General Electric—which owns 80% of NBC Universal—just reached an agreement to buy French conglomerate Vivendi's 20% stake in the company for $5.8 billion. This will allow GE to sell NBC in turn to cable TV provider Comcast. (Very confusing.) If regulators approve the NBC deal, Comcast will boast a double threat of content production and distribution with which it will squelch all opposition and force-feed The Office reruns to the American populace until we are witless, sitcom-dazed zombies at their beck and call. At least that's what some concerned media activists say will happen. (Doesn't sound so bad, honestly.) [THR]

•Alec Baldwin has just announced he's quitting acting for, like the sixth time or something. Baldwin told Men's Journal he is planning on retiring March 2010, when his "30 Rock" contract runs out. But The Wrap points out he's said this many times before, and here he is! Plus, his new corporate overlords at NBC/Comcast/Evilcorp will probably implant a chip in his brain that makes him want to act forever. [THR]

•Peter Jackson's two-part "Hobbit" is being delayed until 2012 because of delays in writing and casting. I think I speak for nerds everywhere when I say: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO [shakes fist angrily at computer screen while flecks of spittle fall to the crumb-strewn floor of his parents' basement.] [The Wrap]

•BREAKING: Nicole Richie had an idea! (It was for an ABC sitcom that will "feature Richie as a professional woman with complicated family relationships and struggling to figure out what role she'll take as her life and her family evolve.")[Variety]

•By the time you read this the White House Crashers will probably have already appeared on the "Today Show" to present their side of the story. So jealous of you, future! [LAT]

•Kathryn Beglow's Hurt Locker has won "Best Picture" at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. We are trying to think of some adjective to describe the film in a different way than the LA Times. What is a synonym for "gritty"? [LAT]

• Having his tawdry personal life ripped wide open for the world to see isn't doing David Letterman any harm ratings-wise. The Hollywood Reporter writes, "Far from hurting the host's popularity, the sex-and-extortion headlines seemingly have had little impact on his late-night show and possibly even helped the series grow its viewership compared with last year." Season to date, The Late Show is up four percent in viewership, compared to its main competitor NBC's Conan O'Brien who has taken just a tiny 47 percent drop this season compared to Leno's performance in the slot last year. [Hollywood Reporter]

• In the end, Michael Jackson came through. After a back and forth over the past two weeks over whether the hype machine was properly calibrated to the public level of enthusiasm for the rehearsal documentary, This Is It earned a decent $21 million at the US box, although this morning's write-ups focus on the more impressive sounding world tally of $101 million, ample to earn Sony back its $60 purchase price. (Which is odd in that Monday morning box office write-ups almost never mention international grosses, generally taking the US box office as the whole magilla.) The consensus view seems to focus now on the stat that This will become the highest grossing concert film in history. Which is not quite the "Biggest Movie of All Time Ever In History" the media seemed to be heralding a week ago, but still nothing to sneeze at. [Box Office Mojo]

• Elsewhere at the box office, Paranormal Activity continued its run, taking the number two slot and bringing its total domestic haul to $84 million. Saw 6 fell off 60 percent from its already unimpressive opening weekend numbers giving faint hope that the series' day may be drawing to a close (but don't count on it.) [Variety]

• The NBC/Universal drama is on the brink of resolution. Comcast is said to have reached a tentative agreement to buy the studio and network, with an announcement expected at any time. [NY Times]

• Katie Holmes will star in and earn her first producing credit for The Romantics, a film about eight college friends who reunite for a wedding also starring Anna Paquin, Elijah Wood and Malin Ackerman. [Variety]

On its Media Decoder blog, the NY Times raised the curtain on the Comcast war room, revealing the man pulling the levers is none other than mogul-on-the-loose Chernin himself. And now the media world is wondering, is Chernin about to rule Hollywood once more — and this time for keeps?

For Hollywood's reporting savants this is a day that will live in infamy. To learn after months of reporting on the pending sale, they missed this huge element of the wheeling-deadling. There will be no Toldjas on this shift of the tectonic plates.

