If it ain’t broke…. you know the rest. NBC sure does. I thought the long awaited announcement of its fall lineup was decidedly underwhelming and when you’re number one, that’s OK.

I used to work for a guy who claimed that the economy was like a toddler: moody, occasionally brilliant and just beyond your control. I thought about that this week. This was the kind of week that turns an ad economy.

If the big story coming out of NCTA is the move toward developing more Video On Demand services, I’m yawning. I think the story nobody wants to talk about is the pressure on cable channels for more flexibility in creative units.

It kills me sometimes how talent agencies want to be ad agencies. Case in point: Michael Ovitz sold his floundering talent/ad/celebrity agency, Artists Management Group, to The Firm, a music management company that counts Korn, Limp Bizkit and The Dixie Chicks among its acts. Ovitz was once deemed too powerful in Hollywood. When he ran the Creative Artists Agency during the high flying late 80’s, he set it on course to drift from brokering talent to getting a piece of the ad agency pie back in his high-flying late 80s days. CAA, in fact, recently signed K Mart as a …

Several reports yesterday had Al Neuharth seriously contemplating a national newspaper for kids. Let me guess - it will have really short stories and a lot of color graphics, right?

Hey, it’s cool to be jaded and cynical, but diminishing the importance of winning a National Magazine Award is off-base. Content excellence needs to be celebrated.

With the recent announcement that ABC will devote its entire Sept. 11, 2002 on air schedule to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, it becomes apparent that networks have thought through their approach to a difficult event.

Greetings. As a media professional you get enough thrown at you on a daily basis. Can't even get in an elevator anymore without the latest stock market numbers nagging you from the corner of the screen. This column will riff on what's happening in the world of the integrated media business. It will equally riff on what's not happening and what should happen in this business. I hope it unsettles your day a little bit, and starts you thinking about new possibilities for advertising and marketing.