Stop the Presses! They’re Too Cheap!

A Friend of Unfair Park sends us a fascinating story involving a Seattle-based law firm specializing in international affairs, a Japanese-based maker of printing presses, The Dallas Morning News, the illegal sale of printing presses, and a $19-million dollar settlement last month in a malpractice suit. Fascinated? I am –…

KTVT-Channel 11’s News Director Is Out on His Regent Ducas

Late-breaking news about, um, late-breaking news: KTVT-Channel 11 and KTXA-Channel 21 just announced that news director Regent Ducas is out and Scott Diener is in — immediately. Diener’s been with the CBS affiliate, and its UHF counterpart, since June 2006, when he arrived from a Belo-owned station in Phoenix. And…

Tonight’s Guests: Ahnuld, Naomi, Eva … and Lupe!

Now we know the answer to: “What do Eva Longoria, John Legend and Lupe Valdez have in common?” Carlos Watson has been around your TV dial for the last few years, popping up as a chat-show host on such outlets as CNBC, CNN and BET. Now, it appears he has…

Snakes and Jakes

Reuben Armstrong and Bill Cosby, who is clearly a good friend Reuben Armstrong is a local talk-show host — his program’s on the Web, from the looks of it — and this week, he says he was supposed to publish a book called Snakes in the Pulpit. In it, he…

Glenna Whitley Has a Date with Dateline NBC Tonight

Tonight at 9, Dateline NBC airs an hour-long episode devoted entirely to … Sandra Camille Bridewell, better known ’round these parts as the Black Widow. “A lot of it is based on the Observer articles,” says producer Esther Zucker. “We basically report on what people are whispering about.” Correspondent Dennis…

Yeah, But Would Charles Darwin Sell The Dallas Morning News?

The tizzy over Rupert Murdoch’s buying The Wall Street Journal and the constant hand-wringing about the death of the newspaper business are doing one of those déjà vu things for me. It’s also doing one of those I-told-you-so things. I remember getting not just derisive laughter but outright hostility in…

Victory Storm Warning

Hannah Storm, so we’ve been told, is available for interviews concerning CBS’s The Early Show making a Dallas pit stop on Friday. And, yeah, we could ask her about her pops, the former American Basketball Association commissioner. Or we could talk to her about her early-career stint in Houston, where…

How Buzzed Was Former Miss Dallas?

I had no idea till yesterday that the infamous Merry Miller of ABC News is this Merry Miller. Says her Learning Annex bio: “The former Miss Dallas, who grew up in tiny Mesquite, Texas, has a list of contacts that’s the envy of networking professionals all over town.” We also…

Dallas’ One-Man Newspaper Dynasty

In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that the Bancroft family had indeed agreed to sell Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion to Rupert Murdoch, this morning the Los Angeles Times wonders whether newspaper dynasties aren’t quickly becoming a dying breed. Of course, it need look no further than George…

The Source of Love

Look, Los Angeles Times, we read you. Why don’t you read us? From today’s paper, in a story headlined, “Romancing the source: When journalists become involved with newsmakers, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve written their professional obituaries”: • In Dallas, television reporter Sarah Dodd and Police Chief David Kunkle married…

USA Radio Networks is Award-Winning in, Like, Fantasyland

Ginger Allen isn’t the only journalist boasting about a dubious journalism prize. On its Web site, USA Radio Networks still lists the nine Katie Awards the station received from 2004 through 2006 — even though the Dallas Press Club, which hosted the contest, now acknowledges that its former president, Elizabeth…

Ginger Allen Has a New Gig

More news this morning from KTVT-Channel 11. A day after the newsroom there learned that ace reporter-anchor Sarah Dodd had departed 12 days earlier comes word that Ginger Allen has been named the full-time co-anchor of CBS 11 News This Morning — alongside Scott Sams, lucky girl. Allen, of course,…

Belo Earnings: Could Be Better, Could Be Worse

The most memorable sentence from Belo’s second-quarter earnings results, released this morning, is this one: Newspaper Group segment costs and expenses decreased 9.2 percent versus the second quarter of 2006, due in part to the 2006 headcount reductions at The Dallas Morning News and The Press-Enterprise, and lower newsprint and…

Dodd Done at Channel 11

Say it ain’t so: KTVT-Channel 11’s Sarah Dodd is no longer KTVT-Channel 11’s Sarah Dodd. Unfair Park just received a copy of the memo Channel 11’s president and general manager Steve Mauldin sent to the staff today, and he celebrates Dodd’s myriad achievements at the CBS affiliate without offering a…

And the Winner Is …

We had many fine entries in our caption contest today; thanks to the Friends who played along for Wilco tix. Here are just three of our favorites: Southside on Lamar, where toxic gas fumes are on the house! It’s finally gone … wait, Deep Ellum is the other way …..

Estamos Cambiando Nombres: ¡Hola, Parque Injusto!

Look out — they’re “chasing after the young Mexicans pouring into the area”! And by they, of course, I mean the local media outlets about which AdWeek writes this morning, as it dissects the ultra-competitive Spanish-language radio stations, television stations and newspapers in Dallas-Fort Worth vying for the Hispanic audience’s…

Another Dallas Grub Rag

Now there’s a place for your Loving Tex-Mex with Limburger recipe collection. Dallas has a new food and wine magazine: Culinary Concierge Dallas/Fort Worth, a Web-based magazine, plus a four-color dead-tree quarterly, founded by New Orleans cookbook author and food stylist Kendall Gensler in 2000. Culinary Concierge bills itself as…