Certainly, they can be excused for missing it. It seems, according to the NYT reporter that Comcast more or less, kept Chernin locked away under the tightest scrutiny, secreting him into the takeover bunker in phony moustache under the cover of darkness, to advise a select group of cable titans who would know the shadowy adviser only as "Our Friend From The Coast." Amazingly, Comcast was able to even keep the news from Machievelli's foremost disciple in showbiz, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, the man whose job would be most threatened if Chernin's quiet advisory role were to, as they say, become operational after a merger.

So if Zucker didn't know, you can't really blame Nikki Finke for not knowing. But when you make your name pathologically claiming to have known everything about everything that is happening in Hollywood before the players themselves knew it, to have not known about the biggest thing happening currently in entertainment must be regarded as a wee bit of a setback. (The Deadline blog has been notably, uncharacteristically quiet on the subject thus far.)

But even for the non-Toldja oriented press corps, this revelation kinda demonstrates how little our reporting teams often know about what's really happening in the business beyond what's spoon-fed them by various interests. The major outlets have been covering this story for months, none revealing any hint that the Big C had a finger in this pie.

Some other questions, and possible answers, raised by the speculation frenzy:

• The piece claims Jeff Zucker has been assured he would keep his job under a Comcast regime, even furnishing him with the specifics of what his reporting structure would be? Can we believe that? Does he believe that? How is that even possible?
• David Poland offers that this news supplies the missing link to Comcast's world-domination scheme, namely putting someone who understands what to do with content into the mix. By his calculations, this buyout, with Chernin aboard, would make the new company second only to NewsCorp in global integrated reach.
• And what about Vivendi? Don't they still have to figure out what to do with their stake before any of this can move forward? Do our French friends count for nothing?
• With all our blustering about Goldman Sachs and Wall St. greed in the face of economic collapse, where is the outrage for Hollywood salaries run amok in the face of the Death of Media? Especially salaries for former Studio Chiefs. According to the NYT piece, Chernin's goodbye package, in exchange for not running Fox included, "movie and television production deals with 20th Century Fox, and perks such as the use of a private jet and a car and driver. In 2008, he earned a $34 million pay package, according to a regulatory filing." AIG, you're not dreaming big enough!

• Meet your new action hero overlord: Chris Pine. Already fronting the rebooted Star Trek franchise, Pine has signed on to play the Jack Ryan role previously portrayed by Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin in a new go-around adapting Tom Clancy's series of espionage novels. [Variety]

• For those CBS and Viacom employees who feel each day the burden of the Redstone yoke, you can take heart today; Sumner is now less your owner than he was last week. The octillionaire mogul has been selling off the debt of his holding company, National Amusements. For now, however, NA still retains the controlling interest. [Variety]

• As the world waits for the final outcome of Vivendi/GE/Comcast talks over the fate of NBC Universal, Nikki Finke reports that Comcast wants the deal "done and announced in November." So there. [DHD]

• Curse be damned! ABC has won the competition to be the next network to fail with a sitcom by a former Friends star, locking up rights to the Matthew Perry project. [THR]

• The Wrap reports that Alex Young, Co-President of Production at 20th Century Fox is being moved out of the job and into a producing deal. Young was a Tom Rothman protege who has been in the job since 2007. [The Wrap]

• Always on the lookout for a feel good project, director Gus Van Sant and novelist Bret Easton Ellis have picked up the rights to "The Golden Suicides," Nancy Jo Sales' Vanity Fair article about the deaths of downtown artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. [Variety]

• The creator of the Gilmore Girls is coming to HBO. Exec-Producer Amy Sherman-Palladino has signed a deal to develop a dramedy for the cable network. She described the project as the "story of love, hate, family — and finding the perfect opening line," [THR]

