couric, with a reported $15 million contract, into one of the most hidebound news organizations in the business, still smarting from years of downsizing. Contrary to Moonves's long professed and primarily practiced philosophy on under-promising, the build-up to Couric's September 2006 debut was quite the opposite.

Then came the debut. In her first weeks on the newscast, one of the most gifted naturals in the business presided uncomfortably over 22 minutes that were overrun by gimmicks.  By the time the format got straightened out and Couric was running on all cylinders, the audience had already sampled and moved on. And with ever more sources to get news, the nightly news game is more and more about grabbing a piece of an ever-shrinking pie.

It wasn't for any want of trying on Couric's part.  She's to be applauded on several fronts, including her unflinching interview with Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, her embrace of the web and social media, and her willingness to experiment.  In the end, which apparently is imminent, Couric will leave with her brand as a seasoned journalist with top-notch interviewing chops largely intact.

Word is that her next act will be in the potentially lucrative daytime arena, where many are vying to fill the void soon to be left by the end of Oprah's syndicated run. I may not have called it right last time, but I say the odds are good that Couric can make a go of it in daytime. If I'm wrong, a little crow now and then isn't so bad.