The Scripps National Spelling Bee, once a symbol of pride for our nation’s youth, has deteriorated in recent years into a feeble-minded joke, with so-called “champions” claiming their victories with simple words like “cymotrichous” an “knaidel.” Thankfully, that’s all about to change.
Last night, Queens' own Arvind Mahankali, 13, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling "knaidel," a Yiddish word for a kind of dumpling. (Mahankali had twice lost in the finals on Germanic words.) But Mahankali wasn't the only star—nearly every kid on the stage had presence. And good "concentration"…
Tonight, at 8 p.m., 11 children selected by lottery from the 50 districts of the post-apocalyptic nation of The United States of America will battle to the death on live television, in a competition that combines the erotic violence of vampires making love in a pool of blood with the danger and unpredictability of…
The Scripps National Spelling Bee reaches its dramatic conclusion tonight as a group of nine middle schoolers meet in the nation's harbor (National Harbor, Maryland, or, as it is consistently and vaguely identified on the Scripps website, "near Washington, D.C.") to brawl to the death until only one remains.
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• Is Oprah preparing to leave her syndicated show behind and take her act to OWN, her long-delayed cable network? That's the rumor anyway. [DH]
• The new editor of the Observer is Kyle Pope, formerly of Portfolio. [NYO]
• Cable meets kindergarten: Fox News will stop being mean to MSNBC only if MSNBC first stops being…
• Comcast is "close" to a deal to take control of NBC Universal. [NYT]
• Scripps Networks, which controls the Food Network and HGTV, is close to taking over the Travel Channel for the low, low price of $1 billion. [NYT]
• The critically-acclaimed cop drama Southland is coming back. Although NBC canceled the show, TNT…
Anne Morell Petrillo, 38 year-old heiress to the Scripps newspaper fortune, jumped to her death off the Tappan Zee bridge last week. Trauma from a bad marriage and her mom's brutal murder? Perhaps. But the NYT has an additional theory:
Scripps—the company that closed the Rocky Mountain News and posted a $220 million loss last quarter—is opening its brand new, $95 million headquarters for the Naples (FL) Daily News. It is the worst newspaper business thing ever.
The Rocky Mountain News has rolled the presses for the last time. Here's your Media Crack another-one-bites-the-dust edition:
Earnings season can bore, but behind some numbers, there's very human drama. Scripps, the home-and-garden media mini-empire, saw profits rise 22.8 percent to $84.1 million in the first quarter, thanks in large part to Scripps Interactive, led by former Yahoo executive Deanna Brown. Her unit swung to a profit of $21…
E.W. Scripps COO Rich Boehne told a conference yesterday that Yahoo's HotJobs.com will account for as much as 5 percent of its newspaper revenues in 2008. That merely confirms what we've heard: The classifieds jobs site is the only part of Yahoo's newspaper consortium that's working. And that's likely because Yahoo…
Scripps, having spent $525 million to acquire the Shopzilla product search engine in 2005, is now looking to unload it on a new owner for about the same amount. CEO Kenneth Lowe, the mastermind of both the HGTV cable channel and the Shopzilla deal, wasn't able to do much with this online fixer-upper. Scripps saw its …
The E.W. Scripps media company will weed out their newspaper division—they announced today, as hinted earlier in the year, that it will split into two publicly traded companies, one containing the "troubled newspaper division" (Rocky Mountain News and others) and the other, national brands and internet properties like…
Scripps, the cable-TV, newspaper, and Web conglomerate, will split into two publicly traded companies, its board announced today. Scripps Networks Interactive gets the growing cable-TV channels, including HGTV, and all the Internet properties. E. W. Scripps gets stuck with 10 broadcast television stations and…
Do you guys not wear sandals in the locker rooms? The Scripps Network, having repeatedly scratched its Web 2.0 itch before, finds itself still afflicted. It's looking to spice up recent acquisition Recipezaar with an infusion of what we at Valleywag like to call loser-generated content. The current ingredient of…
If we were a newspaper cartoonist drawing a cartoon about the state of the newspaper industry, we would currently be sketching another nail being driven into a coffin that we had helpfully labeled "newspaper industry." E&P reports:
