Once Glenn Beck left Fox, he sort of also left the landscape of media personalities I pay attention to. Not that I assumed his radio show was somehow the model of sensible political conversation that his TV never was, but it's hard to keep up with all the crazy people on the radio everyday.

However, when the guy compares Rick Santorum to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, that sort of pure insanity is impossible to ignore. There's part of me that thinks that Beck will come out some day and say that his entire public persona was an elaborate prank and this will be the moment I look back at and realize I should have guessed.

KMSB Channel 11 and KOLD Channel 13 have reached an agreement: KMSB is dissolving its news department and will transfer production responsibilities to KOLD, but KMSB will keep the advertising revenue its sales staff can generate from the local news product that will be broadcast on Channel 11 from 7 to 9 a.m. and at 9 p.m.

The benefit for KOLD?

“They pay us for this service,” said KOLD general manager Debbie Bush. “So they’re paying us to provide news, engineering and marketing. We have nothing to do with their sales department, except our marketing department helps them with sales in terms of producing commercials and things like that. The news department will be entirely KOLD employees.”

KOLD may bring on some of the KMSB on-air talent and production staff that will be out of work effective Feb. 1 as a result of the transition.

“We’re going to add people. How many is still being determined. Once we get that decision, we’ll let them know first, and then they’ll have the opportunity to apply for those positions and interview for them. Some of those people may be coming over here. We don’t know; they don’t know. ... My sympathy goes out to those people right now.”

Raycom, which owns KOLD, has a similar arrangement with a station in Hawaii. Ultimately, the plan is to present the impression of a separation between the two products. The KMSB newscasts will have a largely different staff compared to KOLD’s on-air news product—at least in front of the camera, although occasional crossover benefits are available.

“Let’s say there was some kind of major news event that happened at 8 o’clock. We have a reporter out there; let’s say it’s (KOLD reporter) J.D. Wallace. J.D. Wallace could pop up at the top of the 9 o’clock news, maybe at 9:30, maybe at the very end of the 9 o’clock news, and then say, 'By the way, join me in a couple minutes on KOLD at 10, and I’ll give you an update,'” Bush said. “Of course it’s going to help us, because it gives us more exposure. Maybe people have never watched KOLD. But that’s not the point: The point is we will be producing high-quality newscasts for KMSB, and we will take pride in that.”

When KOLD recently upgraded its studio, it included the ability to make aesthetic changes within minutes. The station is confident it can utilize that capability when it transitions from its local morning newscast (airing from 4:30 to 7 a.m.) to the KMSB local-news product from 7 to 9. Likewise, a transition will occur from KMSB’s 9 p.m. newscast to KOLD’s 10 o’clock broadcast.

“It will have its own graphics. It will be a KMSB-branded newscast and not look like KOLD,” Bush said.

Fox affiliate KMSB Channel 11 will abandon the in-house production of its nightly newscast on Feb. 1—but that doesn’t mean news will vacate the 9 p.m. timeslot. Instead, KMSB’s 9 p.m. newscast will originate from KOLD Channel 13’s studios.

KMSB on-air and production staff members were told about the changes during a meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 15, where they were also told their employment status is uncertain, at best.

As part of the arrangement, Belo, KMSB’s parent company, will maintain a sales staff, but the hiring of talent and production personnel will be made by KOLD and its parent company, Raycom.

Additionally, KOLD will create a morning-news show to air from 7 to 9 a.m. on KMSB, according to sources.
It was suggested during the meeting with KMSB staffers that KOLD would need to make hires in order to produce the two additional newscasts—but there were no guarantees that the likes of news anchor Lou Raguse, weather personality Gina Trunzo or sportscaster David Kelly would be part of the transition. All told, the change affects about 20 people in front of the camera and behind the scenes who work on KMSB’s news product.

“Under the agreement, KMSB and KTTU will continue to control, manage and program the stations and sell all on-air advertising,” according to a press release. “KOLD-TV will, by contract, provide certain services to support the operations of KMSB and KTTU (TV 18), including producing local news in high definition, in-depth weather, traffic and sports, and website administration.”

This is the latest in a tumultuous series of events since Bob Simone replaced Tod Smith as Belo’s Tucson general manager two years ago. Simone came into the market with lofty expectations, and early in his tenure, he announced plans to launch a four-hour, locally produced morning-news block. That goal never materialized.

He also approved the funding for news-studio improvements at KMSB’s Sixth Avenue offices. The studio has been built, but was never actually used. As a result, the KMSB news product looks low-budget when compared to the market’s other three local-news operations. KMSB has also endured a number of personnel departures on the news end within the last few months.

