IS PUBLIC TELEVISION ON THE VERGE OF GOING PUBLIC? - Usually, when consumer advocacy groups complain about television, it's the advertising-support kind. Now they're going after the public airwaves.

The sale of DoubleClick to private equity firms Hellman & Friedman LLC and JMI Equity marks the end of one of Madison Avenue's most circuitous equity stories. For those who care to remember, DoubleClick began as a spin-off from Poppe Tyson, a moribund industrial ad unit of Bozell Jacobs Kenyon & Eckhardt, which became reborn by latching onto the Internet as an advertising medium at a time when most big agencies were still looking the other way.

GUESS WHO'S COUNTING THEMSELVES IN NOW? HINT: NEXT STOP? LOBBY PLEASE! - Until the past year, we thought a "lobbyist" was someone who liked to hang out in wide-open areas on the ground floors of big public places. Then we learned that they actually like to spend their time on the highest floors of some very private places, like the executive suite at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan.

UNTIL TODAY, WE THOUGHT WE WERE BEING A LITTLE HARSH ABOUT THE TV NETWORKS' PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE -- That was before the release of a new report from management consultant Deloitte's Technology, Media & Telecommunications Group. It wasn't the title of the report, "Television Networks in the 21st Century: Critical Mass in a Fragmenting World," nor the substance of its content, so much as it was the way Deloitte's press release so succinctly summed it up: "Television Networks Threatened with Extinction: Change or Die, Says Deloitte Report.

I WANT MY RSVP - It's been a while since we've received a phone call from Larry Divney. In fact, it's been never.

AN ACTION WORD - There are many things we've heard Nielsen blamed for in our years of covering the couch potato counter, but the ones invoked Monday during Don't Count Us Out's one-year anniversary press briefing surprised even us. It covered everything from Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to New York's Crown Heights riots. We were surprised, because all this time we thought the issue was about whether Nielsen was using the most accurate audience measurement methods and whether they could or should be held accountable to that. As it turns out, we were wrong. It's …

THE MOVIE HOLLYWOOD WOULDN'T MAKE -- Occasionally, we fancy the notion of becoming Hollywood screenwriters, but the story we've been working on lately is one that would likely be rejected as far too implausible for even the most outlandish of Hollywood Studios, with the exception of Fox, which would pass on the movie treatment and option it as a primetime reality series, which would subsequently be canceled due to miniscule Nielsen ratings. Here's the pitch anyway.

UPFRONT 101 -- If you're like us, you're probably still a bit confused about how the whole upfront thing works. Well, just in time for this year's festivities, ABC is offering an upfront "tutorial.

ALL THE TVB NEWS THAT'S FIT FOR FITS - Want to know what's on the minds of advertisers these days? Apparently, it's not the marketers themselves that you'd want to listen to, but to the consumer and trade journalists who cover their business. At least that was the thinking of the Television Advertising Bureau's marketing conference planning team who assembled a panel of renowned ad journalists to tell the TV station community what their clients are thinking these days.