• This is what it's come to in the strange, contorted career of Bill Murray; taking Joe Pesci's leftovers. For those who thought Murray's Zombieland cameo was just a little strange— that he was too big, or had been too big a star for the joke about Woody Harrelson being obsessed with him to completely click — you are right. In an interview with Hitfix, Murray revealed the walk on had been intended for Joe Pesci — with whom the joke would have made a lot more sense — but that Murray took the part after Pesci passed. [Hitfix]

Reuters says both Murdoch and Liberty Media's John Malone are sniffing around the 20 percent stake in NBC Universal that Vivendi is prepared to sell, but neither man has actually approached NBC Universal owner GE about a deal. As much as we'd love to imagine MSNBC under Murdoch's gentle-but-firm leadership, here's why it's not going to happen:

1. The report of Murdoch's interest comes via CNBC, which is the preferred in-house avenue for GE getting its messages out there on this deal. So it's almost certainly just a way for GE to keep pressure on Comcast and let them know that it has other options.

2. The FCC would blow a gasket. News Corp. already owns two television stations in nine markets, and is maxed out in terms of how many the FCC will let him own. It's unclear to us whether a minority stake in NBC Universal would trigger the FCC's limits on ownership and require Murdoch to sell off some of his assets in order to satisfy regulators, but the anti-trust implications of one television, cable, and movie giant owning a significant stake of another television, cable, and movie giant—especially when radical leftists control the White House and the Justice Department—make it a far stretch.

3. The Comcast purchase is a done deal, because the mellifluously named prognosticator Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's computer has ordained that it will happen. Bueno de Mesquita, whom the CIA hires to predict the future using Microsoft Excel and has a purported 90 percent accuracy rate, was asked by the Wall Street Journal's Dennis K. Berman to weigh in on the acquisition, and he says it will happen, based on what Berman told him about the players' intentions:

For the Comcast-NBCU game, I provided Dr. Bueno de Mesquita a crude approximation of the positions of the dozen parties most likely to influence a deal.

[snip]

Of course, these were rough estimates done on the fly. As Dr. Bueno de Mesquita reminded me, my evaluations could be flawed. His work was done over a weekend, which may influence the quality of the results. Most assignments can take three weeks, at an opening price of $50,000.

Oh, OK. That settles it then.

The story's murky: Citing two sources, The Wrap reported that a deal to purchase NBC Universal—which owns Universal Studios, the USA Network, Bravo, MSNBC, NBC, and a bunch of other stuff—from General Electric "had already been completed at a purchase price of $35 billion." GE has been rumored to be interested in selling NBC for ages, and Vivendi's reported intent to exercise its option to sell its 20 percent stake in the company this year could be a motivating factor for getting a deal done. Comcast, which owns cable and internet pipes but not much of the stuff that goes through them, has always wanted to own a big content company, and made a failed pass at Disney five years ago. GE makes engines and microwaves, so it never made much sense for them to own a network and studio.

But Comcast has attempted to knock the story down, saying "the report that Comcast has a deal to acquire NBC Universal is inaccurate." And while GE has officially remained silent, CNBC—which Nikki Finke suspects is acting as a mouthpiece for its corporate parent—is pouring cold water on the report as well. But NBC Universal's bullet-headed, upward-failing chief Jeff Zucker sent out a compay-wide e-mail today that took pains not to shoot the story down, saying, helpfully, "there are a number of possible things that could happen." The New York Times says that, Comcast's carefully calibrated denial notwithstanding, it is just one of many companies looking at buying Vivendi's stake in NBC Universal, but not the whole company. Billions of dollars are at stake, so you can be fairly confident that everybody is lying.

But what happens if Comcast does buy the whole hog outright? Here are a couple of potential ramifications:

Tina Fey Is Screwed:
The primary comic engine of 30 Rock is the notion of a television network being run by a cultish global microwave conglomerate. Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, is a mild-mannered squash champion who lives in Philadelphia. They could get a good story arc out of the sale, but in the end, what's so funny about a show-runner clashing with cable executive? We suppose they could just pretend it didn't happen, but it's been funny because it's been true!

