Media Sniper Riffs: Unless I’m wrong, cable news channels were started for two reasons. The first was that you could run a network all day and night for a fraction of what it cost to run an entertainment-based network.

Don’t Call It A Comeback: The media business is in a nice spot right now. Magazines are loaded with September success.

Some media content riffs that are stuck in my keyboard: Watching TV and websites during this tragic shooting spree, I strikes me that never in the history of TV has so much non-news been labeled “breaking news.”….

OPRs (Other People’s Riffs) For the week that was: Translation: “This Thing Just Wasn’t Making Any Money:” Said Time, Inc. president Ann Moore after closing SI For Women this week, "SI Women was smart, interesting and attractive.

The baseball version of Riffs: Here Comes Dick Parsons To The Mound: It’s easy to say things like this when you’re not writing the checks or apologizing to Wall Street analysts, but I think SI For Women got a quick hook. AOL/TimeWarner shut the book down reportedly for not filling the growth mode among active female athletes that the company thought it would fill.

Cut Charmed; Heavy Up on 60 Minutes: Lot of buzz so far this week about a New York Sunday Times article about advertising to the 18-34 demographic group. The core of the article is this: “People over the age of 50 account for half of all the discretionary spending in the United States.

Go Donny, Go Donny: First trade show I ever went to: 1985, National Association of Record Merchandisers. LA. I was just a year removed from college keg parties, I had a very hard time getting my head around the fact that there was a whole floor of record company suites at the Century City Plaza that wanted nothing more than for me to come in and drink with them.

If You Gotta Ask You’ll Never Know: Is great journalism compatible with business? Hell, yes. The questions comes from an Editor and Publisher story last Friday concerning a discussion among 24 media executives and journalists who convened for three days in June at the sixth annual Aspen Institute Conference on Journalism and Society.

Other People's Riffs: Walter Isaacson Tells It Like It Is: The CNN Chief told The New York Observer, “We do very fine in the overnights. We have really good audiences.

ARFnotes: This year is my first trip to the Advertising Research Foundation’s conference t in NYC. I was expecting three things: numbers, numbers and numbers.