This is KMSB’s second shared-news arrangement. When KMSB announced it was launching the nightly newscast, it entered into a shared-content deal with KVOA Channel 4, but that was severed shortly after Bill Shaw took over as GM of the NBC affiliate.

Esquire names Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, as an American of the Year:

Somewhere along the way, astronauts diverge from the rest of us. The pilots, especially, become something different. Their standards of "ordinary" change, particularly after they've traveled into space, and Kelly had gone up three times already. He was now forty-seven years old. He had become a naval aviator in 1987; he flew thirty-nine combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. Next he became a test pilot, one of the best, spending more than five thousand hours in more than fifty different aircraft. Nearly four hundred times, he had landed his plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Each time, he had looked out his cockpit at the rolling ship below, slipped down, and hit his throttle just as he was landing. It's counterintuitive, but throttling up meant he'd have enough power to lift back off the deck in case something went wrong. It was one of a Navy pilot's most important lessons: Sometimes the best way out of a bad situation is to hit the gas.

In space, Kelly had received further instruction in catastrophe. On his third trip into orbit, he had delivered a part to the International Space Station, where the residents needed badly to fix their broken toilet. His previous flight had been only the second after the Columbia disaster. Astronauts understand: Something always goes wrong. On the day his wife was shot, during the torturous flight that Kelly, his mother, and his daughters from a previous marriage made from Houston to Tucson, there were twenty minutes when he thought he had lost his wife for good. He was flying on a friend's private plane, and he had turned on the TV to watch reports of the shooting. "It was a terrible mistake," he said later. In the chaos, someone said that his wife was dead. His mother practically screamed, he remembered after; his daughters cried. Kelly retreated to the bathroom. "I just, you know, walked into the bathroom and, you know, broke down," he said. Eventually, he managed to get through to someone at the hospital, and he found out then that Giffords was, in fact, alive. "As bad as it was that she had died," Kelly said, "it's equally exciting that she hadn't."

There's going to be an avalanche of information about Gabrielle Giffords this week, from the 20/20 interview tonight to tomorrow's release of Mark Kelly's memoir Gabby, but Steve Fishman's feature in the November 21st issue of New York magazine (but online now) jumps out for me personally, partially because it discusses Giffords' internal conflict over staying in politics, even before the January 8th shooting. However, what will probably be the most notable portion of the story involves the question no one seems to want to address, Giffords' political future (and by extension, Mark Kelly's):

The fact that Giffords hasn’t yet declared her intentions is itself an element of her political power. No one dares declare a candidacy or raise campaign funds while this courageous woman fights against the odds. A website, giffordsislying.com, that had backed her opponent now shows a single page, a prayer for her swift recovery.

The book changes this equation. No doubt, it will generate positive feeling toward Giffords, but it could also limit her options. “It will draw attention to her ability to run,” said one staffer.

And her recovery, impressive as it has been, is not over. “If she had to declare today, she couldn’t run,” said a longtime friend.

For some, reclaiming her old seat has become the sine qua non of her recovery, part of its definition. In the book she offers a simple, heartfelt declaration: “I will get stronger. I will return.” But there are other options if it takes longer than expected. One of the daydreams floating through the corridors of Washington these days is that Kelly will step in. “He’s really accomplished. And there’s the popularity that both of them enjoy. Plus his biography would make him compelling,” said an influential Democrat. Kelly was already speaking for her, endorsing candidates on her behalf, which led to media reports like “Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords support …” It was a version of Bill Clinton’s buy-one-get-one-free boast about Hillary.

The Democratic Establishment reached out to Kelly when Republican senator John Kyl decided not to seek reelection. Kelly rebuffed them at that point. (Now Dr. Richard Carmona, a former U.S. surgeon general and close Giffords ally, is going to run for the seat.) “She’s the politician in the family,” he said recently. “I’m the space guy. And I see no reason to change that …”—he left the door open—“… now.”

A preview of tonight's ABC News special on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' recovery with the help of her husband, Mark Kelly:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has always been a fighter.

For years, she fought for her causes in Congress, she fought her way through 10-mile-hikes and runs with her friends in Tucson, Ariz., and with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, she fought — through in vitro fertilization and fertility drugs — to have a child.

But on Jan. 8, all of that changed. Following the shooting of 19 people at a meet-and-greet in Tucson, Giffords fought to survive a near-deadly gun shot to the brain, and after that, she had to fight once again, for the life she wanted back.

"Difficult," Giffords says in her first interview since the shooting, with ABC News' Diane Sawyer.

Giffords still struggles for the right words to form sentences, a condition called aphasia that is common in brain injury patients. She has undergone months of intensive speech and physical therapy to try and rebuild the connections in her brain that were severed when a bullet entered just over her left eye, traveling through the left side of her brain.