Bill O'Reilly is Screwed:
Ruh-roh. The hysterical crusade against GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt for personally helping Iran build a nuclear warhead sort of lacks urgency when it's not a proxy war against Keith Olbermann and MSNBC. If GE fully divests and Comcast takes over, O'Reilly loses his favorite target to lie about. Maybe Comcast gives free cable to ACORN, or something?

Jeff Zucker is Probably Not Screwed Because He Always Gets Away With It
Jeff Zucker, who personally oversaw the dismantling of one of the greatest television brands in history from the home of Seinfeld and Friends to the home of the Jay Leno Comedy Hour, should have been fired, repeatedly, years ago. But he somehow persists, and even though we'd like to speculate that Comcast's new management would seek a shake-up in order to more closely integrate NBC Universal's content into Comcast's delivery system, we won't because the guy always wins.

Other than that, NBC Universal would have to get used to having an interested, involved corporate parent that thinks it knows something about the entertainment business. Its status as the red-headed stepchild at GE afforded it some independence—GE didn't care much as long as NBC made the numbers. Comcast, on the other hand, is in the business of delivering entertainment, and probably has some ideas on how to make it. It would also of course seek to sell Universal Studio's film library via its On Demand service, and would likely try to find a way to sell all of NBC Universal's content through its internet service.

One significant area where the two companies overlap is ad sales: Right now if you're a Comcast subscriber watching USA Network, you're seeing a mix of ads sold by NBC Universal and Comcast. If a deal is completed, Comcast would in effect own all the cable ad inventory on its cable properties. And in local markets, Comcast now competes with NBC's owned-and-operated stations—they want the local car wash to buy Comcast's cable spots, not the NBC station's local news spots. That competition would go away.

Still, Comcast's shareholders aren't reacting well to speculation about the deal: It's stock is down 6% right now. And the Wall Street Journal's Martin Peers spells out why:

But there's little evidence that owning both content and distribution brings strategic value. Time Warner, in fact, only this year split its cable systems from its vast content operations. In Comcast's case, it's tough to see that having more MGM movies on demand has helped Comcast slow the inroads that phone companies have been making into its video business. And there are surely cheaper ways to prevent exclusive deals by rivals than to spend billions on an equity stake.

• It's a waiting game to see whether Vivendi will exercise its put option on its remaining 20 percent stake in NBC Universal, possibly sending the network studio hybrid into the fabled lands of IPO. While the anticipation mounts, Vivendi's chair said the company would take the next few months to make up its mind. [Variety]

• Oprah's Harpo Productions, Sam Mendes and Focus Features are teaming up to bring Joseph O'Neill's celebrated cricket pot-boiler Netherland to the big screen. [Variety]

• Spike Lee and Robert DeNiro announced plans to make a series about Alphabet City for Showtime. Alphaville will be an ensemble drama set in the 1980's. [Hollywood Reporter]

• With a mere two months until its release, pre-sales of tickets for New Moon the second installment of the Twilight saga have been brisk, with many locations reporting showings have already sold out. [Hollywood Reporter]

• What you won't read much about in the trades is the rumors about the trades themselves. Yesterday, Nikki Finke declared Variety was planning to take its website behind a pay wall and the Hollywood Reporter to cease publication entirely. The Wrap attempted to find the truth behind the rumors. It quotes a "high level" Reporter exec reacting "with amusement" to Finke's item, while Variety remained oblique about its online plans. [The Wrap]

The attack included the usual snipes about Fox News' super superior ratings, like how the network's 9am morning show beat MSNBC's 8pm evening show. How embarrassing, indeed, O'Reilly! He also made sure his viewers feel personally invested, for MSNBC thinks they're all "paranoid" and "racist."

"Pinhead," insists O'Reilly, doesn't begin to describe NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker and his crew. We're sure O'Reilly's longtime foe, Keith Olbermann, feels a bit left out after not even getting a mention.

NBC Universal—which runs, among other things, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Universal Studios, and a bunch of theme parks—pulled in a profit of $391 million in the first quarter of 2009, versus $712 million in the first quarter of the previous year.

