Call us baseball purists, but we've been a little harsh on the World Baseball Classic. But since we're also open to experimentation, we were all set to commend Major League Baseball this morning for at least trying it, ESPN for televising it, all while hoping 2009's Classic will live up to its name.

Then we opened the Wall Street Journal:

In the end, baseball had an answer for all the haters: total attendance of nearly 740,000 and solid TV ratings in the U.S. and abroad. Baseball executives said the event is expected to turn a profit of $10 million to $15 million.

Now we get it.

ESPN, which paid about $5 million for the rights to broadcast the Classic, is looking forward to more lead time:

Len Deluca, ESPN's senior vice president for programming and acquisitions, said the network could devote more attention to the event next time around. "We did this on three months' notice; we did it with no chance to sell it; we did it with barely a chance to schedule it,'' he said.

After a Few Foul Balls, World Tournament Ends Up Being a Hit [WSJ]

Here's one surefire way to keep your occasionally-hot-headed White House reporter away from Scott McClellan: stick him next to Katie. David Gregory is filling in for Matt Lauer today on Today, and who better than to moderate a segment debating the war in Iraq and media's coverage of it? You guessed it.

As for the segment itself, Laura Ingraham and James Carville sparred over the war, with Ingraham needling Today for putting more emphasis on "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" than broadcasting from Baghdad.

Today

... then we can only imagine they'll be even worse for an hour of watching Tony on life support.

FishbowlNY's Sopranos Media Coverage:

Ratings Sink, Sopranos Actors Want a Sit-Down
Meadow Steppin' Out

FishbowlNY is coming to you live this afternoon from Rehearsal Hall #1 at the CBS Broadcast Center, where I've chosen to hole up for the first afternoon of March Madness. Greg Gumbel is broadcasting live somewhere down the hall, but in here — where one wall is nothing but screens displaying multiple feeds from every game and another wall is fill with monitors and ethernet cables for working schlubs like me — it's a forest of empty Heineken bottles. This is CBS Sports' March Madness Tip Off Party, and I've never seen a more varied selection of sports jackets and shirts with small blue checks in my entire life.

A rotating cast of network executives and representatives of varied leagues have been here since noon and will keep coming until midnight, when the 16 games today will have finally concluded. That's more than enough time for all of us to have another dozen pigs in a blanket, at least.

Almost exciting as the games themselves (I've got Winthrop beating Tennessee in my bracket, how 'bout you?) is CBS's apparently successful experiment in obliterating the productivity and available bandwidth of offices nationwide with its March Madness On Demand broadband broadcast, which by all accounts appears to be holding up under the strain of 268,000 simultaneous video streams, with thousands more packed into virtual waiting rooms for their crack at the broadcast. MMOD, as it's been dubbed, has been rapturously described as a "watershed event," for online video, with CBS apparently able to make money despite its bandwidth costs from advertising alone. The Washington Post reports that fretting office managers have rushed to block the streams, and with good reason — Deadspin's Will Leitch has posted reader emails all day long attesting to MMOD's ability to bring network traffic to a crawl.

Which explains why you weren't able to read this until Friday morning.

UPDATE: CBS says MMOD has already surpassed 1.2 million video streams served. So you really won't be reading this 'til Friday morning.

Today FishbowlNY had lunch over at the CBS Broadcast Center for its 12-hour NCAA Basketball Championship Tip-Off Party, where sports journalists, agents and assorted executives gathered for cold-cuts, cold drinks and regionally-tuned flat panel TVs. Say what you want about college basketball, but this time of year grown, professional media people — many of whom wouldn't know Mike Krzyzewski if he fell onto the hoods of their cars — become strangely knowledgable about Wichita State University's athletic recruitment program.

Madness, indeed.

Our resident bracketologist Greg Lindsay will be filing from CBS throughout the afternoon, provided the Illini survive the first round.

As devout followers of Jon Stewart's career, we were glued to our seats watching Stewart's Oscar night like he was one of ours. It evoked feelings we imagine might have watching our kid's first Little League game. That is, if we had kids. But that's Little League. This is the f*cking Oscars. And even he seemed a bit in awe last night, at least at first. And why not? The roughly 1.4 million average nightly Daily Show viewers was now roughly 41 million. Talk about an introduction.

