Bay Area TV

The Travel Channel's "No Reservations" did a piece in San Francisco recently, in which host Anthony Bourdain dined about town, including one stop at which he ate a sandwich "as big as Giada De Laurentiis' head."

Watch the video below, or check out Laughing Squid's account, which includes a visual ingredient chart for the sandwich in question.

KRON's parent company was supposed to be auctioning off 10 of its stations, including KRON. Bids were due Friday, and a decision was supposed to be made yesterday.

But now Young Broadcasting has canceled the auction, apparently because it did not receive any bids meeting its minimum price.

Broadcasting & Cable is reporting the company's lenders will now assume control of the stations. B&C says the company's chairman Vincent Young sent a memo to employees today, explaining that the lenders submitted the highest bid, and no other bidder was willing to exceed that price.

The hashtag #CNNFail rockets to the top of Twitter's most tweeted topics over the weekend. Here's why.

---------------

Remember almost 20 years ago, on that first night of the first Gulf War, when everyone gathered around TV sets to listen to CNN's John Holliman and Peter Arnett describe Iraqi anti-aircraft guns desperately trying to shoot down U.S. bombers? CNN's reporting was revolutionary at the time. Holliman and Arnett (and anchor Bernie Shaw) were holed up in a hotel (taking cover under beds at times), but thanks to modern technology, they were able to bring everyone in the U.S. (and around the world) over to Baghdad and experience exactly what it was like to be in a city under siege. (Watch/listen to it here. (Thank you, YouTube))

Well, apparently a slew of viewers turned to CNN, CNN.com, and CNNbrk (CNN's Twitter feed) on Saturday for similarly groundbreaking coverage of the post-election demonstrations in Iran—which al Jazeera called "the biggest unrest since the 1979 revolution"—and did not find what they were looking for.

"Hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street, the top story on CNN.com remains peoples' [sic] confusion about the switch from analog TV signals," Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote on Web technology news site ReadWriteWeb in a post titled "Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran."

On cable, CNN carried reports throughout the day. But it wasn't the nonstop, rolling coverage some viewers apparently were expecting.

So the viewers got mad. Over the weekend, the hashtag #CNNFail rocketed to the top of the list of Twitter's most tweeted topics.

@dogstop: #CNNfail one of the biggest news stories of the year and what do we get Palin vs. David Letterman the media talking about the media

@michaelcanfield: @ralavi Can we stop tragedy before it is too late? Ask for live coverage #CNNFail #IranElection RT Please Before It's Too Late

@AndeeD: @cnnbrk Please break into your stupid reruns of old news and cover LIVE what's happening in IRAN. You are making yourself irrelevant

BayNewser wasn't watching television this weekend, so we can't tell you what CNN or CNN.com was or what not reporting. But here are some thoughts about what may have gone wrong—and some lessons news organizations might want to take from this experience.

The lessons—after the jump.

continued...

Google is usually the one to create cute animations around their logo to mark important occasions (like Election Day and the Olympics). But today, it was Yahoo who noted the final death of analog TV and the transition to digital.

As many as 65,000 Bay Area residents could wake up without television tomorrow, once television stations turn off their analog signals once and for all, The Public Press is reporting.

Most at risk are seniors, residential hotel residents, and non-English speakers. A representative of an organization that serves elderly Chinese residents told The Public Press that television is a "lifeline" for her clients. The director of an organization that works with the Filipino community estimated that 70% of their elderly clients weren't aware of the switch or what they needed to do about it.

Full article: "June 12 digital switch threatens TV 'lifeline' for thousands"

This is just plain bizarre. KRON-4's Gary Radnich's son apparently cut his ear while they were wrestling. The bleeding couldn't be stanched, so Radnich went on air with blood dripping onto his shirt.

"I don't think you've ever seen a newscast where a guy is bleeding," Radnich says in the clip.

No, Gary, we haven't. And we also wish we never had.

(Via SFist)