• by October 1, 2003

TRIBUNE 1, AOL TIME WARNER 0. The battle of the media giants was held in another arena Tuesday night, when two of the conglomerates' subsidiaries played each other in the first round of the National League playoffs. Speaking at Tuesday's Goldman Sachs Communicopia XII conference hours before the first pitch between Tribune's Chicago Cubs and Time Warner's Atlanta Braves at Turner Field in Atlanta, Tribune Co. President/CEO Dennis Fitzsimmons predicted that the 20th wasn't the Chicago Cubs' century that perhaps the 21st century would be. Fitzsimmons, a native of the New York City borough of Queens, almost predicted the Cubs would make the World Series. "Here in New York, against the Yankees. That's what we'd like to see," Fitzsimmons said. Except that history isn't on the Cubs' side, with no World Series win in almost 100 years, even longer than the long-suffering Red Sox.

IT'S FOR YOU, MR. SPEAKER. It's not unusual for the sound of ringing cell phones to go off in the audience at business events and conferences, usually annoying the people around the offender and sometimes drawing a strong rebuke from someone on the dais. A speaker's cell phone going off doesn't happen as often, but that's what it did Tuesday morning about halfway through InterActive Corp. Chairman/CEO Barry Diller's interview with a Goldman Sachs analyst in front of a packed house in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt in mid- town Manhattan. Diller was discussing the strategy of InterActive subsidiary Home Shopping Network when he reached in his pocket and looked quizzically at the cell phone. Explaining that he never gets calls on the phone, he ignored it. Not that at least some in the audience would have minded if he took the call. Analysts remarked later that Diller didn't say anything particularly profound during his presentation.

DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO? A story in today's Hartford (Conn.) Courant claims 11 top executives in the telemarketing industry - or at least their phone numbers - have been signed up for the national do-not-call list that the industry has been fighting in court. The Courant reviewed the 50 million phone numbers on the list so far and found the home numbers of members of the Direct Marketing Association and chief executives of two telemarketing companies. At least one DMA executive claims that someone is trying to embarrass him by signing his number up via the Internet. It's true that no names are collected, just telephone numbers. Yet another DMA executive admitted it, telling the Courant anonymously: "I registered there myself personally. For the same reason that other consumers have. I don't want to be bothered by telemarketing calls."