Catching The Red Eye: I think The Chicago Tribune’s decision to launch Red Eye is a big deal. It is potentially a watershed moment in the newspaper business, maybe on the scale of USA Today’s launch.

Writer’s Block: Nothing gets to me like school shootings. Anything like yesterday’s events in Maryland can absolutely own me.

Not Effexive:This celebrity-disguised-as-pharmaceutical-endorser trend has gone off the hook. First, Lauren Bacall hawks arthritis drugs on the Today show.

This Week’s Riff That I Wish I Wrote: By Chris Willman on EW.com.

Playing The Dozens: A dozen. That’s the number of reports the FCC put out yesterday in an information overload that is bound to short-circuit some of the real constructive debate about changes in media ownership rules.

Got Growth? Part I: We’ve been knocking around the ad revenue forecast for 2003 here in the idyllic setting of Westport. Without any grounding in the science of forecasting, I have to go to the basics.

Million Dollar Bod And A Ten Dollar Game: Apparently you don’t even need to bring an A-game to be a sports marketing hero these days. Burns Sports & Celebrities annual sports marketing ranking (by dollars earned) makes it official.

Riffs On Two Days Of Forecast 2003 Buckets: Mediapost (parent of Media magazine and all the newsletters you get including this one) put on a Forecast 2003 conference in NYC last week. There were two days.

OPRs For The Week Of Sept. 23 Whoa, Dude.

Indigestion: I was driving home from our Mediapost Forecast 2003 conference in Manhattan last night, and I stopped at the McDonald’s on the Hutchinson Parkway, supersized my Quarter Pounder and fries, came home, kissed the kids and sat down to write this. So I’ll attribute some of this paranoia to mega grease toxicity.