It's yet another colossal failure in Zucker's cap: He single-handedly engineered the demise of NBC from first place to fourth; he spent insane amounts of money on the Olympics in Athens and Beijing, which netted great ratings but not enough ad revenue to keep profits growing; he hired a club-kid to run NBC; and he acknowledged defeat last month. But he keeps on keeping his job, maybe because he dazzles and confuses his General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt with reflections from his exceedingly bald head.

NBC Universal blames the profit drop squarely on the broadcast television unit, which lets it mask poor executive decisions behind the general advertising recession. Yes, local TV advertising is down because nobody is buying cars. But NBC also says that the Super Bowl was a drag on profits:

While NBC aired Super Bowl XLIII to great ratings success, there were significant production costs to air the big game, combined with rights fees paid to the NFL. Those expenses added up to $45 million in the quarter.

"Ratings success" understates it: Super Bowl 43 was the most-watched Super Bowl game in history, and the second-most watched program in the history of television. That's right: NBC Universal is explaining it's poor performance last quarter by saying that it got stuck with broadcasting the No. 2 television broadcast since the medium was invented. Tough luck guys!

Also dragging down profits were expenses relating to the Beijing Olympics, another huge ratings success that, in the normal course of business, ought to mean more money, not less. DVD sales were also down significantly.

On the upside, NBC Universal's cable networks were up 19%, which explains why executives were describing boring old USA this week as the company's "single biggest asset."

Yes, good ole USA Network is busy paying the bills while NBC honcho Ben Silverman naked arm wrestles with people and Lauren Zalaznick at Bravo obsesses over hipsters in Bushwick.

"USA is the single biggest asset that we currently have at this company," an NBC Universal cable exec told the Associated Press.

The network had more viewers than any other cable network in history in the the first quarter. USA and SciFi (soon to be "SyFy") Channel alone threw off $1 billion in profit last year, or about a third of the take for the entire company, which has upwards of eight networks and a studio production operation, among other assets, but which makes two thirds of its TV money off cable channels.

USA "really hit the jackpot," AP writes, on re-runs of shows like House and NCIS. Then there's the booming pro wrestling segment and original USA cop shows like Monk and In Plain Sight.

It's great that the advertising depression is bringing USA good press, because as soon as the easy money returns it's getting sent back to the nerd table with SyFy and the Weather Channel faster than you can say "Walker, Texas Ranger."

This morning, Zucker stuck up for Cramer, dismissing Stewart's critique as scapegoating and saying that "just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn't make it so."

Oh no he didn't! Daumann refused to let the insult stand, taking the stage to defend Stewart: "Jon Stewart is a great person and he's very smart and has a connection with the zeitgeist which makes him successful. It got so much attention because Jon Stewart was one of the few people on air that spoke to what people are thinking out there. He did a great job and we're proud to have to have him as part of our family."

Please, please let them settle this with fists. Zucker is rumored to keep a roll of quarters on hand at all times in case he needs to throw down.

"SyFy" sounds exactly like "Sci Fi" when you say it, but, as Richard noted in the Trade Roundup, NBC Universal will own it now. For years, NBC executives had longed to trademark the channel's own name, but legal kept telling them you can't trademark a genre of entertainment for lonely obsessives. So they spent years, and paid a branding company gobs of money, to come up with SyFy.

The fact that a Floridian named Michael Hinman discovered that you can creatively misspell Sci Fi more than 10 years ago, when he founded a web site that eventually became the SyFy Portal, which covered many of the Sci Fi Channel's shows, seems not to have bothered NBC Universal. A couple months ago, SyFy Portal abruptly changed its name to Airlock Alpha, which the site's founder says was done "indirectly because of" the Sci-Fi Channel's decision to steal and/or buy the name.

Accompanying the name will be the channel's new slogan, "Imagine Greater," which means nothing and is grammatically incoherent.

