Is it possible that Oprah Winfrey could be losing her Midas touch with audiences? Her television show ratings have declined slowly for the past three years, with a 7% drop this year, per Nielsen. "O, The Oprah Magazine" has seen a 10% circulation decline over the last three years, per ABC. Her TV reality show on ABC also struggled to keep people interested. The problem could be that Oprah-the-woman, who is pulled toward spiritualism and the candidacy of Obama, is at odds with Oprah-the-mogul, who needs to keep her audience of middle-aged white women happy.

In a sign of the times, NBC ran a cornucopia of reruns for the May sweeps and suffered a 27% plunge among adults under ages 49 compared to last year. "Broadcasting isn't casting broadly anymore," and it is reacting to the seismic upheaval by developing material that can work on multiple platforms, including online. But it's tough to believe that TV's "cheap reality fare will suddenly turn on a magical cash spigot in a different medium," according to this analysis. Instead the focus should be on compelling programs, since they are the only things that can keep the networks relevant.

The CW, which has shown a willingness to reinvent TV ads, is offering advertisers a chance to attach commercials to a series of unusual video clips that tell a story around one of its stars. To see the entire story, viewers watch the first clip on TV, the next one online and the final one on TV. "We're mimicking the way our viewers move from TV to online and even to mobile," said CW marketing boss Rick Haskins, The core audience of the fledgling network increasingly views video in places other than on a TV screen.

The FCC's thinking about media ownership and power is being exposed as an "incoherent muddle," says Knight journalism ethics professor Edward Wasserman. Policymakers' decision to allow the companies to own both newspapers and TV stations in big cities applies to two obsolescent technologies--print and over-the-air TV, he says. More "troubling" is Cablevision's purchase of Newsday, the country's eleventh-biggest paper--a deal the FCC can't touch. Wasserman says the FCC is also too late in encouraging localism in local TV. Soon national networks will be using online and cable and "localism will be all that's left for local TV stations."

Guitar World magazine unexpectedly discovered that the instructional DVD-and-booklet packages it publishes sell better on magazine racks than the print magazine offered right next to them. The DVD packages are now sold online as well as on the newsstand and have become a key income source for Guitar World's owner, Future PLC of Britain, says Publisher Anthony J. Danzi.

As America becomes more multicultural, a weekly magazine with race-related content is set to launch June 22 and be distributed in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers. Called "RiseUp," the publication will initially have a circulation of 4 million and be driven by national ads. "Our mission is to provide an ongoing conversation for all races and ethnicities to better understand each other and build stronger communities," says founder Janice Ellis. Her plan is to double circulation by fall.

Talk of a "digital divide" usually centers around rich vs. poor, or urban connected vs. rural off the grid. But many mainstream occupations, lifestyles and preferences enable valuable consumers to be unwired. Ad agency blogger Dan Goldgeier reminds himself and his media peers that "the same things we find so engaging about new technologies are the things others find so constricting--complexity, cost, incessancy, and the feeling of enslavement." With the race to new media, his worry is that old media could turn into "a dumping ground of bullet points, sale announcements and trite product features."