If Meet the Press moderator David Gregory were a guest on his own show, he knows the kinds of questions he’d be asked. Why have your ratings been falling? Is the show in trouble? Is your job in trouble?
Friday wa Michael Isikoff’s last day at NBC News. He joined NBC News in 2010 as a Washington, D.C.-based investigative correspondent, after 16 years with Newsweek.
NBC Nightly News topped the network evening newscasts for the first quarter of 2014, bolstered in large part by the Sochi Winter Olympics in February, while ABC continued to close the gap in the coveted adults 25 to 54 news demographic.
McFadden will serve as NBC News’ senior legal and investigative correspondent, joining the division’s investigative unit. She will be replaced on Nightline by Juju Chang.
NBC News President Deborah Turness is in Washington this week and will meet with Meet the Press host David Gregory and executive producer Rob Yarin to discuss changes to the format of the show, network sources say.
Exclusives
NBC News has agreed to pay the family of Reeva Steenkamp, the South African woman killed by Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, for its cooperation in a series of interviews. The deal is the latest instance of pay-to-play, or “checkbook journalism,” by NBC, which has lined up a series of other newsworthy individuals by offering, in some cases, more than $100,000 for their cooperation.
The the first female executive producer of NBC Nightly News, and now NBC News senior vice president, is leaving 30 Rock at the end of March.
NBC News, which was an early adopter of “native” formats — ads that are disguised to look like editorial content — online, is bringing them to TV. In what it claims is an industry first, NBCUniversal will produce 30-second pieces of content for Xerox that will air on its broadcast and cable TV news and sports channels.
The Mayo Clinic discovered last summer that Brokaw has multiple myeloma, a cancer affecting blood cells in the bone marrow, NBC News said. His doctors are optimistic about his treatment and encouraged by his progress since the August diagnosis, the network division said. “With the exceptional support of my family, medical team and friends, I am very optimistic about the future and look forward to continuing my life, my work and adventures still to come,” Brokaw said.
NBC News today debuted its new online home with the relaunch of NBCNews.com. The relaunch marks the site’s first significant design change since NBC News acquired full control of its digital properties in July 2012.
Deborah Turness, the recently named boss of the division, on Friday named Alex Wallace to be the executive in charge of the Washington bureau — while also elevating her to the No. 2 spot within NBC News. As head of the Washington bureau, Wallace, 48, will oversee Meet the Press, which has slipped recently in the ratings.
NBCU’s News Group is teaming up with NowThis News, the video news startup founded by Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau, to produce content for NBC’s news outlets.
NBC News says a Radar Online report that Ann Curry’s contract won’t be renewed is “completely untrue, and, as a matter of fact, she’s going on a big assignment for NBC News this week,” a network spokeswoman says.
NBC News boss Deborah Turness is turning her attention to her troubled Sunday talk show, Meet the Press — asking staff to write a mission statement and explain what works and what doesn’t. Turness has been reviewing individual shows one by one with the aim of having staff focus more clearly on winning the ratings wars, sources say.
The joke referenced the news that the sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s funeral allegedly used fake signs.
ABC and CBS are keeping top anchors Diane Sawyer and Scott Pelley in New York, where George Stephanopoulos will also be located Tuesday when he anchors an early morning ABC special on Mandela. The moves show how economics and a dwindling interest in international news are changing the biggest broadcast networks, where a decade ago there would have been little question that their most prominent faces would be on hand for such a big story.
NBC News named veteran ITV News journalist Bill Neely as its chief global correspondent, the second big hire the NBCUniversal unit has made from that British outlet under the new leadership of Deborah Turness. He will be based in London.
Julian March, currently director of online for the U.K. broadcaster, will become SVP editorial and innovation at the news unit, now headed by former ITV News editor Deborah Turness.
NBC News has named Julian March senior vice president of editorial and innovation, it was announced today by Deborah Turness, president of the division. March, currently director of online for ITV in the United Kingdom, will have responsibility for all digital businesses, including NBCNews.com, as well as the news division’s editorial units. NBC plans to further integration its broadcast TV news and digital operations.
In a second episode of apparent “checkbook journalism” in a week, NBC News has locked up exclusive interviews and amateur footage of an aerial accident with a six-figure fee to a group of sky divers who survived the collision of their two small planes. NBC’s news division has agreed to compensate the nine sky divers and two pilots who were involved in the accident for an appearance on Tuesday’s Today show, a story on NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams and a one-hour Dateline NBC special.
In a bid to reinforce Twitter’s mutually beneficial relationships with the news industry, the social networking giant on Thursday appointed Vivian Schiller to a newly created position, head of news and journalism partnerships. Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News, will leave NBC and join Twitter in January. At Twitter, she will oversee partnerships with news organizations like NBC, NPR and the New York Times; she worked for all three organizations earlier in her career.
Deborah Turness, NBC News president for two months, took over a television news division that has dominated its field for years but lately shown signs of staleness.
Alarmed at the direction, NBC chose an outsider to give the division a fresh look; she’s the former editor of ITV News, Britain’s top commercial news produce.
Former MSNBC CFO Nicolina O’Rorke is named CFO of NBC News, while Time Inc. veteran Ali Zelenko becomes the news division’s chief spokesperson.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lew Wood, a veteran broadcast journalist who covered the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy for CBS and later anchored the news report for NBC’s “Today” […]
NBC News is handing chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel his own production unit, which will produce both short-form and long-form pieces for all NBC News broadcasts and platforms. The company has also named Madeleine Haeringer as the EP of the unit.
NBC News will rerun the Aug. 25, 1963, broadcast of its Sunday Beltway show Meet the Press this Sunday, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.The ’63 broadcast featured an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. three days before he delivered his I Have A Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial; the episode will be broadcast in its entirety.
NBC News plans to announce today that it’s buying Stringwire, an early stage Web service that will let the news division stream live video straight to its control rooms in New York from the cellphones of witnesses of news.
Palmer worked for NBC News from 1962 to 1990, and then returned to the network from 1994 until 2002. He became a familiar face to viewers of the Today show during much of the 1980s, delivering the news in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner at a time when the program often led in the ratings. He was 77.
The not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial will enable the neighborhood-watch volunteer to resume his case against NBC News for the mis-editing of his widely distributed call to police. Back in December, Zimmerman sued NBC Universal Media for defamation over the botched editing, which depicted him as a hardened racial profiler.