Nikki Finke says it's all Jeff Zucker's fault.

Appropriate, because New York Nonstop is as close as one can get to the Internet in obscurity, and yet still claim to be on television, making it an appropriate home for the contentless musings of Allison, an inappropriately well-known dating columnist Time Out New York, and her two friends, Silicon Valley heiress Meghan Asha Parikh and vapid handbag designer Mary Rambin. (Or perhaps just Rambin: Rumors are spreading that Parikh may have quit, though Allison denies this.)

Episodes of TMIweekly, a videoblog, have featured the three talking about uninteresting aspects of their lives. (Imagine Twitter, but videotaped.) It's part of a pseudo-business called NonSociety. Allison recently informed me that NonSociety had taken in $60,000 in revenues in all of 2008. Using the advanced business metric known as earnings before expenses, that would give NonSociety's three foundresses a living slightly above minimum wage. Parikh's family fortune must surely throw off more interest than that in a month.

The 24-hour news channel broadcasts in Manhattan, sort of, on digital channel 4.2, and Time Warner Cable carries it on channel 161. So if you avoid triple-digit cable channels and haven't upgraded to a digital converter — since the government has pushed back the deadline for the digital transition, you probably haven't — you can remain blissfully Allison-free. New York NonStop claims a theoretical reach of 5.7 million, though, so it's possible someone, somewhere, in the New York area might accidentally be exposed to her work.

Whatever NBC is paying Allison for this 24x7 filler, it's surely too much. As NBC officials themselves seem to realize! Meredith McGinn, senior manager of special products for NBC4, explained to the New York Daily News:

You'll get your meat — your news, weather and headlines — every 15 minutes. In between those 15 minutes, you may have a two-minute segment, a two-minute pod, a five-minute pod. So the shows we're looking at are in little bits, not your traditional half-hour newscasts.

So the news is the meat, which makes TMIweekly, what, exactly? Shredded lettuce? Mayo? Anything, surely, except relish.

Rather than force you to watch TMIweekly, we will show you Gawker videographer Richard Blakeley's much funnier parody, "NomSociety":

Welcome To NomSociety from Richard Blakeley on Vimeo.

The Writers Guild of America has initiated disciplinary proceedings against Leno, Variety reports, and could ultimately expel or suspend his union membership. The union is upset that Leno wrote his own material in January 1008, in the weeks before the writers strike ended, allowing the Tonight Show to return to the air and compete against David Letterman, who owned his Late Show outright and was thus able to settle with the union early. Had Leno not come back, Letterman almost certainly would have clobbered him in the ratings.

NBC said at the time the union gave Leno permission to write his own material in a meeting and that the union's prior contract allowed him to do so anyway.

What ramifications a union expulsion or suspension would have for Leno's new 10 pm show are unclear. But it would definitely be embarrassing for the late-night host to be slapped by the union he publicly supported in a big way during the writers strike last fall. Sounds like the union isn't too happy with Leno annexing a huge chunk of NBC's prime time. At least the time didn't go to reality shows, guys. Those programs barely even have writers.

The report comes courtesy of ABC News, which could only be a more delicious payback if Silverman-insulted ABC head Steve McPherson delivered the news personally, while taking the network's peacock mascot from behind.

Also, naturally, the brothel that was frequented by the unnamed NBC VP also serviced Eliot Spitzer—though they eventually banned Spitzer for being too aggressive (something they would never have to worry about from a flailing, Leno-appeasing NBC VP). The brothel's madam, Kristin Davis (not that one!), is fed up about prosecutors' disinterest in her comprehensive client list:

"Some of these guys, I was invoicing on corporate credit cards," she said. "I was writing up monthly bills for computer consulting, construction expenses, all of these things, I was invoicing them monthly so they could get it by their accountants," Davis said.

A spokesperson said district attorney Robert Morgenthau had "no comment" on the handling of Davis' case or her allegations.

Davis provided ABC News with a print-out of her computerized client list, the same one she says that was offered to the district attorney.