Which is why we found odd that, despite taking some of his show's award-winning writers with him, Stewart never mentioned The Daily Show or Comedy Central. Not once. Did ABC impose a ban on Viacom-owned Comedy Central references (which Stewart would've probably used self-deprecatingly)? We don't know, but would love to find out.

Then again, a guy who frequents a ton of national magazine covers, only to skewer their high-profile editors in front of a roomful of advertisers probably doesn't need an introduction.

Jacques Steinberg has a nice article today about how ABC News is faring as it moves forward in Peter Jennings' absence. At its center is Jon Banner, exec producer of "World News Tonight" and its web versopm, "World News Now"). Banner, a 16-year vet of ABC news, had been Jennings' exec producer from June 2003 and together they had been pushing hard to put Jennings in the lead over NBC's Brian Williams -- until Jennings got sick. Now he's pushing Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff in a new broadcast that is trying to quickly find its feet and close the widening gap between ABC and NBC (coincidence that Williams started pulling ahead after Labor Day, and Katrina? Likely not). After just a week, Alessandra Stanley isn't particularly moved, lamenting the loss of that elusive "voice of God" and dismissing the possibility of chemistry between Vargas and Woodruff. That remains to be seen, but in the meantime, Jennings casts a long shadow. Let's hope it inspires the news team, because they'd best be delivering results soon, per bossman David Westin:

"I don't like to put timetables on it, but we are not in this to be No. 2," Mr. Westin said.

ABC News Remembers Peter Jennings as It Moves On Without Him [NYT]
Debut at ABC News: 2 Anchors, No Hitches [NYT]

The first NYT City Section of 2006 led with a celebration of NY1, which kicked some ass during the transit strike, because the playing field gets significantly leveled when all you can do is camp out with Cheetos in a hotel ballroom. Writer Alex Mindlin knows that everyone loves the underdog, so he kicks off with the tale of how boyish newsman Bobby Cuza broke the news of the strike before any of his better-equipped counterparts. Fishbowl's man on the scene, strike-watcher and Animal Magazine publisher Bucky Turco who was at the Hyatt on both nights of strike-watching, said of Cuza: "He seemed generally
pumped about the situation while his counterparts seemed kind of on edge. He was quite bouncy." Aw. Cute!

Not as cute: the NYT's chosen pic of adorable Canadian morning anchor Pat Kiernan. They shot him from below and made him look all square and puffy and jowly. Seriously, Robert Caplin for the New York Times, what were you thinking? Pat's so adorable! Luckily, we have a jaunty pic to prove it (and is it me or does he kind of look like Topher Grace here?). But Caplin did manage to catch Kiernan's shoes in the frame - perhaps it's just that they're in the foreground but they do look rather sizeable. I report, you decide. We lifted this photo from The Panopticist, who noticed that viewer comments being read by Kiernan off a laptop were displayed in Microsoft Word - complete with telltale squiggly underline marks denoting grammatical and spelling errors. Panopticist Andrew Hearst agrees with the NYT and apparently with the channel's loyal viewers: "Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it's charming."

The Little Channel That Could [NYT]
Note to NY1: Disable Spellcheck and Grammar Check Before Showing Microsoft Word Files on the Air [Panopticist]

Related:
Transit Strike Coverage: News You Can Snooze [FishbowlNY]

Slideshow:
Stalking Bobby Cuza [AnimalNY on Flickr]

NB: Photo of Bobby Cuza above by Bucky Turco, who submitted a whole whack of great photos and commentary for the second night of strike-watching - sadly I was not able to post them at that time because I, too, was strike-addled and stuck working on a Mac, which everyone says is so much better but I couldn't figure out how to use without a right-click button. Oops.

On Tuesday night FishbowlNY tagged along with brother-in-blogging Brian Stelter (aka TVNewser to the Time Warner Center for the CNN "Holiday Media Party" (aka another deliberately-fired salvo on Christmas). I was, I admit, a tad nervous that they might clap me in leg irons and have security haul me out when they realized that I'd, er, been there before, but PR VP Christa Robinson greeted me warmly and said that it was nice to have me there for an official visit. Eek.

Or maybe they were just tolerating me because I was with Brian - the real star of the night. Honestly, I've been squired by a gent or two in my time, but never has my date been so swarmed with well-wishers or showered with attention like this one. FishbowlNY was happy to bask in the reflected glory and quietly pray that other things might be forgotten.

