The saddest news for TV stations is that political TV spending seems to be on the rise. It's sad for the simple reason that this bit of news would have been a nice surprise in a year without the Olympics or big elections, especially if the automotive and financial advertising had kept up their end of the things, even just a little bit, in this full-force recession.

Flexibility is a growing drumbeat from TV media buyers in this upfront market. Media executives are looking at a number of ways to get it, which could include "rolling options" -- basically, a month-to-month review of deals made previously in the upfront. Want to keep your upfront media plan for November? You'll need to give four week notice by the beginning of October. Then you might do it again in December, in January, and so on.

Television may just be in need of some good psychoanalysis; it needs to talk about its problems to its viewers. Right now it doesn't do much of that. According to a new study by the University of Pennsylvania about the declines in the usage of TV news and newspapers, there were 900 articles about the drop in newspaper circulation -- and only 95 about the shrinking audience for broadcast networks' newscasts.

So Google needs TV after all. It's starting a new TV advertising campaign to get people to consider Google's new Web browser Chrome. Isn't the Internet's highly vaunted blogging and social network community enough to sell a product? Not this time.

In America, everybody loves a comeback. But these days, high profile returns come with a lot of road rash. Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers has been accused by Major League Baseball of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and is getting a massive 50-game suspension. He says he's innocent; some physician seemingly gave him something not right. In any event, he'll be back by July.

If the TV environment isn't tough enough -- with almost all network TV shows getting lower and lower ratings -- now Nielsen, the omnipresent TV audience measuring company, has offered up no TV viewing data gpt shows over the last four days. Maybe those increasingly lower TV ratings have -- I'm guessing --really disappeared. Nielsen can't find them -- which works well with the fact that TV networks can't find viewers for shows

A conga line of big-name local TV anchors has been leaving local TV stations, taking with them some brand appeal for their news programs. The likes of Paul Moyer of KNBC-TV Los Angeles, Diann Burns at WBBM-TV Chicago, and Len Berman, sportscaster for WNBC-TV New York, have been part and parcel of their respective stations' brand names for decades. Now, station executives believe those names and their salaries aren't part of the future of local TV news program.

NBC is maybe out-front or in-front with its up-front programming. But concerning next season, it still seems to be left-back in at least one area. While four new dramas and two comedies made the cut during its upfront presentation in New York, NBC didn't give advertisers what they usually have received in recent years: a slate of new reality shows.

A growing number of traditional TV deals have a lot of hair attached to them these days. The follicles are those branded entertainment or product placements deals -- increasing because of DVR-commercial skipping, and financially strapped TV producers looking to making ends meet. But with the economy as a major question mark, will this year's upfront mean a cut and blow for some TV deals -- or hair extensions?

Hasbro's deal with Discovery Kids Network to restart a stronger kids channel might mean the logjam of Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney in kids television will end -not just for programmers but for media buyers as well. According to media buyers, not only will the new network run Hasbro--produced kids shows -- "Transformers," "G.I. Joe," "My Little Pony" and "Trivial Pursuit" -- but it can air independent programming that Cartoon, Nickelodeon, and Disney typically don't consider in their scheduling.