Magician fingers Martha Stewart in negligence lawsuit
Martha Stewart may be heading to court again, though with a less formidable foe than the Securities and Exchange Commission. The domestic diva’s company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Kmart, which sells many of her wares, are being sued by an Iowa magician for negligence and improper design of a lounge chair. Patrick Albanese alleges in a suit filed Monday that he severed his finger in a Martha Stewart lounge chair when the front legs collapsed while he was moving it in June. A surgeon later reattached the diced digit, which is lucky since Albanese has a side career as a hand model. Albanese claims that the chair was not properly inspected or designed and that the companies were negligent for failing to issue a warning with it. Later models of the chair had a different design to eliminate potential collapsing. The Clive, Iowa, resident wants recompense for his medical expenses, pain and suffering and loss of earning capacity.

Fired Univision news director: Newscast was biased
When Univision Communications fired news director Jorge Mettey from Los Angeles’ KMEX last year, it claimed the five-year veteran had been slanting news coverage. Now Mettey is firing back with allegations that it was actually the other way around. He filed suit earlier this week in a Santa Ana, Calif., federal court claiming that he’d been axed because he would not change news coverage to suit some of the newscast’s advertisers. Mettey claims that Univision would insist on running advertisers’ logos during stories or covering relatively non-newsworthy stories that focused on sponsors. “During his employment, Mettey encountered problems with Univision's desired method of conducting business, specifically the sale of news content and the promotion of immigration reform strictly for the purpose of having political campaigns buy advertising time from Univision,” the suit states. Univision says the suit has no merit.

Whale of a rating: 'Wars' boosts Animal Planet Friday
Sharks apparently aren’t the only sea creatures to perform well on cable TV. Following in the tradition of Discovery’s “Shark Week,” Friday night’s “Whale Wars” on Animal Planet averaged 1.1 million total viewers in its second episode, giving the network its most-watched Friday night telecast in five years. The episode also posted a 0.9 household rating, up from a 0.8 for the series’ Nov. 7 premiere and an 80 percent boost versus the network’s 0.5 average household rating in November 2007. “Wars” follows a former Greenpeace member as he tries to find and shut down illegal whaling outfits. Friday night’s episode also posted a 0.6 rating among viewers 25-54, men 25-54 and women 25-54, a 200 percent increase in each demo versus the network’s primetime average last November.

MSNBC's Dan Abrams moving on to his own PR firm
A lot of people in media leave the business to go into PR, and the latest is Dan Abrams, longtime legal correspondent for NBC News who more recently was general manager of MSNBC and hosted a number of shows on the cable news network, including “Verdict With Dan Abrams," which was canceled in September. Now Abrams is opening up what amounts to a PR firm that will plug in investors and business executives with a network of high-profile media mavens for advice, training and research on media issues. Abrams Research, as it will be known, has been in the works for months, since before his show was canceled, but Abrams will still contribute to NBC as its chief legal analyst. Abrams, the son of Floyd Abrams, the highly regarded First Amendment lawyer, made his media bones covering the trial of O.J. Simpson for Court TV back when the network was run by Steve Brill, who founded it after launching American Lawyer magazine in the late '70s.

And now, the minutest details on ESPN's BCS deal
Yesterday ESPN made official what everyone already knew, that it is taking over BCS coverage from Fox starting in 2011. But the network did announce more details of the four-year deal, which includes radio, digital and international rights as well as the rights to air the Fiesta, Orange and Sugar Bowls each season and the BCS National Championship game in 2011, 2012 and 2013. It marks the first time that college football’s premiere event will air on cable, after airing on ABC and Fox for the previous decade. ESPN is available in 98 million homes, or about 10 million fewer than Fox. ESPN will also take over the unveiling of the weekly BCS standings on Sundays. ESPN Radio, which already held rights to the BCS games, extends its deal to 2014, while ESPN.com will operate the official BCS web site. Games may be simulcast through ESPN360.com and ESPN Mobile TV, though that’s not been determined for sure.
 
 
ComScore: Web retailing up 1 percent in October
More signs that the economic turmoil is beginning to bite hard: New figures from comScore show that online spending in October grew only 1 percent compared to the same month the year before. That’s the lowest monthly growth rate since comScore began tracking e-commerce in 2001. A demographic breakdown shows that middle- to lower-income segments cut back their online retail spending dramatically. In fact, households with incomes under $50,000 annually spent less in October than they did than a year ago. Looking at the monthly growth rates for retail ecommerce over the last year and a half shows just what an impact the souring economy has had. In August 2007, retail e-commerce growth rates were at 28 percent year on year. Growth has slowed dramatically since then, with the year on year growth rate falling six months in a row.

Comic relief: King Features adds ads for strip sites
Plenty of people continue to read newspapers’ comic strips offline. Now one of the largest comics syndicators, King Features, is trying to get readers to access them online and help pay for newspaper web sites. Yesterday King Features announced that it is introducing Comics Kingdom, which will allow at least 60 comic strips to be placed next to local and national ads on newspaper sites through a digital platform that can be embedded on the web sites. The new program also aims to boost comic sales, which have slipped as newspapers continue to lose circulation, shut down or reduce the number of pages they publish. King Features, which is owned by Hearst, publishes “Blondie,” “Beetle Bailey,” “Mutts” and “Hagar the Horrible,” among others. Its rivals, including United Features, Tribune Media Services and Creators Syndicate, are also turning to the internet to try to boost sales through interactivity, audio and video.

Study: Young Chinese choose web for leisure time
Young people in China watch their budgets when it comes to how they spend their leisure time. To that end, surfing the internet has become their favorite pastime, followed by going shopping and watching TV, according to BIGresearch’s latest China Pop Culture and Entertainment Survey for September 2008. Among Chinese consumers 18-34, 92 percent of those surveyed said they surfed the internet during the past three months. Shopping and watching TV were tied at 73 percent while going to the movies came in at 69 percent and listening to music came in at 65 percent, although the latter was named their favorite pastime for relaxing. But they aren’t listening to music on CD players. Instead 88 percent listen to their favorite tunes, mostly pop, on their computer, or digital music player (76 percent) or cell phone at (58 percent). BIGresearch surveyed 2,301 respondents for the report.

Longer Life: Google digitizes magazine's photo library
Fans of Life magazine’s photographs can now Google their favorite images, with a collection of newly digitized images on Google Image Search that date back to the 1750s. Only about 20 percent of the collection, a very small percentage of which have been previously published, is currently online. But over the next few months the remainder of the Life archive, about 10 million photos, is expected to be posted. In addition to images created by famous Life photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili and Nina Leen, users can also access the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, The Mansell Collection from London, and the Dahlstrom glass plates of New York, among others. A Google blog states: “This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”