The L.A. Times’ Meg James and Matea Gold scoop that NBC, including NBC News, will be moving from its Burbank location to across the street from Universal Studios…

NBC has ambitious plans for its new digs, which it has dubbed the West Coast News Headquarters and Content Center. The company intends to be the anchor tenant of a massive project, more than 1 million square feet, being proposed to the city of Los Angeles by Thomas Properties, NBC Universal’s developer for the project.

The new building is expected to have a street-side studio modeled after the “Today” show set in New York, as well as state-of-the-art production facilities that will allow the company’s news organizations to more easily share content, executives said.

“I think this is a real pronouncement of a serious commitment on the company’s part to news and information going forward,” said Steve Capus, president of NBC News, adding that the new Universal City headquarters would provide a “central nervous system.”

“It’s really about being greater than the individual parts,” he added. Even though the various newsrooms currently share the same facility in Burbank, “right now we’re kind of a completely disconnected organization, because the technical spines around our organizations are built on different platforms.”

While the behind-the-scenes changes may not be immediately evident to viewers, Capus said, “it will be great to finally be able to honestly say when we throw to someone in Los Angeles, ‘We’re standing in the city of Los Angeles.’ ”

ICN hears the Today Show’s Matt Lauer has landed an exclusive interview with Senator Larry Craig. It will be filmed in Boise on Tuesday. Tentative plans call for airing the show on a Dateline special. Clips will probably air on MSNBC in advance of the Dateline special.

Somebody’s piping in music to the control room? Or another FBN launch related glitch?

Update: An insider tells ICN there was a small technical issue with master control in New York during Special Report which was fixed immediately.

Update 2: What I find interesting about all this is whenever the audio changes you see a visible glitch in the picture.

TVNewser has the latest debate rankings. The CNBC debate was the second lowest. This doesn’t surprise me because the 4pm start time is not the best time to be having a debate. Consequently MSNBC’s re-air brought in an additional 1,000,000 viewers and a higher Demo who probably couldn’t see the debate live.

TV Guide’s Stephen Battaglio interviews Chris Matthews…(via TVNewser)

TVGuide.com: You caused a stir with some remarks you made at the 10th anniversary party for Hardball, at which you said [referring to the perjury conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby] that the Bush administration had “finally been caught in its criminality.”

Matthews: I thought on the 10th anniversary it would be good to celebrate the First Amendment, which gives us all our living. We reviewed in brief the remarkable experience of covering the Clinton [scandal] and the defense of the war with Iraq. And the difference in these two cases was that although I was extremely tough on Clinton, there was never any attempt to silence me — whereas there was a concerted effort by [Vice President Cheney’s office] to silence me. It came in the form of three different people calling trying to quiet me.

TVGuide.com: Why are you coming out about this now?

Matthews: I think people ought to know this. There’s a lot going on among our producers, our young bookers, now that I never noticed before. There is an almost menacing call that you get whenever someone hears something they don’t like — their people call up and threaten, or challenge and get very nasty. That’s now become the norm. I told people, just tell me this from now on. Every time someone calls and tries one of those things, whether it’s the Mitt Romney campaign or the John McCain campaign or whatever, I will put it on the air. I’m tired of this kind of pressure that’s now become normal among the young staffers on these campaigns. When it’s coming from the Vice President’s office — there was a concerted effort to stop me from reporting on what the Vice President’s office was doing in terms of making the case that there was a nuclear threat from Iraq. I wanted to remind people that having a talk show that is outspoken is not without its troubles.

Jimmy Carter was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer in The Situation Room today and made enough controversial comments to keep the right side of the internet fed for a week. Transcript highlights follow…

On the Republican presidential candidates

BLITZER: Do any of these candidates, presidential candidates, scare you?

CARTER: Not on the Democratic side, no.

BLITZER: What about the Republican side?

CARTER: Well, they all seem to be outdoing each other in who wanted to go to war first with Iran, who wants to keep Guantanamo open longer and expand its capacity, things of that kind. They’re competing with each other to appeal to the ultra-right wing, warmongering element in our country, which I think is a minority of the total population.

BLITZER: Who scares you the most?

CARTER: I wouldn’t want to judge between them, because if I condemn one of them, it might escalate him to the top position in the Republican ranks.
(more…)

Cable News Daily Ratings for October 9, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 806,000 viewers
CNN – 429,000 viewers
MSNBC – 339,000 viewers
CNBC – 334,000 viewers
HLN – 214,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,645,000 viewers
CNN – 698,000 viewers
MSNBC – 1,001,000 viewers
CNBC – 333,000 viewers
HLN – 390,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 239,000 viewers
CNN – 137,000 viewers
MSNBC – 122,000 viewers
CNBC – 90,000 viewers
HLN- 86,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 435,000 viewers
CNN – 229,000 viewers
MSNBC – 342,000 viewers
CNBC – 142,000 viewers
HLN – 151,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 835,000 viewers (287,000)
American Morning- 377,000 viewers (124,000)
Morning Joe – 224,000 viewers (88,000)
Robin & Co. – 191,000 viewers (80,000)
(more…)

This is came via the Ron Paul website where Carl Cameron is interviewing Paul and someone is shooting both of them. It’s the standard campaign interview stuff until it gets near the end and when an odd exchange takes place…

CAMERON: How about Fox, how are we doing?

