Wayne Friedman at MediaPost begins his analysis of NBC’s downturn in up front ad commitments with this gloomy lead…

NBC, THE LAGGARD BROADCAST NETWORK in what has proved to be a languishing upfront sales season, is expected to announce it has wrapped up its upfront sales at considerably lower levels than some had predicted — ending up at $1.9 billion in upfront ad commitments for the 2005-06 prime-time season, agency executives tell MediaDailyNews. That’s a decline of nearly $800 million from NBC’s 2004-05 upfront sales effort, and represents another weak signal not just for NBC, but for what many are now saying is a far weaker television sales marketplace than initial reports suggested.

More details here…

Newsweek’s Verne Gay takes a look at The Situation and wants the show to slow down…

What’s Happening At CNN has a nice send off to Bill Hemmer…

In an attempt to take on MSNBC.com’s extensive video streaming service, CNN today announced a new broadband service. The description of the free part of the service reads an awful lot like what MSNBC.com is already doing. There will however also be a premium part of the service, subscription based, that includes multiple live streams and access to the video archives. This is something that MSNBC.com does not do (yet). The launch is scheduled for June 20th.

oh…there is this tidbit in the release that I think the folks at MSNBC.com might take issue with…

CNN.com ranks as the leading online news and information site

Last time I checked MSNBC.com had the most traffic per month. Is CNN parsing the data in such a way that they come out on top?