It's official after all the scuttlebutt: Michael Wolff is leaving his position as editorial director of Adweek, to be replaced at least nominally by executive editor Jim Cooper, who will be running day-to-day operations of the print and digital pubs, effective immediately. See the story from the horse's mouth here.

A number of TV stations, including several NBC-owned ones, are bucking the trend of cutting investigative journalism "to reinforce their brands, firm up the relationship with viewers and, ultimately, increase ratings points and revenue," writes Michael Malone. Such stations are also "capitalizing on the demise of newspapers in their markets and the billions of dollars in political revenue set to gush in over the next 12 months." Malone provides a number of case histories on this encouraging trend, including stations where ratings, staff morale, and community goodwill are up because of such pieces as, say, "KNXV Phoenix’s piece on fudged …

Want some fries with your in-store TV? Customers visiting 800 McDonald's restaurants in southern and central California in the next few months will see the rollout of McDonald's Channel, set to provide local news, human interest stories and entertainment features, with about a minute and a half of McDonald's promotion per 20-minute pod. If the initial venture is successful, the program may go national. "Programming will be anything but low-key and grass-roots," what with the participation of reality TV guru Mark Burnett, along with input from BBC America and  KABC-TV Eyewitness News, writes Greg Braxton and Joe Flint. And, yes, …

New York magazine's  online daily blogs, e-newsletters and apps like Vulture (for entertainment and the arts) and  Grub Street have attracted many new readers, upping the pub's online traffic significantly, according to David Kaplan. Time magazine likewise has benefited from a vertical blog strategy for  tech, politics, health and financial, adds Kaplan.

Bill Carter dissects the trend of Friday nights becoming the second-least-watched time for both broadcast and cable shows. Still, network execs vow that they're not going to give up programming the night entirely, letting it become a wasteland of repeats. Lending encouragement to this vow, there are some exceptions, like CBS' "Blue Bloods" (targeted to an older demographic), and Spanish-language network Univision, "which has beaten the broadcast networks on Fridays in the 18-34 age group for 28 weeks in a row," writes Carter.

A video is worth a thousand words of explanation on how our ideas on media keep evolving, so we'll just point you to this link, which points you to the evidence that a baby used to playing with her parents' iPads already sees print mags in a totally different way than anyone ever did before.

Though Dish Network's efforts to buy Hulu were just foiled,  the company has spent $3 billion this year on acquisitions (including buying Blockbuster) in its campaign to  "transform Dish from a pay-TV provider to a wireless mobile video company that can take on both traditional cable rivals and online services such as Netflix," write Alex Sherman and Ronald Grover. "I don’t think we’re just a satellite TV company anymore,” says CEO Joseph P. Clayton. “Given the assets we’ve been accumulating, I don’t think it’s hard to see we’re moving in a different direction from simply pay-TV, which is a market …

Following a bidding war, NBC bought a comedy pilot from Ryan Murphy, creator of "Glee." The unnamed one-camera show "reportedly centers on a gay couple and the surrogate who will carry their child," writes Dan Snierson.

In an unfortunate sign of declining newspaper fortunes, two papers -- one major, one smaller -- announced staff reductions within a day of each other. Brian Stelter (In a rare instance of the New York Times reporting on itself) writes about the company's plans to eliminate "up to 20" newsroom positions by seeking volunteers for buyouts (rather than involuntary layoffs). The paper's business side will also suffer a combination of buyouts and elimination of positions that are vacant. Meanwhile, 38 full- and part-time employees (mostly in the news/editorial department) of The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegramwill be laid …

The Kindle Fire has indeed kindled extra enthusiasm among magazine publishers for tablets, according to reports of a talk by Hearst Magazines president David Carey. "There’s going to be this fantastic trade war between Barnes & Noble and Amazon and Apple that’s going to be an enormous benefit for the magazine industry," he said. "These are people bringing out better devices that are used to consume our content at lower prices.” Still, Carey acknowledged that so far additional revenue brought in by tablet subscriptions was "still pretty small stuff," reports John Koblin. “Thus far, the digital or the tablet content …