> It's a strange time now, for CNNfn staffers. Some plan to "come in periodically until the end of the year to use computers and look for jobs," an insider says. "A few who are looking are being told to 'call back in January.'"

> Losing the CNN international feed "really sucks," an e-mailer says. "I was wanting to see a good international news net here...CNN International on the weekends was always a welcome departure from the constant Peterson BS I saw on CNN...and MSNBC...and Fox."

> "It doesn't look like the two direct-broadcast satellite providers are replacing CNNfn, which went dark Wednesday night, with anything at this juncture," Multichannel News says.

> "When Rupert Murdoch bought Direct TV I knew it would come to this," Reese Schonfeld blogs...

"Turner Broadcast System (TBS) Latin America bowed CNN Headline News in Latin America and the Caribbean on Wednesday," Variety reports (subreq). "The introduction of CNN Headline News to this region is an important step in the continued growth of CNN," Rolando Santos said in a press release.

A TVNewser profile: Meet the man who merged the minds of the media and court in the Scott Peterson murder trial

TV networks called him the "pool producer." Courthouse officials called him the "media liaison." Print reporters called him the "pool coordinator." He called himself the "pool boy."

As the Scott Peterson murder trial captivated national media attention, veteran news producer Peter Shaplen became the liaison between courthouse officials and the press pool.

When television producers sought better camera positions, they fed their requests through Shaplen. When the jury reached a verdict, the judge called Shaplen. When the death penalty sentence was read, Shaplen met with the jury to prepare them for their newfound fame. And during a post-sentencing press conference with the jurors, Shaplen discovered a bit of fame himself.

In an interview with TVNewser Wednesday morning, Shaplen described "the San Mateo model" of collaboration between the court and news media.

"They appreciated what we were trying to do, and we appreciated that they had a courthouse to run," he said by telephone as he carried boxes across the plaza outside the courthouse. Here's how it worked:


"Don't try to run to your car and rush out of the parking lot, because they will follow you."

Shaplen is quoting the advice he shared with the Peterson trial jurors.

"Talk to them. Engage them. Find out what it is they're offering."

Immediately after the death penalty recommendation was read on Monday afternoon, Shaplen spoke with the jury in a room outside Courtroom 2M.

"I wanted to sell them on the idea" of attending a post-deliberations press conference, he said. He promised the jurors that the environment would be controlled -- "they would get to both hear the questions and respond to the questions without feeling that they were being shouted at. If they wanted to speak, this was a really great place to do it."

Shaplen had already raised the idea of a press conference with courthouse officials. "I explained to them that there was obviously a lot of interest in the jurors, that the bookers from all the shows that were going to be all over the place, and that these jurors were about to become public figures. I asked, would it be possible to talk them into doing a news conference, so it would be a little more controlled, a little more safe? Not only did San Mateo agree, but they provided us with a room."

As cable news viewers saw on Monday afternoon, the resulting press conference was must-see TV, with Shaplen as moderator. He introduced the jurors, called on reporters, and passed along a few questions of his own.

"I was worried that if no one was there to interface between the jury and the media, every one of the 100 people in the news media was going to stand up and shout their questions," he explained.

The day after the sentencing decision, Juror #1, Greg, came up to Shaplen and thanked him. "Greg told me 'everything you told us was true,'" Shaplen said.


"It was like having 850 of your closest friends coming over for dinner, and what are you going to cook?"

Shaplen is explaining the challenges the court faced. "They did a remarkable job," he stressed, "and they did it by being flexible, and they did it by being collaborative."

So the arrangement was helpful for the media. What did the court think of it? When asked if the arrangement was beneficial for her office, Peggy Thompson, the San Mateo County court's executive officer, responded succinctly and enthusiastically: "Yes."

"By having a coordinator -- a single point of contact -- it helps avoid communication mis-understandings [with the media], and most importantly provided me and Peter with an opportunity to get to know each other's business, goals, and agendas. It sounds simple, but it made a big difference," Thompson said in an interview on Wednesday.

Shaplen and Thompson touched base countless times throughout the course of the trial. They helped each other understand the needs of the court and the press.

"Courts work slowly. But for the media, it's immediate. The faster you get it, the better. Understanding deadlines contributed greatly to [our ability] to get information timely," Thompson said. The press Web site established for the case was especially important in this regard.

Shaplen echoed the sentiment.

"Often times courts, which work in a very methodical, deliberate, and deliberative way, have difficulties working with the press, who always need the answer yesterday," he said.

Thompson provided perhaps the very best example of the cooperation: "When I got the call from the judge that they had a verdict, Judge D called me and said 'We have a verdict. I want you to get Peter, and I want you to bring him to my chambers.' I called Peter and said 'I need you now.' Poor Peter ran up here!"

