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FCC to Renew Attack on Indecency (NYT)
Lawmakers and the new leader of the Federal Communications Commission have proposed a broad expansion of indecency rules, which were significantly toughened just last year.

Dan Digs In (USAT)
Dan Rather had planned to take some time off before returning as a fulltime correspondent on 60 Minutes Wednesday. Yet just three days later he was in Boston interviewing former GE chief Jack Welch and his wife, Suzy, for this week's edition of the newsmagazine. WaPo: Bob Schieffer has already managed to change the rigid formula of CBS's nightly newscast, writes Howard Kurtz.

Liz Smith: Gossip's a Rough Trade (NYT)
Gossip-writing was a no-go for a time, after the industry collapsed in scandal in the late 1950's. But it got a second wind in the early 1970's with the introduction of People magazine, and now it is flourishing.

Emmy Tape Ban Irks Media (AP via San Francisco Chronicle)
Journalists are complaining that access to tapes of Emmy-nominated performances has been shut off, and the National Television Academy won't even let them know which specific episodes are being judged.

Junck is E&P's Publisher of the Year (E&P)
Lee Enterprises Chairman, President and CEO Mary E. Junck—who engineered the blockbuster $1.4 billion cash deal to acquire the storied Pulitzer Inc. chain—has been named "Publisher of the Year" by the magazine.

Tightwad Titans? (Variety)
The monster-rich media & entertainment moguls—think Sumner Redstone, Charlie Ergen, Rupert Murdoch—aren't mega-players when it comes to personal philanthropy.

Publishers Discover Conservatives Too Late? (Slate)
Daniel Gross: Right-wing scribes, and perhaps even Republicans at large, shouldn't be celebrating the news that Simon & Schuster has hired Mary Matalin to run an imprint to publish conservative books. Indeed, the move encapsulates the ways in which big media have been led astray in the past.

The 30-Second Spot (NYT)
The same digital set-top boxes that turn your television into an ad-zapping, instant-gratification device also provide an opportunity for the advertising-dependent television business to rejuvenate and rejigger the time-honored 30-second spot.

Murrow's Full-Spin Zone (WaPo)
Mark Leibovich: Edward R. Murrow is rolling over in his grave at how often people say he is rolling over in his grave. But given the media's penchant for self-absorption and self-flagellation, it's no surprise that they would produce a legendary grave-spinner.

Celebrating C-SPAN (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Mark Trahant: If the politics of division has become cliche, it's because we have forgotten that the media can also bring us together. Beyond the strident rhetoric of blogs, cable TV, and talk radio is C-SPAN.

British Journalism's High-Low Game (Independent)
Peter Wilby: By all means reform the British Press Awards and the prizes so that like is compared with like. But let's not pretend that the broadsheet form of journalism is inherently superior.

New DC Luxe Mags En Route (WaPo)
Three new high-end lifestyle bibles are preparing to publish, seeking readers in high net-worth households, and already there's a certain frisson in the air.

Do Bloggers Deserve Journalistic Protections? (LAT)
David Shaw: I hope the nation's estimated eight million bloggers will not be entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional journalists—essentially newspaper, magazine, radio and television reporters and editors. AP (via Rocky Mountain News): Particularly for young people, blogging has made journalism into more of a conversation than a lecture.

All the News That's Fed (NYT)
Marion Just and Tom Rosenstiel: Why has it been so easy for the White House to get local TV news stations to run their video news releases?

More Lights, Cameras on College Sports (CSM)
Three cable television networks, dedicated solely to college sports, have been launched, and according to TV executives and other industry experts, there is ample room for still more coverage of college games of all sorts.

Parsons Project (Marketwatch)
Jon Friedman: The key to Time Warner is chairman and chief executive Dick Parsons, who has brought a sense of calm to the company. That's 180 degrees away from the tumult that marked its performance particularly in 2001 and 2002, just before Parsons took the helm.

Family Reunion (Newsweek)
The show will make its return to television three years after it was canceled, thanks to astonishing DVD sales and killer ratings for its basic-cable reruns. It will become the first show ever to be resurrected on prime-time TV by the very network that canceled it—all because of popular demand.

Writers' Guild Discord (LAT)
Walter Bernstein: Sometime in the next few months, the Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, are likely to be engaged in an arbitration. The matter at hand is money.

Reality Show Looks for a 'Nice Girl' (NYT)
Seventeen magazine and MTV will hook up this spring, collaborating on a reality show that tracks the magazine's search for what it calls America's Sweetheart.

—David S. Hirschman