A Gould standard for CNBC?
NBC News insiders expect NBC News Vice President Cheryl Gould to become vice president in charge of prime-time and weekend programming at CNBC. She’s also expected to develop new programming for those blocks in what will be an expansion of the role played by Bret Marcus until he moved up the Jersey pike to MSNBC to produce “The News With Brian Williams.” Ms. Gould will report to both NBC News President Neal Shapiro and CNBC President and CEO Pamela Thomas-Graham.
Business-day programming, which fills the hours of 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. (ET) on CNBC, will remain the domain of CNBC Executive Vice President Bruno Cohen, who also reports to Ms. Thomas-Graham. Ms. Gould’s 24 years with the network, her news experience (after years in the field and as a “Nightly News” producer, she was named veep in 1993) and her management ties to NBC President Andy Lack suggest that in addition to overseeing nonbusiness programming on CNBC prime time, she could be an invaluable resource to Ms. Thomas-Graham, a relative newcomer to TV.
Those who know Mr. Lack and Mr. Shapiro’s fondness for talking about tearing down walls and eliminating fiefdoms see Ms. Gould as a bridge between CNBC, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, and the NBC headquarters team at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In other words, look for more integration than many feel was practiced during the reign of Bill Bolster, who now is focused solely on CNBC International and who reports directly to NBC Chairman Bob Wright.
Summer `Days’ long on teens
`Tis summer, when soaps get into a lather about teens. “Days of Our Lives” is getting with the teen program in a big way. In fact, “Days’“ longtime producer Ken Corday said an upcoming arc involving a deserted Pacific island, a priceless buried ruby and a young crew including Kirsten Storms (who plays Belle Brady), Kyle Lower (Brady Black) and Nadia Bjorlin (Chloe Lane) is the 36-year-old soap’s first such teen-centric summer story line, as well as its most ambitious exterior shoot ever.
Mr. Corday said the rigors of production-16-hour days in locations such as the island of Santa Catalina (35 miles west of Los Angeles), Malibu, Calif., and nearby Point Dume-added a “sense of realism” to the “isolation” the teen characters endure on the quest.
“This is a story about how the teens face all sorts of physical and mental endurance tests during their summer break and find inner strength in each other,” Mr. Corday said. “In some ways, they will be dealing with the same issues in microcosm of what goes on in high school: peer pressure, sexuality and other teen angst. “
With better clothes, The Insider suspects.
Hail `Rugrats’? Hail, yes
There’s been much to celebrate in “Rugrats” land in the last month, between the record audience for the “All Growed Up” special and the gang’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But how, The Insider wondered, does one toast the success of perpetually diapered toddlers and one perpetually dyspeptic rhymes-with-witch wannabe? At Nickelodeon headquarters in New York last week, the astounding 70 share in kids 2 to 11 for the 10th anniversary special was celebrated with beer and-ewwww!-cookies and pretzels.
CBS meeting no secret this time
Speaking of making nice with business colleagues, CBS’s second can’t-we-all-get-along meeting with chieftains of major TV stations groups has been scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 5, in New York. Unlike the first gathering-a secrecy-cloaked early-morning tete-a-tete on the last day of the affiliates convention in Las Vegas at the end of May-this one is expected to last most of the day. Oh, yes, and The Insider has five weeks, instead of 24 hours, in which to figure out which door to stake out.
The final word
For those who missed Brian Williams’ poignant postscript at the end of the July 26 “NBC Nightly News” about “News” writer Joan Scarangello’s death from cancer at age 47, The Insider would like to note that a funeral will be held Monday and a memorial is to be scheduled for after Labor Day.
In the meantime, her family-which includes her husband of only five months, Patrick McNeive, who oversees the magazine-editing operations for ABC News-is suggesting donations to the Thoracic Oncology Service Research Fund, Cost Center 5420/5173, MSK Cancer Center, 1275 York Ave., New York, NY 10021.
Before joining “Nightly” as a writer, Ms. Scarangello had worked at ABC News, where she had started in radio, spent numerous years on ABC News’ foreign assignment desk and served a stint as a writer on “ABC World News This Morning.”