• Bancroft family to have private meeting re: Dow Jones; Rupert Murdoch to stand outside the boardroom with a water glass pressed against the door.
• Stone Phillips is out at NBC News. Related: Dateline's ratings decline, viewers tuning in to watch The Surreal Life and infomercials for ProActiv instead.
• On the plus side, however, Phillips and his wife have finally unloaded that overpriced penthouse triplex!
• CBS says it led television ratings for fifth year; ABC, NBC respectfully disagree.
• The 1/2 Hour News Hour was the top-rated show on Sunday night, proving once again that Republicans have no sense of humor.
• The accessories director at In Style is quitting her job to open a chintzy trinkets store in Omaha, Nebraska.
Exorbitant contracts at NBC? Those are the first to go, as any cost-cutter goes. Which means that while Brian Williams will stay on collecting his eight-figure sums, Dateline's Stone Phillips, who's been at the network for 15 years, will be on unemployment. When his contract is up in June, Stone will be gone, just like John Seigenthaler's bloated payday. (Seigenthaler was replaced by Lester Holt.)
So who's taking over for Stone? Nobody. Ann Curry (also Today's news anchor) will be the solo host, which means she'll have to shuttle the lead-ins to Chris Hansen's pedophilia reports all by herself.
Donny Deutsch's holiday party wasn't the only NBC Universal soiree to go awry. While a party bus break down kept CNBC's bridge-and-tunnel staffers from boozing in the city, we hear Stone Phillips and Ann Curry's crowd had an equally miserable experience.
While it was easier for NBC's Dateline staffers to find the party – at the Ted Turner Bison Restaurant – we hear staffers were charged $20 each to attend. And what's they get for their cover charge? A "disturbing" performance by Dateline executive producer David Corvo's 12-year-old daughter singing "Desperado." Ahem.
Jeff Zucker promptly sent top brass a memo, heralding the entrance fee as a brilliant cost-cutting measure that saved the bottom line untold hundreds of dollars.
