Actual news got in the way of last night’s annual New York fundraiser for the journalism group NLGJA. Soledad O’Brien, who was to co-host with her HLN colleague Jane Velez-Mitchell, couldn’t as she moderated CNN’s Trayvon Martin town hall which airs tonight.

• Related: Behind the Scenes at CNN’s Trayvon Martin Town Hall

Don Lemon jetted up from Atlanta to co-host with Velez-Mitchell, who mixed and mingled before making a beeline for Time Warner Center herself to participate in the town hall.

Velez-Mitchell made the biggest splash of the night when, during her welcome remarks to the crowd, she pulled her girlfriend on stage and planted a big kiss on her. “I won’t be doing that!” Lemon joked. “Ben doesn’t like that kind of thing,” he said glancing over to his partner, Ben Tinker, who is a producer in CNN’s medical unit.

CNN managing editor Mark Whitaker talked about his network’s commitment to diversity in the ranks and on the air. CNN was the lead sponsor for the event which was held at the Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams showroom in SoHo.

Also spotted in the crowd: NBC News VP Alex Wallace, former “Today” show co-anchor Meredith Vieira, “CBS This Morning” co-host Erica Hill, MSNBC’s Willie Geist, former MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer and Fox News meteorologist Rick Reichmuth.

We chatted with FBN’s Gerri Willis who told us she has a new appreciation for the work of the Supreme Court after anchoring her show from Washington during oral arguments on the health care law. We also caught up with Fox News’s Alisyn Camerota and new Fox News political analyst Sally Kohn, who is settling in to her role as progressive pundit both on air and online, which

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On Wednesday, CBS News celebrated the one year anniversary of its new leadership under chairman Jeff Fager and president David Rhodes. CBS brought in a giant cake and plenty of champagne for staff to enjoy, with satellite offices calling into the newsroom to hear the speeches.

“CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley toasted Fager and Rhodes, and other attendees included the “CBS This Morning” team of Charlie Rose, Gayle King, Erica Hill and CBS CEO Les Moonves also stopped by, according to an attendee.

(L-R) Charlie Rose, Chris Licht, Jeff Fager, Scott Pelley and David Rhodes

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Today’s debut of “CBS This Morning” was worth the price of admission just for the pleasure of watching 70-year-old Charlie Rose look into the camera and say: “It’s a huge Twitter topic that Twitter friends have been Tweeting.”

PBS’s cerebral late-night host was probably thinking: #WTF?

As the producers no doubt instantly realized, Rose’s comfort zone does not extend seamlessly to pop-culture stories like Beyonce and Jay-Z’s new baby. Still, he gets an A for effort, and so does the show.

Given CBS’s unbroken record of failure dating back to the launch of its first morning broadcast in 1954, executive producer Chris Licht made good on his promise to break the mold. There was no goofy weatherguy, no raucous fans outside the studio and, most important, no phony chit-chat among anchors.

In fact, unlike Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s hit ‘Morning Joe,’ (Licht’s previous credit), Rose and Gayle King rarely appeared together on set. He fronted the hard news-driven 7 a.m. hour, with the affable King on the lighter stuff from 8 to 9. Erica Hill, lone holdover from CBS’s ‘Early Show,’ crossed over both hours.

Instead of the traditional couch, they sat around a round glass table – perhaps an homage to Rose’s wood model on PBS. The glass-walled Green Room, which does have a couch, is also on set, which may well turn out to be a short-lived experiment.

There were several live shots of rocker Melissa Etheridge and Julianna Margulies, star of CBS’s ‘The Good Wife,’ chatting on said couch. They may or may not have been noshing on bagels. Don’t be surprised if this novelty wears off quickly. Many celebs, particularly those outside the CBS family, are not eager to be seen behind the curtain.

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CBS this morning debuted its new morning news program, “CBS This Morning.” After a brief introduction from Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill, previewing the days stories. The first segment was the “Eye Opener,” a slickly-produced 90-second look at the past 24 hours in news (unfortunately CBS did not make the segment embeddable, but you can view it here). Update: Here it is:

Among the stories today, plenty of politics, a follow-up on yesterday’s “60 Minutes” report from Scott Pelley on stem cell fraud, and some lighter news in the 8 PM hour.

The set for the new show, Studio 57 (named after its location on 57th street in New York City) is impressive and large, and includes something that EP Chris Licht said would be absent a few weeks ago: a couch. That said, the couch is actually located in the green room, which just happens to be behind glass on the set itself. See Licht give a tour here:

More on the set, after the jump.

