ESPN is introducing its first football Kickoff Week sponsored by Gillette, which will consist of 24 college games telecast on ABC and various ESPN Channels, as well as on ESPN Radio and ESPN Mobile. The games cover a five-day period beginning August 28. In addition to Gillette's week-long sponsorship, selected games and game segments, along with extended college football editions of SportsCenter, are being sponsored by other brands. ESPN will also conduct the Kickoff Week fan festival for six hours in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park on August 30.

Comedy Central has inked a multiyear partnership with the New York Comedy Festival. Highlights from the November fest will air on the Viacom cable channel next year. Panel discussions at the event will include writers from "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "Late Night With Conan O'Brien." Footage from the 5-year-old annual festival will also be culled for various Comedy Central digital platforms.

It's been a rotten year for network television as broadcasters try to hold on to viewers who find more compelling content online or on cable TV. While major networks struggle to create content that meets the FCC's decency standards, HBO, Showtime and AMC have pumped out profitable hits such as "The Sopranos," "Sex & The City" and "Mad Men" with profanity and sex. "These are shows that could only be developed in a more relaxed regulatory environment," says market researcher Gerry Kaufhold. The migration of viewers has also made it tougher to attract talent to the networks, making …

Consumers, faced with a dearth of celebrity scandals and a souring economy, have seemingly turned skittish on many of their favorite magazines. CoMag Marketing Group, a distributor owned by Condé Nast and Hearst, released the results of a survey of 2,000 magazine titles about first-half of 2008 circulation performance. CoMag found "softness in sales across all editorial categories, retail classes of trade and geography." Overall, the magazine industry is bracing for one of its worst beatings in years on the newsstand as the ABC prepares to release its report. "Let's face it, magazines aren't a necessity, they're …

Marketers are under mounting pressure to find out which subset of the millions of ad viewers actually purchase their product. To help them Jon Mandel, CEO of the Nielsen Connect project, is trying to find common threads between Nielsen panelists and databases that examine consumer purchases. The research, uses a technique called "fusion." Interest appears to be growing. Interpublic Group's Martin Agency and Crown Media Holdings' Hallmark Channel are looking for ways to use the Nielsen Connect service. Sony Pictures Television has used it to show the spending habits of its audience. To extend its authority …

In an effort to get the max out of their respective content budgets, Condé Nast's Portfolio.com struck a deal to share articles and video content with BNet, CNet's online management advice spinoff. Both publications will showcase a mix of shared text articles and videos on their sites. Portfolio.com will begin streaming episodes of the BNet's "Dog & Pony" series, which profiles entrepreneurs, and BNet 's "At the Whiteboard" instructional series. BNet, in turn, will post articles from Portfolio's business travel and executive sections and original video interviews of executives.

After multiple attempts to take Cablevision private, the Dolan family is thinking about breaking off a piece instead. Which assets might be cut loose? The most-discussed candidate is Rainbow Media, which owns IFC, AMC and the recently acquired Sundance Channel. Media stocks have done poorly in the last year, but the recent acclaim of AMC's "Mad Men" has brought a big dose of cachet. Other options are spinning off Madison Square Garden and selling the Cablevision cable assets to Time Warner or Comcast.

More than 100 college coaches are appealing to NCAA President Myles Brand this week to eliminate alcohol ads in college sports telecasts. Anheuser-Busch and SAB Miller, for instance, are among the top five advertisers in CBS' telecasts of the "March Madness" college basketball tournament. The coaches say they are "troubled by the prominence of alcohol advertising, mainly beer ads, in televised college sports" and offer a proposal to phase out alcohol ads over three years, "gradually and relatively painlessly." The appeal is backed by 59 college presidents and 239 athletic directors. Currently, the NCAA limits alcohol advertising …