Jeff bercovici

The good news, for magazine publishers, is that the earthward plummet in newsstand sales has finally started to moderate. The bad news is that sales are still falling at a vertigo-inducing rate -- just not quite so rapidly as they were a few months ago.

It was controversial for CBS to accept an anti-abortion ad from group Focus on the Family. But long before the game started, Focus had already accomplished its goal of communicating a pro-life message through the vehicle of affable college-football star Tim Tebow and his mother.

During Congressional testimony Thursday, top executives from Comcast and NBC Universal pledged to restore the luster of the beleaguered Peacock Network, which has suffered through low ratings, a dearth of hit shows, and most recently, the Leno-Conan debacle.

President Obama is exhorting Americans to break the cable news habit. And he's right, because cable news emphasizes unimportant and visually sensational "news" instead of information with actual news value.

Vanity Fair recently delivered its annual Hollywood issue to howls of protest. The problem: Of the nine supposedly up-and-coming starlets featured on the fold-out cover, not one is African-American, Asian or Hispanic.

Howard Stern may be headed back to terrestrial radio before long -- but not if Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin has his way. The shock jock's deal with Sirius pays him around $100 million a year, which the company may not be able to sustain.

When I wrote that the tide is turning against MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, I suspected it might land me a place on his "Worst Person in the World" list, where he settles his scores. But I didn't think that he'd tell an outright lie about me and the organization I work for.

Yahoo has put the sale of its small-business unit on hold after finding a shortage of interest, DailyFinance has learned. As part of its drive to shed non-core properties, Yahoo had started looking to sell the unit, which provides Internet services to small-business clients, last summer.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has accomplished just want it wanted to by expanding its Best Picture category to 10 nominees: creating space for deserving movies that would have been ignored in the past.

When the left needed a forceful voice to rally around, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann became so popular that MSNBC reoriented its primetime lineup around it. But today, creeping indications suggest that viewers might have lost some patience with Olbermann's shenanigans.