"It's clear that any lower, it would've killed her, any further midline, it would've killed her," Kelly tells Sawyer. "If it crossed hemispheres, it would've killed her. Any further outboard, she'd never be able to speak again. Any higher, she'd never be able to walk."

Giffords' remarkable journey to recovery and the love story that brought her and Kelly together is the subject of a new book they worked on together, "Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope."

In the beginning of the book, Kelly writes that he and his wife hoped that 2011 would be "the best year of our lives." Kelly would command the last flight of the orbiter Endeavor, Giffords would begin her third term in Congress, and the two would hopefully conceive a child together.

Instead, 2011 was punctuated, first with terror and grief — and then with a daily routine of hard work, occasional setbacks and personal triumphs. Together Giffords and Kelly, a couple bonded by a deep and lasting love, learned what survival really meant with a severe brain injury.

"She was sitting in her wheelchair, tears running down her face. She was hyperventilating, absolutely panicked," Kelly told Sawyer. "I saw how scared she was. I got scared too.

"I just held her, and said, you know, we'll get through this," he said.

PRX has a great two part series [part 1; part 2] created for public radio called The Hidden World of Girls, hosted by Tina Fey that can be streamed online. As a wildly panicked father of a nearly four year old daughter, it's nice to hear that some girls are managing to make it through this world somehow:

Groundbreaking writer, actress and comedian, Tina Fey comes to Public Radio to host The Hidden World of Girls, two new hour-long Specials inspired by the NPR series heard on Morning Edition and All Things Considered. From the dunes of the Sahara to a slumber party in Manhattan, from the dancehalls of Jamaica to a racetrack in Ramallah, Tina Fey takes us around the world into the secret life of girls and the women they become. Sound-rich, evocative, funny, and powerful—stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities. Of women who crossed a line, blazed a trail, changed the tide.

While there was some question whether Gabrielle Giffords would be on-screen for the Diane Sawyer special on ABC timed to the release of her book with her husband, Mark Kelly, the brief commercial for next Friday's episode of 20/20 shows Rep. Giffords on screen seemingly talking to Sawyer. More on the special as it approaches.

His morning show co-host Jennie Grabel was let go last week, and now Chris Patyk, who was also the program director for The Mountain, news station KNST and the somewhat accurately named Funny 1450, has been let go by Clear Channel as part of their nationwide plan to not have so many actual people on the radio.

I'm not the biggest fan of The Mountain or any of Clear Channel's stations in this market, but this seems like the move towards the nationwide broadcasts and wildly homogenized crap that everyone feared when the company was buying up every station they could get their hands on. At this point, if there aren't personalities on the air that I care about and the music is the same here as it is in Tulsa and Toledo, why shouldn't I just switch over to listening to Pandora stations that feature slightly more of the songs and artists I like and far fewer commercials?

The Mountain did an admirable job of connecting to the not-terribly-musically-adventurous-soccer-mom listening audience they cultivated between their Studio C performances and Jennie and Chris constantly out in the community, but I guess those days are likely over.

At least we'll still have the music of Colbie Caillat to get us through this tough time, I suppose. Best of luck out there, Chris.

Jonathan Rothschild's new ad is out, and while I appreciate that it doesn't scare my kids like the ones Tyler Vogt and Jennifer Rawson are running, it's super boring. People I've never met think Jonathan's a swell guy who works hard? He runs a business? Super news! I am now confident this guy will lead us to prosperity! Wait, not really. However, I don't even think Rick Grinnell has ads, although he does have a poorly lit video on YouTube taken in front of El Charro's bathrooms
and something about empty buildings, so I guess Rothschild is winning on that front. Then again, it's not like Grinnell apparently wanted to run until the other Republicans candidates couldn't get on the ballot, so it's not like he's super motivated for the gig.

[Jim Nintzel informed me that Grinnell does have an ad, it just doesn't appear to be on YouTube or aired during TV shows I watch. You can watch it on his website. My bad.]

However, then you see this absolutely incredible ad for San Francisco's interim mayor, Ed Lee:

Yeah, that's an ad. I want to move to San Francisco just to vote for Ed Lee. I'd vote for a different Ed Lee if someone with that name were on ballot here. While I don't expect the Pima County Democrats to cough up the money for a will.i.am cameo, could you people meet me halfway here? Something at least somewhat interesting? Rothschild jamming with Neon Prophet? An appearance by Daniel from El Guero Canelo? Unprovoked mean-spirited verbal attacks on Portland? Maybe some inspirational group singing? Anything?

[HT: Mother Jones]