At right, anchor Sharon Tay and entertainment reporter Claudia Difolco pose. MSNBC staffers are buzzing about the network's two new weekend entertainment shows, "MSNBC at the Movies" and "MSNBC Entertainment Hot List." They premiere the first week of February. (The shows were announced last week.)

"There's a lot of excitement over the entertainment shows," an MSNBC insider says. The shows will be taped on Fridays, with some flexibility for inserting breaking news. Tay will anchor from Secaucus, with Difolco reporting from LA.

I hear that executive producer Scott Leon, formerly the vice president of CNN Entertainment News and executive producer of 'Showbiz Today,' joined MSNBC in late summer, and has been preparing to launch the two shows ever since. As TVNewser first reported last month, the new shows are an attempt by Kaplan to increase weekend viewership...

> "Tay stirred up a minor controversy over the blurring of the line between news and entertainment last year by posing in various stages of undress in an issue of Razor, a men's magazine, published in March," the LA Times says. (Daniel Cooper has a picture, and a reaction.)

> "This is an extremely exciting time in my life," Tay writes on her personal web site. "I'll be moving east to host two brand new weekend entertainment shows on MSNBC and invite you to join me there."

> Update: 11:35am: "With regards to the new MSNBC shows, what about Dana Kennedy?," an e-mailer asks. "Why isn't she anchoring these shows? Will she still be the entertainment editor at MSNBC?"

Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams has been dropped by his newspaper column's syndication service because of the $240,000 he accepted to promote the NCLB act. Williams "appears regularly on CNN as a commentator," the AP noted today. "CNN said it would evaluate the situation, pointing out that Williams has no formal contract with the network. 'We will consider very seriously this issue before booking him as a guest again,' said CNN spokeswoman Megan Mahoney." Williams has also appeared on MSNBC and Fox in the past...

> Update: 11:40am: CNN "does not seem to have a problem at all with having Kerry advisers Begala and Carville on their paid staff," an e-mailer says.

J. Max Robins examines Jon Klein's "baptism by water" in Broadcasting & Cable (subreq). "If we're going to succeed, we have to stay on important stories and own them," Klein says. "We're going to cover the war on terror and homeland security the way we covered the tsunami." "According to Klein, CNN's approach to covering the tsunami disaster has provided a new template for the 24/7 news machine," Robins writes. Lots of good quotes...

CNN has altered its weekend schedule to air additional tsunami coverage. Keeping true to Klein's storytelling mantra, CNN is airing "Voices from the Tsunami" several times this weekend. It is a special edition of People in the News that first aired on Friday night, as some of CNN's anchors boarded planes back to the USA. Also, "After the Tsunami: Healing from Tragedy" airs at 1:30 today, after a "Turning the Tide" report from Hugh Riminton. "After the Tsunami: Aid -- The World's Response" airs at 3:30pm. "Saving the Children" will also re-air this weekend. "Next@CNN" and "In The Money" are pre-empted again this weekend...

"In the days since a tidal wave of tragedy swept over South Asia, the performance of the America's so-called mainstream media has administered a bracing rebuke to both ideological antagonists and corporate apparatchiks," Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times. He concludes by subtly contrasting FNC and CNN: "Do Americans really hunger for news media that provide more and more opinions based on fewer and fewer facts? Do they want media in which belief trumps knowledge? Do they really desire media suffused with attitude and bereft of understanding? The experience of the last two weeks clearly suggests not.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker mentioned Bill O'Reilly in her column a few days ago, calling him an "accused sexual harasser." O'Reilly thought that was a "cheap shot," so he confronted her about it -- and now the paper has dropped O'Reilly's syndicated column.

"Now I wouldn't mention this except that you should know a lot of things that go on in journalism are personal," O'Reilly told viewers on Thursday. "There's no question the column is successful. Millions read it every week. But the editorial page editor down there, Cynthia Tucker, really dislikes me even though I've never even met her." Bill's advice?: "You might want to let that paper know what you think about that."