The document shows Davis kept meticulous notes about her clients, their credit card numbers and mobile phone numbers.

Silverman has announced plans to buy said list, adapt it into a mediocre sitcom (starring... let's go with Cheri Oteri as Davis) and broadcast it in five-minute increments seeded in between Leno's new 10pm slot and Conan. It will be called Fun Fun.

• CEOs, Bankers Used Corporate Credit Cards for Sex, Says New York Madam [ABC via DHD]

Six Sigma has been part of America's corporate culture for a couple decades now; some 80 percent of the 100 largest American companies now use it. But General Electric, NBC's parent, is particularly famous for its Six Sigma fetish. GE does not think it's a laughing matter: "It is not a secret society, a slogan or a cliche," GE's website harrumphs.

What does it means in practice? As Universal found out after GE bought the Hollywood studio, it means lots and lots of meetings. "They are very focused on results," Universal Studios president Ron Meyer said of his new owners to the Times in 2004, after the acquisition. "They don't want surprises."

The idea behind Six Sigma is that every process of a business should be executed with as few errors as possible — the target Six Sigma aims for is 3.4 errors in every 1 million attempts. Now, lots of companies follow silly management philosophies. But Six Sigma takes on religious overtones at G.E. because of its followers fervent belief that it is a universal belief, enforced in every facet of the corporate empire. Even, at one point, according to a (maybe apocryphal) well-told anecdote to comedy writing. Former GE chief executive Jack Welch is said to have once ordered the counting of the number of laughs each episode of NBC's sitcoms.

Eliminating deviations is entirely wrongheaded when the audience wants something fundamentally new. Six Sigma's not a bad practice for industrial manufacturing, but it's not easily applied to fields like information technology, entertainment, R&D, or startups — in other words, everything that increasingly drives what's left of our economy.

Then again, maybe Fey, who bought a copy of Six Sigma for Dummies, is learning something. When 30 Rock launched in 2006, Fey sprinkled episodes with Six Sigma jokes. One of her comedic predecessors, David Letterman, delighted in mocking GE after it bought NBC. Here is a process that can be defined, measured, analyzed, improved and controlled: biting the hand that feeds you. It delivers a laugh every time. The black belts would be proud.

They, along with 22 other estimable names, including Ogilvy & Mather Chairman-CEO Shelly Lazarus, aren't forming an agency in the traditional sense, but will be part of a "panel" offering marketing and general business advice to NBC Universal and its clients on how to reach women. The group will also blog, write and appear on air for the media company's women-oriented properties and contribute to a quarterly newsletter, "Power of the Purse," covering marketing to the demographic and the latest female trends. The panel will convene for the first time Feb. 10. In effect, it could become the most powerful female-focused agency in the country.

Ha. Um. As you can see, when times get tough, media companies just stop giving a fuck about anything except pulling in more revenue. Which this may or may not succeed in doing! This is a bit like Dan Abrams' comically unethical new PR firm featuring working journalists, except even more ambitious. Reportedly "Journalists and other members of the group will be able to recuse themselves as necessary to avoid conflicts." So all 'journalists' on there, just get out now, before things get ugly.

The revenge upon those who embrace this idea will be having to listen to Tori Spelling give paid advice. [Ad Age]

• 30 staffers in ad sales and research.
• CNBC is rumored to be facing as many as 80 layoffs today.
• TVNewser says "The NBC News bureaus in Dallas and Los Angeles (Burbank) are already experiencing cuts, with the insider saying Dallas will experience more layoffs than in Burbank. Among those losing their jobs, NBC News correspondent Don Teague who has been with the network since 2002."
• More specific info on those NBC news bureau cuts: Burbank lost a few people yesterday; Dallas had their layoffs last week, New York went this morning (and may hear about more later today), and DC has a meeting at 3:00 to hear about theirs. Most of those laid off will have their last days on Dec. 31. In addition to the aforementioned Don Teauge, we hear that Dateline's John Larson has been let go.

More info as it arrives.