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CBS News is changing up the final week of “The Early Show.” On Monday and Tuesday Bob Schieffer and Norah O’Donnell will co-anchor from Des Moines, Iowa ahead of the first votes of the 2012 presidential primary. Next Friday’s show will be the last for “Early” which debuted Nov. 1, 1999, with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Clayson as co-anchors. On Monday, January 9, the new “CBS This Morning” with Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill will launch.

Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly is profiled in today’s New York Times, and the “America Live” anchor — who is gearing up for Thursday’s GOP debate in Sioux City, Iowa — talks about everything from how she got her start in television (“I said I’d put a stiletto through his eye if he didn’t put me on the air”) to some early-career advice she got from a well-known newswoman who told her she had to choose between having a family or being a major news anchor:

Ms. Kelly — now a Fox News anchor, ex-Jones Day lawyer and blond GQ pinup with the alabaster good looks of Katherine Heigl and the can-do-ism of a former aerobics instructor — decided to ignore her. “It was terrible advice,” she said, recently speaking from her studio.

Ms. Kelly, 41, is part of a new generation of TV anchors — Erica Hill of “The Early Show” on CBS, Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and Soledad O’Brien, formerly of “American Morning” on CNN — who have juggled their careers and family life full-throttle in front of millions of viewers in a way that Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer notably did not. Rather than hide their pregnancies, they flaunt them; rather than cover up their off-hours role as mothers, they turn it into part of their on-air persona.

Kelly, who says she loves the political horse race, interviewed Donald Trump this week about the debate he plans to moderate — and snuck in a question about his infamous hair (video after the jump).

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• Come January 9, “The Early Show” will be no more. CBS has settled on a new name for its new morning news program hosted by Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill. The show will be called “CBS This Morning.” As noted by Eric Deggans, that is the name of the morning program that aired on CBS from 1987-1999.

When CBS recently announced that Charlie Rose and Gayle King would headline its revamped ‘Early Show,’ Rene Syler got slammed with tweets asking for her reaction.

“It’s interesting that people think I’m interested,” says Syler, an ‘Early Show’ anchor from 2002 to ’06. “I’m not in that world anymore. To be honest, I don’t have much of a reaction.”

She may be the only one. Most observers predict that the unlikely combination of the cerebral Rose, who turns 70 next month,  and the chatty King, 56, will do nothing to break CBS’s unabated string of failures in a franchise that dates back to 1954, with host Walter Cronkite.

“It has no shot, in the slightest,” says network-news analyst Andrew Tyndall.

“I don’t get it…. Charlie Rose won’t play in the morning. Of all the timeslots for TV news, morning shows skew the youngest. It’s completely counter-intuitive to hire someone that old.”

When the show launches Jan. 9, the plan is for Rose to handle the 7 a.m. hour and King the 8 a.m., with holdover Erica Hill contributing to both. CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager says the new broadcast will do nothing less than “redefine the morning television landscape.”

Is that all? Heady stuff for a show in its third incarnation since last December; its eighth since ’99.

Having essentially two different programs will be too disruptive to morning viewers accustomed to a more discernible flow, according to Tyndall. “There is such a sharp break between what Rose

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Yesterday CBS CEO Les Moonves was interviewed as part of the HRTS “Newsmaker” series. Among many other topics, Moonves discussed his network’s new morning show, and the state of broadcast news as a whole. He also briefly addressed the long-rumored on again off again partnership with CNN.

With regards to the revamped “Early Show,” Moonves was bullish on the new concept:

“To do a poor imitation of the Today Show or GMA is not the way to go,” Moonves said. “It’s going to be a different kind of show.”

Given the unusual pairing of Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill, and the statements made by CBS News executives, it certainly sounds like it will be different.

Moonves was also bullish on broadcast news as a whole, though he acknowledged that it would never bring in the money that the entertainment side of the business does:

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Just off of 57th street and 10th avenue, behind some temporary walls (that you may have seen earlier this month), CBS is building out a new studio and newsroom. The studio, which CBS News chairman Jeff Fager called “Studio 57″ during a tour of the space this afternoon, is currently an empty room, filled only with construction workers and equipment. The walls are exposed brick, which Fager says will remain a part of the design. There is also a newsroom next door, which will have a large window on 57th street and skylights, letting natural light into a room that was once kept quite dark.

Come January 9, it will be home to CBS News’ new morning program, to be anchored by Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill.

Fager, along with CBS News president David Rhodes and VP of programming Chris Licht are betting that the new show will reverse the network’s morning channel fortunes.

“It matters to this news organization a lot,” Fager said. “[There is] a phrase that I hate hearing, and that is ‘distant third.’”

Fager has charged Licht with running the show. In addition to his duties as VP of programming for CBS News, Licht will serve as EP of the new program:

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