The Independent’s Sophie Morris has an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo…(via Romenesko)

What is the best thing about your job?

I have an ability to interview business people and executives from around the world. Since I came back from the World Economic Forum in Davos (in January) I must have spoken to 1,500 people about different aspects of the economy. I love finding out what people are thinking when it comes to business.

And the worst?

I’m constantly on deadline and it can get very stressful. Today I was up at 5am because I did an appearance on the Today show on NBC and went down to the New York Stock Exchange and talked about the federal reserve and inflation. That was over at 8am and I’m on my way now to interview someone for my Business Week column. I don’t go to the CNBC studios until 11am because my show, Closing Bell, airs at 3pm. Every day varies.

TVNewser scoops that Michael Rubin has returned to MSNBC as Vice President of Long Form Programming, thus cementing the notion that MSNBC is going to be running more tape in the future.

Greta explains the decision making process behind why On the Record didn’t cover the Miami terror cell arrests much on the day the news broke.

We thought the story was, while important, pretty much over with the arrests and that occurred well before 10 p.m. If the group is not Al Qaeda and if they had no explosives and if they were all in custody… what more could there be? What stood out to us was that there was no immediate danger. In other words, this was a plan to plan something… and it never materialized. A few different facts or a bit more information might have changed our minds, but it just wasn’t there and, in our judgment, it did not warrant going wall to wall on it for the entire hour.

We took the cautious approach. We did not blow out our entire show and put the breaking news words or put a FOX News Alert on your screen for an entire hour. In our judgment, the way to handle the story was to simply start the show with a FOX News Alert about the arrest — since it was important — and go to our reporter Steve Harrigan in Florida where the arrests were made. We had him do a short report — a few minutes — and then moved on.

Johnny Dollar sent this in. MSNBC GM Dan Abrams was at Lis Wiehl’s wedding and posed for this picture with FNC’s E.D. Hill. You can tell from the cap that this appeared on Fox and Friends.

CNBC announced this morning that Meredith Start has joined the network as Vice President and Executive Producer; CNBC.com…

Meredith Stark has been named Vice President and Executive Producer, CNBC.com, effective immediately, it was announced today by Mark Hoffman, President, CNBC.

“I’m delighted to have Meredith join CNBC’s digital team,” said Hoffman. “CNBC will position itself to provide real time news, analysis and interviews on CNBC.com. I’m confident that with her extensive background and experience, Meredith will help lead our digital team to create such a platform to ensure that CNBC is everywhere.”

Stark has more than 10 years experience in creating and managing web sites. She joins CNBC from Gartner, Inc., where she served as Group Vice President, Product Platforms, responsible for all digital platforms delivering Gartner research. This month, she won a Webby Award, the leading international award honoring excellence in web design, for her work on .
(more…)

The AP notes that Soledad O’Brien was named one of Newsweek’s “15 People Who Make America Great”…

Also among the 15 people or corporations named were Soledad O’Brien, an anchor on CNN’s “American Morning” who the magazine said showed an “inner rage” while reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Blogging is going to be sparse during the daytime this week. It’s the end of quarter this week and work is going to keep me busy…

WHAC notes that Pipeline is expanding to weekends…

The New York Times’ David Carr has a must read on CNN…(via Romenesko)

Back when he was recommitting CNN to news and steering it away from personalities and agendas, Mr. Klein left a side door open: CNN would stay the course “unless the first batch of things we’re trying to do don’t turn out well.”

Welcome to Plan B. Mr. Klein ran straight into a brutal competitive environment.

What sells on cable is “edge,” not the events of the day. CNN, a longtime chronic presence on signal events, has now joined the pack in smudging the line between news and opinion, celebrity and anchors, journalism and ratings.

____________
“Why would we go to plan B when Plan A is working so well?” he asks. He admits he is doing what he can to win, but he is trying to “win with substance.”

“Sizzle is out — audiences expect substance, and we deliver that in a way no one else does,” Mr. Klein said. “We are feeling very good about the momentum we have gained and the fact that we are showcasing our reporting. Our gimmick is news.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal rehashes the Cooper/Jolie interview and uses it to paint a large brush over the celebritization of news…

Cooper, the one-time ABC reality-show host officially cast as anchor/reporter but seeming to be gunning of late to replace Larry King, is being promoted as a personality at a network founded on the quaint premise that news–not newscasters and not glitterati–should be the draw.

If you’re CNN, perhaps you’re apt to try anything, having trailed Fox News Channel for so long. But having just about every show last Tuesday–Lou Dobbs’ program was a notable exception–talk up Cooper’s Jolie interview that night or the World Refugee Day cause Jolie wanted to promote probably isn’t the long-term way to do it.

The interlaced campaigns to sell Cooper and his best-selling memoir pay off only if he delivers the goods. You would think a man whose mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, is a brand name herself would caution him, if not his bosses, about what happens when branding goes bad.

Broadcasting & Cable writes up a small blurb on FNC that is going to raise some eyebrows…

Production values are slipping, and bookers aren’t competitive enough, relying too heavily on the same pool of faces and settling for authors or actors after they’ve already been on CNN or … gasp … MSNBC.

A full-page “Now Hiring” ad that ran recently in a trade magazine asked, “Can you make the cut?” Says one Fox staffer, that question was not addressed to outside applicants: “That was aimed inside.”

Broadcasting & Cable redid their website a couple of weeks ago. That shouldn’t be news to anyone who visits it on a regular basis. But what might have gone un-noticed is they’ve put up BC Beat in a more prominent location. Somehow I had missed it all this time. Here’s something in it from earlier in the week on Chris Matthews at Promax…

One of the perennial disappointments of trade shows is the usually bad idea of getting “name” personalities to moderate panels and then discovering they don’t know much about the topic. Whatever the topic is. Thursday at Promax, the promo group let MSNBC and NBC News hardballer Chris Matthews moderate a panel with three top marketers (Mike Benson from ABC, Vince Manze from NBC and Ken Dice from Discovery Networks), joined by Dave Neuman, president of programming for Current. It could have been interesting but it wasn’t very because Chris Matthews doesn’t know much about the promotions and marketing business.