Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts Inc., the world's biggest video game publisher, are teaming up to develop three original video games. The pact comes as the video game industry -- whose sales rival those of the nation's box offices -- continues to gain status, taming its maverick image and moving closer to Hollywood.

Grand Marnier has introduced an advertising campaign to sell its $225-a-bottle vintage liqueur, Cuvée du Cent Cinquantenaire. The fact that the name of the liqueur is hard to pronounce is part of the marketing. The ads will run in the October issues of Desert Living, Robb Report, Departures and City Magazine, and will appear on telephone kiosks near the New York City Public Library in an effort to encourage passers-by to visit the library, expand their use of language and learn to pronounce the words.

Former federal telecommunications regulator W. Kenneth Ferree has resigned from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, just five months after becoming the corporation's COO and executive vp. As chief of the media bureau at the Federal Communications Commission for four years before joining CPB, Ferree pushed to accelerate the transition to digital TV and sought to lower barriers to media consolidation.

Kellogg Co. is reviewing its roughly $400 million U.S. media account currently handled by Publicis Groupe's Starcom USA. A spokeswoman for the Battle Creek, Mich.-based cereal giant said the company is "reviewing our media-buying practices in the U.S. as part of a normal review to strengthen our execution. We have worked with Starcom for decades and we have confidence in them and are very proud of their work with us."

CBS News, which is remaking its evening news and news magazines in the wake of the Dan Rather scandal, may be turning to an unusual source for help - MTV. According to sources, among the alternatives CBS boss Les Moonves is considering is moving MTV entertainment chief Brian Graden to head CBS News.

The networks live for younger viewers, but their audience just keeps getting older. ABC, CBS and NBC have all seen the median age of their primetime viewers go up this television season. Despite the aging baby boomer generation, the networks still make it their mission to find programs that will appeal to the younger viewers preferred by most advertisers.

Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and iTunes online music store made paying for music downloads cool, but can they fuel a similar revenue-boosting boom for record labels with music videos? That's the hope for the major record companies, who took steps this year to do what they hadn't done in more than two decades of shelling out millions of dollars to produce music videos - get paid for them.

The Wall Street Journal, which is reducing its international editions to tabloid size later this month, announced yesterday that it was shrinking the width of its United States edition as part of a $100 million overhaul of the newspaper. The change is intended, in part, to save on the rising cost of paper.

Telecom giant Cingular Wireless has unexpectedly shifted millions of dollars in upfront media commitments out of Fox and is said to be spending the money with other broadcast networks, according to executives close to the situation. The commitments, which industry executives have pegged at anywhere between $3 million and $25 million, were part of deal to purchase airtime on Fox sports programming. The change happened around three weeks ago and was the talk of the town at last week's Association

After conducting an internal investigation into payola activities, Clear Channel has dismissed two unnamed employees. The investigation was conducted as the result of a legal settlement reached two months ago between the New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, and Sony BMG, in which allegations were raised that some CC programmers engaged in illegal pay-for-play activities.