On WEEK’s screen crawl tonight, it says the “Spook River Public Library Dist.” will be closed tomorrow. I guess the folks in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, haven’t read any Edgar Lee Masters lately.
UPDATE: They got it fixed by the time Jimmy Fallon aired. Still funny, though.
According to the venerable New York Times, Jay Leno is tanking at 9:00, so the network is punishing Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon.
The network has a plan in the works to restore Jay Leno to his old spot at 11:35 [10:35 CT] each weeknight for a half-hour, while pushing the man who replaced him, Conan O’Brien, to a starting time of 12:05 a.m. [11:05 p.m. CT] Mr. O’Brien would then have a full hour. […] The third NBC late-night star, Jimmy Fallon, has shown some promising ratings with younger viewers. He would then begin his show at 1:05 a.m. [12:05 a.m. CT], the executives said.
Conan’s show would still be called “The Tonight Show,” thus avoiding a breach-of-contract penalty for NBC. The stupidest thing is their reasoning:
Mr. O’Brien, meanwhile, has had his ratings suffer on “The Tonight Show.” He has trailed the “Late Night With David Letterman” on CBS by about two million viewers a night; Mr. Leno had easily been the winner in that time period previously.
Well, it’s amazing what 15 years does for your ratings. A better comparison would be to see how well Leno did his first year on the job. Answer: third place — behind Letterman and Nightline. This is a knee-jerk reaction to top all knee-jerk reactions, and will result in even more viewers being lost.
On the PBS Newshour Wednesday, they did a segment on Rocco Landesman, National Endowment for the Arts chair. You may remember that he made some disparaging remarks about Peoria, then visited Peoria last November. During the PBS news segment, there’s footage from his Peoria visit as well as his explanation/apology for the disparaging comments he had made earlier:
JEFFREY BROWN: You created a stir early on with the Peoria comment. And it sounded as though you were saying that money should go to places with proven merit, as opposed to the more traditional sort of distribution geographically. That’s the way it sounded.
ROCCO LANDESMAN: Well, Peoria was really a figure of speech. I’m a Broadway guy, and there is that great old Vaudeville expression, will it play in Peoria? I didn’t mean anything personal to Peoria. And what I was trying to say was really that art that’s going to be supported by the NEA is going to be on the basis of merit and quality, not just because it exists in a certain place. And we’re going to be wherever it is.
So there you have it: Peoria’s national reputation has been restored. Who could ask for anything more?
Radio station WOAM (AM 1350), which went off the air in 2008 then popped back on unannounced in the fall of 2009 without commercials or disk jockeys, has once again gone off the air. WOAM is owned by Kelly Communications, which is trying to sell the station. According to published reports, the station had to temporarily resume broadcasting to keep its FCC license.