The judge conferred with Shaplen and briefed him on timing issues.
"For a judge to say to me, 'Peggy, bring in the media coordinator to make sure this all works for everybody' -- I think it states better than anything else how well this works," Thompson said.


"We're both going to survive this, how can we do it best?"

Shaplen is describing his first meeting with representatives from the court.

"I know it sounds like a cliche," he said. "But from that simple starting point...everything led off of that."

When the trial was first moved to San Mateo County, the situation wasn't so smooth.

"They told the networks that they were all going to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for space for their trucks and anchor positions," Shaplen said. "Suffice it to say, the answer 'No, we don't want to do that' was pretty resounding. So everything got off to a kind of awkward start."

The tent city was growing outside the courthouse, though, and it wasn't going to get smaller. Shaplen began performing his liaison duties in early May. He used to produce for CBS and ABC, and still freelances for the latter. He received calls from both networks earlier this year, asking if he'd be interested in the assignment.

"The truth is, I kind of backed into this," he said. "I was available and interested, and the bureau chiefs in L.A. knew who I was, and they asked me to do the job, so I said yes."

His next words were surprising: "Fortuitous, fortunate, wonderful." It was clear he enjoyed the task.

"The challenge of this was to take a whole lot of people who don't always work in sync with one another -- in the middle of this huge trial, with all of its intracicies -- and have it work out perfectly for pretty much everyone involved -- the court, the sheriff and the media."

The networks provided his paycheck, but "everybody won," Shaplen asserted. He sounded proud of his contribution, facilitating coverage of the court case.

"We got tremendous, tremendous cooperation from the court and the sheriff -- far more than we ever would have expected," he said. "It enabled people to do really really good work."


"I don't know if it's unprecedented...but I've never seen it before."

Shaplen is referring to one of several instances when San Mateo County officials strived to support the media's needs.

Court watchers typically make a "best guess" as to when the jury is deliberating. But in the Peterson case, "the court clerk was giving it to us from her official minutes of the trial," Shaplen said. ""The court provided us with like a stats sheet...That's an example of when the court responded to us in a way that they could respond."
He cited several examples of the cooperation.

"We had a real problem with what material was being requested from the court during the deliberations and the penalty phase," Shaplen recalled. "It was just very confusing."

Shaplen intervened, and made a request on behalf of the individual media organizations. "And the court started giving us morning and afternoon updates of every item, every read-back, every piece of evidence that they requested," Shaplen said.

Cooperation is a two-way street, of course -- and on "more than one occasion," Thompson said, the media policed themselves. She recalled one instance when jurors were visible within camera range, and the videographer informed Shaplen, who in turn spoke to Thompson and ensured the jurors avoided the area.

"We were getting the shots we needed. We were obeying the court orders...when it became pretty clear that this was a working pool, the court [became more] flexible," Shaplen said.

Courthouse officials, in turn, were respectful of the media's needs. When Amber Frey took the stand, "she was coming through an area [around the courthouse] that was particularly congested, so the court order permitted only a single camera in that area," Shaplen recalled. "And it really would have been a crappy shot if we had had just one camera. So I went in and said, 'Can we have two, and keep them as fixed cameras?' It was pitched to [county presiding judge Mark Forcum], and his response wasn't, let me think about it, because it was going to happen in an hour. His response was, 'Ask Peter if he would like to have three cameras.'...He said I know the time is short, I know the picture is going to be an important picture, would three work better? When was the last time you had somebody ask if you want more than what you asked for?"


"We're literally just taking out power drops right now."

It's less than 48 hours after Scott Peterson received a death penalty sentence, and Shaplen is standing on the plaza, watching the media clean up and clear out.

"It's getting pretty empty," he observed. "We're picking up the last of the last. We'll be out of here by the end of the day, definitely."

The position of media coordinator is not brand-new. It existed at the O.J. trial, and during the Kobe case earlier this year.

But in the Peterson case, it played a pivotal role -- and Shaplen expects it will happen again.

"It means that there can be one voice that speaks for all of the networks," he said. For the court, a cascade of media types can be overwhelming. "They don't understand, for instance, the difference between X network and Y network. They are frequently getting multiple requests, and it can be confusing. This gives them one point of contact."

Shaplen's role may be reprised in a matter of months, as the Michael Jackson trial nears.

"We've gotten calls from L.A. on the Robert Blake case, and a number of calls from Santa Barbara on the Michael Jackson case," court officer Thompson said.

"And it wasn't just because they needed to know what color passes they were using," Shaplen added. "People have come here to look at the model."

