When I was in NYC I heard rumblings that Weather Plus’ Jackie Meretzky would eventually be coming to do the weather from 30 Rock during Morning Joe. Remember that the first couple of days they were doing weather from the “2nd floor” of the MSNBC set. However later in the week I heard contrary information that said that wasn’t the case. But someone on the MSN MSNBC board noted that Joe Scarborough earlier this week appeared to refan the flames that Meretzky would be coming to 30 Rock…

Earlier this week, Joe made a big to-do about her now broadcasting from Englewood Cliffs. He said something to the effect of, “first MSNBC world headquarters in Secaucus, then CNBC world headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, soon NBC world headquarters here in New York.”

It was weird though… you really couldn’t tell if he meant that she would soon be doing WX from NY or not.

Last night on Countdown. during the Worst Person in The World segment, Keith Olbermann gave the Worst award to someone at FBN. (video here)

And our winner is:

The perpetually anonymous spokesman for “Fixed News” or “Fixed Business News” usually Roger Ailes or a proxy…

Variety reported Fox had a strong interest in hiring Jim Cramer away from our sister network CNBC…so the proud spokesperson who will never identify himself or herself by name…sent a series of emails to TV blogs that sounded something pretty close like this: “Strong interest? Try no interest. Jim approached us about coming to FBN. We turned him down because he has no ratings at CNBC and he was fired by FNC years ago.”

They’d kill for Cramers ratings. Oh, by the way…Alexis Glick, Liz Claman, Neil Cavuto…the heart of a Fox Business Machine being watched by literally…dozens of investors…each of them dropped by NBC and CNBC!

A Fox executive responded, “Unlike Keith, who has been fired from nearly every job he’s held, Neil Cavuto jumped to FNC from CNBC in 1996.”

At around 11:30 am, Chris Jansing, who was pulling extra weekend duty today, started anchoring from what I call the “cubby hole”, the area in front of the NBC Newsroom where contributors and reporters are sometimes interviewed. And she stayed there for the remainder of the program. At first I thought it was because they needed more time to set up something on the set but, once the news ended without them ever returning to the studio, that theory went out the window. Did something break in the main studio which forced this move?

(Before the sparks)

(After the sparks)

Update: This was serious. ICN hears sparks flew and there was smoke. I looked over the TiVo footabe and found nothing to indicate something happened while they were on the air so it must have been during a set changeover when the lighting is changed as the desk is rotated to a new orientation.

The upshot of this is the main MSNBC set is currently out of commission. Who wants to bet that come Monday if it’s not fixed that MSNBC will be anchoring from the NBC Nightly News set? That cubby hole is too small to do a whole days worth of newscasts from. And then there’s Morning Joe…three people can’t fit in that small space.
(more…)

Post your choices for this week’s What’s hot/What’s not. I’ll take them under advisement and post my list on Sunday…

…accompanied by more Cramer FBN tweaking. The NY Daily News’ Phyllis Furman has more…

“CNBC tells me to give it my all every single night. I love that,” Cramer told the Daily News Thursday.

“I want to play for an all-star team. I don’t want to play for an expansion team,” he added, tweaking the competition.

Eat The Press’ Rachel Sklar writes about a case of misidentification regarding yesterday’s NH Clinton HQ hostage drama…

But! As it turned out, Troy Stanley was NOT the hostage taker — as confirmed by HuffPo’s on-the-scene correspondent from Off The Bus, Bryan Bissell. The real suspect turned out to be the similarly-troubled Leeland Eisenberg. This news broke around 5:50 pm on HuffPo, CNN, E&P and Fox News below — except that someone forgot to tell the people working the Fox chyron. Watch as Cameron plainly IDs Eisenberg (”The suspect is believed to be Leeland Eisenberg — a new name”) while the chyron still stubbornly insists that “Clinton Office Standoff Suspect Is Troy Stanley” — then displays information provided by Stanley’s ex-wife. Oops. Watch:

CJR Daily’s Gal Beckerman defends CNN over the Kerr/YouTube debate incident…

Where does it end? Does CNN need to weed out of the audience anyone who has ever attended a Democratic rally or flipped through Barack Obama’s book at a Barnes and Noble? As it was, at least two other questioners from that debate were later deemed unsatisfactory by the blogging heads. One woman, named “Journey,” asked a question about abortion and was later spotted in another YouTube video criticizing the candidates’ responses — while wearing a “John Edwards 08” T-shirt. Still another questioner, who asked if the candidates would accept the support of Log Cabin Republicans, wrote in a profile on Obama’s Web site about how swell he thought the junior senator from Illinois was.

The minimum threshold at these forums should be pegged to interesting questions that elicit telling answers. Klein seems to understand this at some level, but is also too afraid to upset the partisan hounds. The questioners should not be either sycophantic or asking obviously partisan “gotcha” questions. Everything else should be fair game.

This campaign so far has been fraught with bad and stupid questions to the candidates. Can we really afford to disqualify a good one when it comes along?

Business Tennessee’s Kate Porterfield has a big profile of FBN’s Dave Ramsey. Link 1Link 2Link 3

It goes without saying, for example, that there’s only one Dave Ramsey, which begs the question—what will happen when he’s not around? Establishing a transition plan is a must for any “small business” owner, but it becomes even more imperative when the CEO is also the product. So, though he’s not yet 50, Ramsey says he’s been spending quite a bit of time trying to determine what the Lampo Group will look like when he can’t wear either hat.

He’s not sure yet whether that’s a transition strategy that involves his now college-aged children and/or their spouses. His 19-year-old daughter Rachel recently hosted Generation Change—a new product for youth groups in churches, and though he believes she’s “got the stuff” to fill his shoes, it’s hard to say whether Rachel, his other daughter or son will “want to involve themselves in this organization.”

The other part of leaving a legacy, he says, involves something that he decided he wanted to do about 10 years ago when he was on his first book tour.

“I was in Seattle having lunch with a guy, and we were looking out across this beautiful patio at all these houses,” Ramsey explains, “and he said, ‘There’s 25,000 Microsoft millionaires in Seattle alone, people who worked for Microsoft and became millionaires working there.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, that would be nice.’”

In Fast Company.com’s Idiot Box, Elizabeth Spiers takes shots at the TV Business channels over the way they do their news…

The problem is not that straight business news is too boring to work on TV; it’s that the channels perceive it to be too complex for the notoriously dumbed-down medium and its presumably dumb audience. On the Fox Business Web site, featured articles include “What Is Wall Street?” and “Dating to Meet Your Match and Your Budget”–online counterparts to the channel’s service-oriented on-air stories that, for instance, tell you how to avoid foreclosure if you default on your mortgage payments. From this we can deduce that the channel’s producers imagine its typical viewer to be someone tightly budgeted and single, so ignorant of the business world that “Wall Street” is nearly if not completely unintelligible, and on the verge of having his or her house repossessed. CNBC and Bloomberg seem to think a bit more highly of their audiences, but their content still consists overwhelmingly of dry digests of market news and analysis generalized to the point of meaninglessness.

In the process, something important is lost. In bending over backward to make business relevant to viewers and assuming that they aren’t sophisticated enough to understand or want anything beyond a rehash of whatever ran in the morning’s Wall Street Journal, televised business news misses an opportunity to really examine the influence of private-sector power in modern society.