Tonight at the Time Warner Center, CNN held a special Fit Nation Summit. Up until now Fit Nation had been an ongoing program to try to get people to be more conscious to the fact that there’s a lot we can do and should be doing to improve our life expectations through a combination of exercise and eating right. The original goal was to add 1,000,000 hours of life to those who participated in the program. This number followed a formula that for every hour of exercise one would get back an additional two hours of life. However, the original goal was shattered and to date more than 3,000,000 hours of life have been added. Tonight’s forum therefore was to examine what has been done and what the next steps would be.
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CNN announced a major initiative to expand international newsgathering resources…

In the biggest expansion of international newsgathering resources in its 27-year history, CNN Worldwide today announced plans to significantly increase the number of correspondents worldwide, open a regional newsgathering hub in the United Arab Emirates, invest in a London-based digital-production unit, and make major investments in CNN’s International Newsource and CNN’s in-house wire operations.

“This is all about owning more content; these new resources will have a huge impact across all of CNN’s networks and platforms,” said Tony Maddox, executive vice president and managing director of CNN International. “Owning the content we broadcast, publish and make available to affiliates and other platforms is the backbone of this business. This multi-million dollar investment in staff and resources bolster our world-class, award-winning journalism as well as give us the power to move swiftly into developing new business models.”

New operations are also planned for Afghanistan, Belgium, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland and Vietnam.
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Here is CNN’s release on tonight’s Fit Nation summit. I’m still catching up on blogging and will post my entry soon…

CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta moderated the network’s 2007 “Fit Nation Solution Summit” today, a forum on public health and obesity at Time Warner Center in New York City, with featured guest former President Bill Clinton, business people, community activists and other civic leaders. During the event, CNN presented KaBOOM!, a nonprofit organization that unites communities and corporations to build playgrounds in underprivileged areas, with a check for $75,000 to build a playground in New Orleans.
The summit was the culmination of a multi-city Fit Nation tour, featured programming segments on CNN’s American Morning and Housecall with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, as well as a multimedia Web site (www.CNN.com/fitnation) that offers practical solutions to reducing obesity, the nation’s second-leading cause of preventable death.

At the event, Gupta described the 2008 Fit Nation efforts to be focused upon building relationships between families and communities to continue to improve conditions that support healthy lifestyles.
The one-hour Fit Nation Solution Summit took place on Wednesday, Nov. 14, from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. (ET). The event was taped and will air online at www.CNN.com/video beginning Friday, Nov. 16.

The Hill’s Klaus Marre writes about the fallout from last night’s Out in The Open segment on John McCain’s poor PR response to a very loaded question…

The camp of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hoped to capitalize Wednesday on what it says was a biased report on CNN about a campaign event at which a McCain supporter referred to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as “the bitch.”

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said in an e-mail to supporters that CNN owes the Arizona Republican an apology for its reporting of the story.

ICN says Sanchez is innocent. McCain did a bad job of handling the question.

After visiting FNC this morning (I’ll be back tomorrow for a different tour) I hopped a cab up to the Time Warner Center to visit CNN. The place is expansive. I had lunch with Rick Sanchez and later had coffee with T.J. Holmes (my former local anchor at KNTV before CNN tapped him for the weekend morning shift). I’ll have more to write about those encounters when I get back home. The main event was the Fit Nation Forum with Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Bill Clinton. I’ll have an entry on that later tonight.