Besides, we got there right at the beginning so there weren't that many other people to talk to - which, perhaps is why Fishbowl was able to monopolize "American Morning" co-anchor Miles O'Brien and CNN legal analyst (and New Yorker scribe) Jeffery Toobin . Miles is much taller than he appears on TV, though of course he's pretty much sitting down the whole time. He seemed upbeat about having to get up an hour earlier in the morning, diplomatically agreeing that yes indeedy, it was early. We refrained from making any bad jokes like, "Great party, but it would be cooler to be in space" and instead complimented him on how not-tired he looked. "Makeup," he said with a smile, and I wasn't sure he was kidding but damned if that wasn't purple glitter on his eyelids.

Other O'Brien Soledad was there looking super-smashing in a black leather skirt and jacket ensemble (sounds Hells Angels-ish but it was tasteful and, may I say, hot) with her gorgeous two kids, Sophia and Cecilia. They were going to meet Mommy's boss (which we assume was CNN news prez Jim Walton, who we met on the way in). Paula Zahn was also in the house, and also in a leather skirt (women of CNN are hot!). We didn't meet her but she apparently had requested an audience with our date and apparently they got on like gangbusters.

Other attendees, in no particular order: Lou Dobbs, who assumed I was younger because I was there with Brian, and then when I told him how old I was said, "Oh! That's old!"; CNN financial reporter Gerri Willis looking camera-ready in a sharp red blazer; Ali Velshi, whose nametag was randomly sitting on a table near the front along with that of Howard Kurtz (whom we did not see); CNN Pipeline captain, executive VP David Payne and Pipeline team members Sue Grant and Jennifer Martin, who was excited to overhear random people saying nice things about Pipeline on the plane down; correspondent Kelly Wallace, very smiley and very pregnant; The NYT's Stuart Elliott, also smiley but not, obviously, also pregnant; the charming Lola Ogunnaike, also from the New York Times, who popped upstairs to the 10th floor after shooting a "Showbiz Tonight" segment, along with "Showbiz Tonight" producers Albert Lewitinn and David Levine; Entertainment Weekly's Ari Karpel, who is yet another media person with a secret past life of showtune-singing, except that oops it's not a secret any more; Anne Becker from Broadcasting & Cable; Rebecca TK from Glamour, whose last name we don't recall but who was lovely and nice; Steve Battaglio from TV Guide; CNN New York bureau chief Edith Chapin, who is in her 19th year at the network and her third month back in New York; SVP of PR Laurie Goldberg; recent marketing hire Brooks Jewell; Lloyd Grove and pretty ladyfriend Ashley, whom we met at the CBS party; and In Touch editor Richard Spencer along with colleague Sue Weiner from the magazine.

Not in attendance: Anderson Cooper, or delectable weatherman Rob Marciano. Luckily there was a big TV screen on the back wall alive with flickering images so it almost felt like they were there, except for the [deleted by Network Censors] part.

Fishbowl's chat with CNN prez Jon Klein and rundown of the tasties after the jump. Follow us there!

continued...

I just noticed ads for MSNBC on our brother-sites TVNewser and FishbowlDC and wondered if they're part of the web-and-blog-blitz planned for Wednesday. The caption beneath the graphic reads: "Porn. It's jumped out of the seedy theaters and back-alley video stores, and into the family computer" (and, presumably, the family blog. Howie Kurtz, cover your eyes!). The show looks to air Dec. 14th; the click-through takes you to the MSNBC homepage and a smiling Rita Cosby in some sort of military structure, with Rita, Joe and Keith pictured and advertised underneath (this is where we learn that the it's Rita who will be presenting "Valley of Porn," perhaps as a successful follow-up to her undercover stint at the bunny ranch a while back. Hooray for serious journalism!). Upshot: It looks like MSNBC has indeed started their big campaign a few days early. So FYI to you all, especially those of you who were getting excited to register for MediaBistro's latest class in porn.

p.s. In case you're wondering, Fishbowls NY and LA are steadfast in their loyalty to Anderson Cooper (see below/right) and love watching him puzzle over the spelling of "kerfuffle" in his notepad. Psst! Anderson! It's with an 'r'!