PAUL: Fox, I wish they would be fair and balanced all the time.

CAMERON [laughing]: Don’t we all.

From Johnny Dollar near the top of the 4pm hour….

About 20 minutes or so ago, maybe more, Jane Skinner suddenly replaced Shep, explaining (and stumbling a bit) that he was out getting more information (they were covering the school shooting).He’s still not back.

Update: According to TVNewser, Smith was ill…

John Harwood blogs about the comb incident which you probably didn’t see last night on the debate…

Suddenly I noticed John McCain lean over to retrieve something — a comb that had fallen to the floor. With a chuckle, McCain handed it to Rudy Giuliani, who no longer has much to comb. Then they turned toward Chris, thus poking fun at the blow-dried TV performer stereotype.

Everyone laughed. I smiled but kept discreetly quiet. And later thanked McCain for retrieving my comb.

Portfolio’s Jeff Bercovici blogs about Chris Matthews…

In the event, Matthews played it pretty straight, which Fox News et al will no doubt chalk up to their watchdoggery. The one off-note came in an exchange with Fred Thompson. After listening to Thompson’s answer to a question about a possible government bailout of Chrysler, Matthews editorialized, “Took a long time. He said no; he should have stopped there.”

There you have it: Matthews is a jerk. And while being a jerk is sometimes a useful journalistic tool, Matthews is a jerk for no reason; he doesn’t seem to get the distinction between adversarial, which every journalist should be, and being combative. When Matthews brags about how “independent” he is, what he means is that he’s obnoxious to both sides.

Earlier today Fox Business Network’s Alexis Glick sat down for some satellite interviews with Fox Broadcast affiliates. The subject? What else? FBN. Some of you can expect to see those interviews airing in your local markets in the not too distant future.

TVNewser has a look at Out in The Open, Countdown, and The O’Reilly Factor are doing at 8pm…

Paidcontent.org notes that CNBC President Mark Hoffman will keynote the 2007 “Future of Business Media” conference in New York City on October 30th at the Waldorf Astoria…

For our “Future of Business Media” conference on Oct 30th in NYC, the president of CNBC, Mark Hoffman, has agreed to join us as a keynote speaker. Along other issues, we’ll of course ask him about his network’s planned moves as it faces new competition from the Fox Business Network, launching Monday next week.

The New York Observer’s Zachary Roth interviews CNN’s Rick Sanchez…

One Thursday in July, CNN’s Rick Sanchez received an e-mail from network president Jonathan Klein.

“I need a hard-throwing righty out of the bullpen,” to fill in for Paula Zahn as anchor for a week in the crucial 8 p.m. weekday time slot, Mr. Klein wrote, according to Mr. Sanchez. “Can you be in New York by Monday?”

That flight isn’t more than a couple of hours, but the distance between his gig as a weekend daytime anchor for CNN, based in Atlanta, was a world away. This was the big leagues: If only for a week, the energetic, 49-year-old Cuban immigrant would go head-to-head against Fox’s fed-up conservative, Bill O’Reilly, and MSNBC’s liberal sophisticate, Keith Olbermann.

He threw a few suits in a bag, jumped on a plane and covered for Ms. Zahn for a week. Things went well. So well, in fact, that the following week, after CNN announced Ms. Zahn was leaving the network, Mr. Klein asked: “Can you do another week?”

That week, too, went well.

“So then he says, ‘Can you do a month?’” Mr. Sanchez remembered, in an interview at his new office in the Time Warner Center. Next, he remembered, it was, “Can you go through Labor Day?” Then: “Can you go through November?” And now, said Mr. Sanchez, “We’re going through February,” when the network’s new star hire, Campbell Brown, will step into the slot.

Media Daily News’ Joe Mandese writes about Nielsen making a rule change in the wake of NBC’s “Heroes” ratings maneuver…

One piece a majority of Nielsen clients have decided not to put together is multiple airings of the exact episode of the same broadcast network TV series.

Cable networks cried foul, because Nielsen’s systems currently do not enable them to reprocess ratings the same way. Broadcast networks that have dominant shows airing at the end of the week, also did not like NBC’s decision to exploit the new reprocessing rule to take advantage of a top-rated show - “Heroes” - that airs at the beginning of the TV week on Monday nights.

Ad agency executives didn’t like it because the policy omitted discrete ratings for each episode, making it difficult to conduct apples to apples comparisons on nights and against counter-programming..

Technically, broadcast networks can still do that on rare occasions, but Nielsen’s new policy tightens the loophole so that in such a way that makes it impractical. Basically, any program that meets Nielsen’s standards for being “reportable” has to be reported as an individual telecast. Among the criteria, are that a national TV show reaches at least 30% of U.S. TV households, and carries national TV advertising in it.