Cable News Daily Ratings for November 13, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 832,000 viewers
CNN – 450,000 viewers
MSNBC – 323,000 viewers
CNBC – 256,000 viewers
HLN – 289,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,700,000 viewers
CNN – 818,000 viewers
MSNBC- 589,000 viewers
CNBC –254,000 viewers
HLN – 505,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 225,000 viewers
CNN – 148,000 viewers
MSNBC – 138,000 viewers
CNBC – 76,000 viewers
HLN- 117,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 385,000 viewers
CNN – 268,000 viewers
MSNBC – 253,000 viewers
CNBC – 102,000 viewers
HLN – 204,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 944,000 viewers (304,000)
American Morning- 322,000 viewers (99,000)
Morning Joe – 256,000 viewers (91,000)
Morning Express w/ Meade – 293,000 viewers (149,000)
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I neglected to note this earlier. But as I was being shown around FNC, a cake whizzed past me followed by Bill Hemmer carrying some forks and knives. Today was Hemmer’s birthday…

If you’ve never set foot in Midtown Manhattan before you will be a little shell shocked with the tall skyscrapers and all the plasma screens and giant signs. But after a block or two of that you get jaded. A block or two, coincidentally, was how far I had to walk to get to the News Corp. building from my hotel. I even had time to take a quick stroll through the GE Building first before my appointment at FNC. I mention the GE building because of the difference between the two buildings when you walk in. You can pretty much walk from one end of the building to the other on the ground floor of the GE building; the security checkpoints are all at the elevators in the core of the building. At News Corp. you have the lobby and that’s it. To go any further you need a badge. As the open stairway to the “basement” offices and newsroom cameras are right around the corner, the necessity for the “up front” security becomes readily apparent.

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The New York Post’s Don Kaplan writes about Nancy Grace being hospitalized…

NANCY Grace, the lightning- rod CNN Headline News host, was hospitalized over the weekend for blood clots in her lungs, the network said yesterday.

Grace, 48, gave birth to twins last week and her medical condition has been attributed to her pregnancy, a CNN spokeswoman said.

Portfolio’s Jack Flack advises Jeffrey Immelt about what he should do with CNBC in the battle against FBN…

1. Define the real endgame. The world now knows that Murdoch’s strategy is to assemble the pieces needed to establish a business-news death star, and no piece is more critical than a strong presence in American business-news television. The world also assumes that NBC Universal needs to be the first unit to go when you start breaking up the company.

The business-news audience is lucrative but finite. The pie will never get much bigger, so you will be playing a largely zero-sum game with an opponent that will not likely retreat from the category. So assume that the only way to prevent Murdoch from spoiling the business over the years is to sell it to him and that the best long-term returns will come from divesting.

Your objective is to sell it to Murdoch from a complete position of strength. Because it will be worth more to him than it will ever be worth to you, you should be able to extract a remarkable return for your shareholders-if you make sure that FBN fails and that CNBC is his only real alternative.
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CJR Daily’s Liz Cox Barrett beats up CNN for all the Las Vegas cliche references for its upcoming YouTube debate in Sin City…

A plea to campaign reporters: please resist the temptation to use Sin City-centric clichés in your coverage of Thursday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas. No boxing references (which lend themselves to shallow jab/counter-jab coverage). No gambling allusions (which lend themselves to superficial winner/loser/horserace coverage). And, yes, What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas once had a certain appeal that other state tourism taglines (say, New Jersey and You: Perfect Together) lack. But it is no longer clever. It is cringe-inducing. Leave it out.

Besides, CNN—which is sponsoring and airing Thursday’s debate—has already beat you to it. All of it.

When Don Imus got dropped from MSNBC, the timeslot meandered for quite a while during which MSNBC tried to figure out what to do with the slot and what would work. It became pretty clear early on that Joe Scarborough would be fronting the program with Mika Brzezinski handling the news updates but the program rotated through a series of “sidekicks” in the third chair and the format seemed unfocussed. The timing couldn’t have been worse for the network becuase Imus had been building steam to the point that I would argue it contributed to the host changes on CNN’s American Morning. But minus Imus, the timeslot cratered and stopped being a threat to CNN. I was beginning to start thinking about taking odds on how much longer Morning Joe would last.

But then MSNBC moved to 30 Rock and Morning Joe changed. Dramatically. Clearly MSNBC had been waiting for the move to implement these changes but unless you’d been watching the show, and the ratings showed that not a lot of people were, you might not have noticed.
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