Over at the HuffPo, Rachel Sklar (shocker!) has the scoop on the new editors at Gawker.

[Thanks, Chris!]

I'm looking to have the design of The Media Drop, plus my personal blog - which runs WordPress - done up, with some themes staying the same, but some improvements across the board. I know a few of you have chimed in in the past, but I'd been crazy elsewhere. In any case, it's about this time, and I'd like to get it going. Ping me via email or IM if you're interested.

The AP's Hope Yen reports on some new studies saying that if media consolidation were allowed to continue along the lines of what some "big media" entities are looking for, that there would be a dissolution of some genres of music on radio. It's kind of sad that just because it's easier to run multiple Top 40 stations in one marketplace, that you'd even choose to do, in a way just to dominate the tuner as far as maximizing value to advertisers goes.

As I was lining up items to potentially blog about this morning, I noticed this WSJ article by Dennis Berman and Sarah Ellison about who was looking into getting a piece of Tribune Co., who is looking for interested bidders at the moment. Then, my colleague Chris Thilk pinged me with a couple of items I hadn't seen, namely this posting from Ben McConnell, who makes the most clear statement that we should all be paying attention to - that this is, indeed, the "end of traditional media ownership." Well, at least in Chi-town. It's most surely a bellwether for things to come, but not one that we haven't seen coming already, right? As much as I try to factor out the Internet and newsreading (and gathering) in general, it's pretty clear that scaling up (or down) is not the same as it used to be.

In addition, Chris pointed out to me that the Trib was reporting that another Chicago paper, the Sun-Times, is looking into financial difficulties of its own. I don't know if I really want to go down a road like this, but are we seriously in a time where, aside from places like Seattle, joint-operating agreements are potentially keeping a publication alive at the cost of another, that some serious, long-time-lived publications, whether weekly or daily, could bite the bullet because there was no other option?

Now, don't get me wrong - this has happened before, for years and years. I mean, the Star-Ledger from here in New Jersey is named that because one day, a long, long time ago, the Newark Star-Eagle merged with the Newark Ledger. There are plenty of other examples of that. But if mass-media companies are seeing that scaling up and mergers aren't making their jobs any easier, will those massive publications fade away?

On Monday morning, I'd received a tip from a friend of mine who works in the mixed martial arts field, about how Buck Woodward at pwinsiderxtra.com had received an internal memo from ESPN that discussed the removal of all mixed martial arts advertisements from Disney and ESPN's networks as a whole. After pinging David Singer about it, he mentioned that he'd be putting something up at another blog he is a part of, MAA on Tap, that discussed the sport as a whole.

David's item is here, and he asks an important question - if this is ESPN perhaps looking to actually get involved in MMA on its own, or if is merely ESPN realizing that by marketing these events for those advertisers, that they are hurting their own bottom line as far as viewership goes. Could be either way, IMHO. In any case, it's definitely interesting.

After a little bit of an incident on the air during Friday night's A's-Tigers baseball game on FOX, baseball broadcaster and former Major Leaguer Steve Lyons was fired by the network over the weekend. "Psycho," as he is fondly referred to by those in and out of the game, is most notably known for forgetting where he was, and taking his pants off at a base during a game quite a few years back, in an effort to get the dirt of them. In this case, Lyons misstepped when commenting on fellow boothmate Lou Pinella's use of a few words in Spanish, which apparently wasn't received well by FOX management. [via Netscape]

As news has come out that New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle was killed in an accident where his plane crashed into a building on the Upper East Side of New York City, I wanted to send some kudos to baseball-reference.com for pulling the advertisements off of Lidle's profile page, which is surely getting a ton of traffic right now. Unfortunately, they'd probably received a number of requests to put ads up, and it looks like that wasn't very tasteful to be doing at this time.

Okay, so comments are more or less back up here at TMD. The fine folks at Zubrcom are working on some fun ways of solving the big issue of comment spam here, although they block a ton, it gets server intensive to do so. They may periodically shut down, but typically only if I'm getting exceptionally pounded, but they should return after some time. Just a heads up. As always, if you have comments, feel free to IM or email them my way!

Chris Thilk pinged me to let me know about this article from ABC 7 (WLS in Chicago) about how it and the Daily Herald were joining forces on the news front, with the main focus being, obviously, the Internet. Here's the money graf:

The relationship with ABC 7 will focus heavily not only on sharing of resources between Daily Herald and ABC 7 in print and on-air, but also on the burgeoning internet presence of both dailyherald.com, beepcentral.com and abc7chicago.com.

It should be noted that the Herald, while having significant presence, is by no means the Chicago Tribune, but that isn't the point. The fact of the matter is that the broadcasters are going to look at newsgathering and reporting one way, and the print / online folks at the Herald are going to have slightly different perspectives and tactics in reporting, purely because of the medium. Sorta like watching television sports and listening to the same game on the radio - they can be very different experiences. This way, both players get the best of both worlds, theoretically improving both areas. But keep in mind that if ABC 7 is already garnering significant Web traffic in this marketplace, and that if dailyherald.com and the other sites owned by Paddock Publications are doing the same, then the mix-and-match deal going on here could make the television station that much better to its viewers, and its online presence along with that of the paper's a bit bigger, perhaps encroaching on what the bigger papers in that marketplace are currently seeing.

A lot of that is just theory on my part based on previous things such as this that have happened, and I'm obviously not living in the marketplace, but have enough knowledge of what goes on there as well as on the landscape as a whole to get a decent idea about it.

Well, it looks like it wasn't such a great day in Cincinnati, based on the first five headlines I'm seeing in my RSS reader for the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Ugh.

Hey, props to Robert Cox and the other folks behind Olbermann Watch for getting picked up in an AP item by David Bauder on Sunday. Yet another great example of a blog - or its bloggers - being quoted from a blog in a news article.

This Tuesday's Robert Feder column in the Chicago Sun Times ran with comments by Cara Carriveau, a radio personality on WLUP (The Loop), a station in that market. Carriveau was heavily critical of the lack of major personalities on the air in that particular city, although not naming any particular stations or specific incidents.

Radio and Records' Mike Boyle details the situation that ensued following that letter running in the Sun-Times earlier in the week, which culminated in Carriveau being fired from WLUP, but apparently not just for this particular incident. Boyle points out what Feder's followup column from Thursday stated, including the station's VP/GM, Marv Nyren, telling Feder that there were "other incidents" that took place before this one with Carriveau.

Now, to be fair, what Carriveau said really isn't too far off from what most of us who have been ragging terrestrial radio for some time now have to say. It's not like what she had to say was *that* inflammatory, but I'd liken it to what has gone on in a lot of industries, including what we do for my day job. For instance, it's no concern for companies today to "let" employees have personal blogs. Stopping them from doing so, for the most part, will only cause more problems in the public's eye. However, those employees should always try and use their best judgement when being critical of work, or the industry they are employed in, for obvious reasons. Most people are "at will" employees, and something like this would be very easy for an employer to terminate an employee for.