"His death could not have come at a worse time for the show," writes Toni Fitzgerald of John Spencer, the 58-year-old "West Wing" actor who died of a heart attack last Friday. With "the show's future already very much in doubt because of sinking ratings and rising salaries," the loss of a principal player--Spencer's character was running for vice president this season--will challenge the series' writers and producers. Although "The West Wing" is in its seventh season, it has gone through several cycles in the ratings; originally a huge hit, the well-written show wandered for a while, losing a huge …

Betting that video-on-demand will help it sell cars to tech-savvy consumers, Ford Motor Company is trying out a three-month ad campaign that will run on cable systems operated by Cablevision and Charter Communications. The campaign kicks off Dec. 28. According to a story in Mediaweek, "Creative for the campaign mixes branded entertainment, 30-second ads, reviews of the cars by car-shopping service Edmunds and 'video tours' that highlight car features. The Cablevision version requires viewers to click on a Ford icon, which takes them to a menu where they can access content or request more information." As the deal is structured, …

A small shareholder of Carnival Corp. stock has asked the Miami-based cruise line to do away with both CNN and "The New York Times" onboard, claiming the media outlets subvert the travel industry by disseminating anti-American propaganda. The result, says James Morgan, who owns 100 shares of Carnival stock, is that these and other media "enflame terrorists" and could "lead to future terrorist attacks that will adversely affect the travel market." Morgan made his case in a letter to Carnival. The cruise line's response is that decisions about media distributed onboard its ships should be left to its managers and …

With the arrival of Howard Stern on Sirius Satellite Radio just days away, the drumbeat of hype and legitimate excitement about the future of the medium is attaining fever pitch--precisely as the inimitable Stern would have it.  Whether or not he can vault Sirius to the No. 1 position in the two-horse-race industry is impossible to predict, but today's New York Times sets out the business model, saying Sirius' $500 million bet on Stern will pay off if it can attract a million additional subscribers over the length of the shock jock's five-year contract. Overall, the Times paints an optimistic …

Responding to Ad Age's questions about the 105 senior-level layoffs last week, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore stressed that the moves were made to eliminate duplicative positions, not incompetent executives. Emphasizing that Time Inc. manages a plethora of "mature businesses" where "natural growth is slowing," Moore said it was necessary to think more strategically about human assets and to "cluster" resources where that made sense. Looking ahead, she told Ad Age that Time Inc. would launch new magazines in 2006 and focus on high growth and "potentially high growth areas, like online" and "wireless initiatives." In an age when much of the …

No one at Wenner Media will confirm the rumors, but WWD.com media columnist Jeff Bercovici reports that Jann Wenner has signed a contract to star in an "Apprentice"-style TV show on MTV, with production set to start in the spring. The New York Post had published a story last summer saying that the publishing chieftain was in preliminary talks with MTV, but nothing has been heard about the proposed program since.  WWD.com says the reality-based series will be about aspiring music journalists--appropriate, as Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine--and that it may air in the fall of 2006.

These are challenging days for media moguls. The proliferation of media conveys the impression that times are good, and in many ways they are. However, these are also times of enormous change, with shifting consumer tastes, emerging platforms, and redirected advertising dollars. Enormous sums are moving from traditional media to the Internet. The result, says the Associated Press' Seth Sutel, "is deeply troubling to many media companies." Television execs are "grappling with the implications of ad-skipping technologies, and key advertisers like automakers and retailers are rethinking their ad budgets." Meanwhile, we are watching a rapid realignment among phone companies, satellite …

Remember ReplayTV? Along with TiVo, it helped create the digital video recorder revolution. Both arrived on the scene at approximately the same time, and both offered similar features and similar price points. But ReplayTV, backed by Time Warner and others, faltered, taking a back seat as rival TiVo stormed to a huge market lead. Today it is expected that ReplayTV will reemerge from the shadows, this time not as a manufacturer of hardware but rather a provider of software that will enable personal computers to behave as DVRs. According to a Reuters report, ReplayTV will seek to sell off its …

Donald Wildmon's anti-gay American Family Association says it was burned by Ford Motor Company, which last week announced it would advertise and promote all eight of its car brands in gay-themed media. As a result, Wildmon has posted a statement on his group's Web site saying the influential AFA might once again contemplate a boycott of Ford products. Wildmon's ire was stoked by Ford's decision last week, which the AFA says was a surprise reversal of an earlier "agreement" that would have resulted in Ford withdrawing all advertising from gay print publications.  "Unfortunately, some Ford Motor Company officials made the decision …

Demonstrating that new national magazines can still emerge from bucolic, largely media-less pockets of America, Green Builder magazine, set to launch next month out of offices in Montpelier, Vermont, will instantly be "the third largest magazine in the homebuilder sector," reports the Times Argus, a Vermont paper. The story explains how the magazine's founder, John Wagner, an independent media consultant, negotiated a list-acquisition deal with the National Association of Homebuilders. Green Builder will focus on ecologically correct, sustainable building techniques, which are rapidly gaining popularity among both builders and home buyers across the country. The magazine is aimed principally at small homebuilding …