ABC ROMANCING BLOOMBERG NEWS

Rumors that ABC may partner with Bloomberg News took on new credence Monday as both Disney-ABC TV chief Anne Sweeney and ABC News President Ben Sherwood each indicated that a partnership with Bloomberg’s cable channel may be in the offing. NBC Universal has its own cable channel (MSNBC), as does Fox TV (Fox News Channel); [...]

DID KENNEDYS KILL JFK MINISERIES?

Members of the Kennedy family including Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of former President John F. Kennedy, and Maria Shriver, niece of JFK, put pressure on the History Channel to kill an expensive eight-part miniseries that it planned to air in the spring, the Hollywood Reporter said Saturday. According to the Reporter, which first reported History [...]

ABC TO SELL TIME ON SOME SHOWS TO LOCAL STATIONS

Saying that her network was “breaking a 60-year tradition,” Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group, outlined on Wednesday a plan to sell time slots ordinarily reserved for national advertisers on ABC programs to local station. The plan is set to be implemented during the last two weeks of October on several programs as local [...]

IGER ORDERING OVERHAUL OF ABC

Disney chief Robert Iger is focusing his attention on “remaking” the company’s ABC television network and is putting pressure on Anne Sweeney, president of Disney/ABC Television Group and newly appointed ABC entertainment chief Paul Lee “to find hits and get them on the air fast,” the New York Post reported today (Tuesday), citing unnamed ABC [...]

DID IGER FORCE WESTIN TO RESIGN?

Although David Westin’s decision to step down as president of ABC News was depicted in some reports as the culmination of a power struggle with ABC President Anne Sweeney, it was actually Disney CEO Robert Iger who wielded the axe, according to veteran industry journalists Peter Lauria and Lloyd Grove, writing in TheDailyBeast.com. Citing a [...]

ABC NEWS LOSES ITS PRESIDENT

Add the name of David Westin to the hundreds of others who have departed ABC News over the past year. Westin, the president of the network’s news division, sent an email to his staff late Monday, saying only that he was stepping down because it was time for him “to move on.” He indicated that [...]

PRODUCER WANTS MODERN FAMILY YANKED FROM HULU

Despite numerous studies indicating that putting TV shows on the Internet does not cannibalize their audience, Modern Family creator-producer Steve Levitan says he thinks it does and has asked Disney-ABC TV Group president Anne Sweeney to yank it off Hulu and ABC.com. As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, Levitan told the Television Critics Association that [...]

DISNEY TO UNPLUG SOAPNET, REPLACE IT WITH DISNEY JUNIOR

Like many of the shows that have appeared on it over the past decade, the cable channel SOAPnet is all washed up — or will be in 2012. That’s when the Walt Disney Co. intends to convert it into a new kids channel called Disney Junior, the New York Times reported on its website today [...]