NEWS FROM THE NEWS

Stumbled in at 3 am this morning to find a very upsetting piece of news from my friend and an "Iddiette", RuthSings, a link to a New York Post story. (Which I never would have read otherwise; like the Dan says, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.)

Here's the gist of it from a story by Keith Kelly:

"David Bianculli, a TV critic who has been at the Daily News for 14 years, is about to get the boot.

Sources said that his contract is not going to be renewed when it expires this fall and that his last column will probably run in late October.

'Everyone is horrified,' said a source familiar with the situation. 'I assume it is a money thing. They'll probably replace him with some blogger who sits around in his pajamas.' "

As I said, that's very upsetting news for me at Toobworld Central. It's not that I'll probably be losing a chance to share the in-jokes that I find on TV shows, but because he has been one of the best TV critic/columnists in the country. And I read about ten such columns a day from all over the USofA.

It's just another sign of the times that the squeeze is being put on TV columnists at newspapers; getting tossed aside for the cheaper tactic of using a pooled story. It happened in Dallas, it happened in Colorado (I think it was), and sometimes it looks like the same may happen in Hartford.

No wonder there was such a kerfuffle at the recent press tour when ABC tried to withhold actual news from the critics in order to splash it up big at the next weekend's Comic-Con. The critics got angry, rightly seeing it as putting their jobs on the line if they couldn't justify the expense of the junket by bringing back real TV news.

Well, hopefully Bianculli will be online wherever he lands; I'd love it if he started blogging like Diane Werts, Verne Gay, and Alan Sepinwall do in connection with their respective papers. Unless of course, the Daily News decides to disappear him, like what happened to Eric Mink.

He pissed off David Chase re: 'The Sopranos', and now he sleeps with the fishes...... Maybe.

RuthSings pondered in the IDD forum at Topica if that blogger in his pajamas might be me. Which is, of course, absurd.

I don't wear pajamas.

BCnU!
Toby OB