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Studio 60 Cancellation Reportedly Imminent (Fox 411)
Despite receiving an order for three more episodes on Friday, the Aaron Sorkin NBC drama Studio 60 on Sunset Strip is about to be put out of its misery. Cast members are already confiding in friends that the end is near. It's likely NBC will pull the plug shortly.

Stop the Presses: Big Metro Dailies Show Wide Losses in ABC Report (E&P)
While the estimated decline 2.5% for daily circulation for all reporting papers may seem negligible, consider that in years past that decrease averaged around 1%. Sunday, considered the money shot for the industry, is losing more, with a decline of 3%. Big cities like L.A., Miami, and Boston are feeling the effects of the Internet and the trimming of other-paid circulation.

Firms Eye Tribune Buy (Variety)
Two private equity firms, Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, are said to be planning competing bids for Los Angeles Times parent Tribune. Bain would pursue Tribune alone, while Thomas H. Lee has teamed up with Texas Pacific Group. Initial offers, which are nonbinding and made before potential suitors have studied Tribune's book in depth, were due Friday.

YouTube Purging Copyrighted Clips (NYT)
Hitting the financial jackpot, it appears, may have created some headaches for YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing Web site that has agreed to be bought by Google for $1.65 billion in stock. The site late last week began purging copyrighted material from Comedy Central, including clips from YouTube stalwarts like The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park. Slate: Does YouTube really have legal problems? Time: How to use YouTube for political gain.

CNN Hopes Blogging Is Election-Night Blessing (LAT)
The cable news network plans to host more than two dozen bloggers from across the political spectrum — including sites like RedState and Daily Kos — at a Washington Internet lounge where they can monitor the election returns on a slew of flat-screen televisions. Each blogger will get his or her own monitor, which can be tuned to any channel. USAT: This election could tip the balance of power in Congress, but covering it isn't a make-or-break night for the Big Three networks since broadcast news has "ceded a good deal of both election night and political conventions to cable news," says Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Sy Hersh: "Americans Are Pretty F*cking Ignorant" (Montreal Mirror)
"You could never accuse Americans of learning from history or learning from past mistakes," says Hersh in an inteview. "To call this ignorance wilful as opposed to general ignorance, I don't know. On any issue, Americans can display an incredible lack of information. I doubt if there's a society which has paid less attention to the facts."

Ex-VJ Kennedy to Host Fox Show (NYP)
The longtime MTV star will be the host of the year-old Reality Remix, a show on Fox Reality evenings at 8:30 that encapsulates the latest developments on reality shows from America's Next Top Model to Survivor as well as providing postmortem interviews with the freshly-axed.

In a Blurry World, Ownership Is Yesterday's News (NYT)
Richard Siklos: The reality is that even if media companies could own more TV stations and newspapers in the same city, they might not think that it's such a brilliant idea any more. As the F.C.C.'s chairman, Kevin J. Martin, said: "We need to develop a rule for cross-ownership that reflects current market characteristics, including the struggling nature of today's newspaper industry." SF Chron: FCC commissioners speak out against media consolidation.

Former MTV Digital Guru Hirschhorn Takes Stake in Stereogum (NYP)
Jason Hirschhorn, the former MTV Networks digital guru now running his own advisory firm, Triple H Media, not only invested in well-reviewed music blog Stereogum along with Bob Pittman's The Pilot Group last week, but also was instrumental in connecting the blog's founder, Scott Lapatine, with the former AOL Time Warner chief operating officer.

Media's Obama Love-Fest (WaPo)
Howard Kurtz: The subtext is a journalistic hunger for a young, attractive black candidate who somehow seems to transcend race. Not since the media establishment tried to draft Colin Powell for president in 1995 have reporters, columnists and talk show hosts so openly swooned over a potential White House occupant.

Can Will Wright Reinvent the Video Game Again? (New Yorker)
For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce's Ulysses. "Spore" draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game.

Early Newspapers Rejected Impartiality (WSJ)
"To profess impartiality here," wrote William Cobbett in his Federalist newspaper, Porcupine's Gazette, "would be as absurd as to profess it in a war between virtue and vice, good and evil, happiness and misery." The motto of the Gazette of the United States, which began publication in 1789, was "He that is not for us is against us."

Letterman/O'Reilly, Round 2 (FBNY)
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly appeared on the Late Show With David Letterman again on Friday evening, and was again pummeled by the CBS host for his stances on the war in Iraq. Letterman called O'Reilly a "bonehead" in one exchange, and claimed not to have ever seen his show. A side note: Before O'Reilly's segment, the CBS affiliate in New York ran an ad for Shut Up And Sing, the controversial Dixie Chicks spot NBC declined to run.

At Two TV Stations in Maine, What Al Gore's Movie Says Isn't News (NYT)
How important is global warming in Maine? Not important enough for local television. Michael Palmer, the general manager of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when "Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories. ... Until then, no more."

Media Moguls Turned to Comedians to Write Speeches for Freston's Roast (NYT)
When Tom Freston agreed to be the guest of honor at an annual roast for media executives in New York, it was before he was fired as chief executive of Viacom. So it seemed that it would be a somber or at least uncomfortable event. As it turned out, the routines by Mr. Freston, Peter A. Chernin, the president of the News Corporation, and other moguls were worthy of David Letterman.