*Photos from CourtTV.com

Continue reading "Not Your Average "Pool Boy""

I'm not usually awake at 6 a.m. That's why I enjoyed comparing and contrasting CNN's Daybreak to FNC's Fox & Friends First this morning. Critics of Fox News frequently call the network "talk radio on TV." When I watched Fox & Friends First this morning, I understood why. FNC "senior judicial analyst" Andrew Napolitano co-hosts Fox & Friends once a week, even though he apparently has no experience at the anchor desk. The breaking news this morning dealt with a possible new bin Laden tape. Fox immediately jumped to conclusions: "It mentions the attack on December 6 in Saudi Arabia, so we know it's of relatively recent vintage," Napolitano said. Meanwhile, on CNN's tightly-produced morning newscast, Nic Robertson cited a Reuters wire service report that the tape mentions the Jeddah attack, but said that CNN's in-house experts had not yet identified that reference on the tape. His report was informative, but cautious, and did not make assumptions...

Was anyone else surprised to see Ashleigh Banfield appear on The O'Reilly Factor Wednesday night?

Banfield, ID'ed as a "television journalist," discussed the dearth of women in the evening news chair. Her explanation for it: "I think they are averse to risk quite often," and "we haven't done a good job in the big three of really bringing these people along -- the women -- they haven't really tried to groom" them. "Why aren't they grooming, for instance, Elizabeth Vargas at ABC?," she asked. Banfield also suggested CBS's Leslie Stahl and MSNBC's Chris Jansing.

The conversation naturally included jabs at the broadcast nets: "Why do we care, anyway, about these three titans?," Ashleigh asked. "Aren't they kind of a dying breed? Aren't all the celebrities being minted on cable now?" O'Reilly asserted that the networks "think we're barbarians over here." He mentioned Peter Jennings in particular.

My favorite moment of the conversation came when Banfield said "there's a real upheaval it seems [in broadcast news]. And why is that? Because people like you are getting 2 million viewers a night." Then Bill promptly corrected her -- he says the Factor gets 6 million viewers a night. "She practically bowed to O'Reilly," a tipster wrote...
> Update: "O'Reilly adds up the three airings of the show to get 6 million," an e-mailer says, "something everyone else should think about doing."

...That's the question Linda Moss tries to answer on MultichannelNews.com. But Court TV and Fox News aren't making it easy: "Court TV put out a press release claiming that it had surpassed Fox News as the top-rated news network due to the numbers it racked up televising the Peterson sentencing Monday. Court TV said it had a 2.5 household rating when the sentence was announced, equating to 2.4 million total viewers. Fox News disputed Court TV's claim to being No. 1, as well as its viewership numbers." FNC definitely won between 4 and 6:45pm; Here are the details... (subreq)
> Update: 11:50am: Court TV's claim was based on a 15-minute time frame, and only based on Households. During that time frame, FNC averaged 2.248 million P2+ viewers to Court TV's 2.215 million. Between 4 and 6:45pm, FNC averaged 2.1 million viewers to Court TV's 1.7 mil...

> Some U.S. cable outlets, including New York City's Time Warner cable system, will continue to air the CNN International feed that replaced CNNfn on Wednesday. Multichannel News went into detail about it recently...

> "DirecTV wasted no time throwing up a slate at exactly midnight," an e-mailer notes. Here is the video. "This is CNNfn, the how-to network for all things money," a promo said -- and then black, followed by a blue screen informing viewers the network was gone...

> Business Week senior editor and frequent CNNfn guest Gene Marcial said he is very sad about the end of CNNfn. "I can't believe that CNN has shut down its financial network," he said in an e-mail to TVNewser on Wednesday. "It had fine, very talented people and I can't believe that management would do away with a unit that was profitable in the past two years."

> I'm disappointed that newspapers have by and large let CNNfn's passing go unnoticed. The Wash Post included a one-paragraph blurb in its Thursday business briefs, and Tim Cuprisin noted the sign-off, but that's it. Google wire...

> The Pale Male controversy may not be hurting Paula Zahn, but her ratings surely haven't been helped. MSNBC's Countdown has beaten CNN's Paula Zahn Now in the coveted 25-54 demo on six of the seven weeknights between Dec. 1 and 9...

> Check out a special edition of Hardball on MSNBC tonight: "A Soldier's Journey Home" will reveal "the personal struggles and steadfast determination of wounded soldiers as they slowly progress on the road to recovery." Kudos to MSNBC for paying attention to the topic. Here's the press release.

> From TVSpy: "I heard from someone still at CNN today that they are merging the technical ops departments for CNN Domestic and Headlines. No one's changing networks, but this way they can have less managers oversee more people."

> CBS's Early Show is partnering with More magazine for a "regular series of lifestyle features," UPI says.

Rap star Ludacris, a nemesis of Bill O'Reilly, mentions the Fox News anchor on his new album, which opened at No. 1 on the pop charts today. "Hi, Mr O'Reilly," Ludacris raps. "Hope all is well, kiss the plaintiff and the wifey." "And that's it," Reuters quips. "No tidings of ill-will or hopes for a grisly death. Eminem could have wrung several albums out of it." Interesting...