Meredith's Fitness and Wenner Media's Men's Journal are offering a joint ad package in an attempt "to compete with bigger health/fitness players Rodale and American Media Inc." -- an unusual alliance for "pubs from big magazine groups, [which] often have directly competing titles and historical rivalries," writes Lucia Moses. "The cross-culture... experience has also been an eye-opener. Big, public and folksy, Meredith is the embodiment of mainstream America—the antithesis of Wenner, with its counterculture roots."

In the wake of ESPN shutting down ESPN3D, another large TV entity -- the BBC -- is putting the brakes on 3D by putting "3D program development on hold at the end of 2013, with no plans to resume until 2017," writes Bryant Frazer. There was minimal viewership of the 3D programming the BBC showed during a two-year pilot period.

"At least 25 people still called the FCC to complain" after the FCC decided not to fine the Red Sox for David Ortiz saying the F-word on TV, writes Connor Simpson. This was during the Sox's first game back in the city after the Boston Marathon attacks, and "was a beautiful moment where a local hero -- a man as connected to Boston as Dunkin Donuts or the marathon itself -- gave a town something to cheer for when they needed it the most," continues. "But, yeah, the game was on national TV and the Mrs. Lovejoys of the world …

Rupert Murdoch did "know about the he culture of criminality at his newspapers," according to "a secret recording of Murdoch’s visit to his beleaguered paper at the height of the police investigation into wrongdoing there," writes Ryan Chittum. The recording shows that Murdoch was "lying that he didn’t know about his newspapers bribing public officials for news until an internal investigation in the wake of the Milly Dowler scandal uncovered it."

"Magazines have a terrible habit of being reluctant to put black women on their covers," and now Vanity Fair is bucking that trend with a cover shot of Kerry Washington, star of the hit TV show "Scandal," according to Esther Zuckerman. "Now the quest is on to make it sell, as a successful venture for Vanity Fair—and hopefully a change in some of the magazine industry's most frustrating newsstand attitudes."

"MSNBC delivered its worst quarterly prime-time showing among total viewers and adults 25-54 since 2007," while during that same period CNN actually rose to "top MSNBC for a rare second-place finish behind Fox News Channel," writes Michael O'Connell, parsing numbers provided by Nielsen Media Research.

In a lighter, pre-holiday mood, we'd suggest checking out this roundtable of six of TV's best comic actresses discussing such topics as their influences to how they first knew they were funny ("The Big Bang Theory"'s Mayim Bialik used to do "shtick for kids at the [school]bus stop" when she was 10.) There's a video of the "uncensored" version, where you can watch such gems as Betty White explaining how she and her parents used to sit at the kitchen table "cracking each other up."

Many ads run during the July 4 holiday window are following a new trend of celebrating U.S. war veterans, especially those from our most recent conflicts, reports Stuart Elliott. "Many such ads also announce donations by marketers to organizations that help those veterans, encourage consumers to make donations, or both." Among the examples he cites: Oral-B's “Built in the USA,” which "includes a $100,000 donation to an organization, Hope for the Warriors, that helps members of the armed forces who have served after Sept. 11, 2001."

News Corp., now spun off as the publishing arm of Murdoch's global empire, has a new aim: "to own the second screen," according to Chief Executive Robert Thomson, "dominating the smartphone market for news, entertainment and information," writes Lisa O'Carroll. In one example of this initiative, "we are working with Fox Sports and even the Wall Street Journal's quirky writers to develop a different kind of commentary for smartphones," Thompson says. 

Firms in every single category of the TV distribution biz are in acquisition/merger mode right now, because of three factors "related to content: It’s costing more to acquire; it’s available on increasingly more platforms; and retransmission fees to broadcast it are growing," writes Peter Lauria. End result of this trend probably won't be good for consumers, who may wind up "paying fewer companies more money for less services."