In your breezy Thursday media column: the Today Show wins television forever, the NYT hopes its paywall rises higher than its ad revenue falls, Vivian Schiller warns NPR, Time puts random media people on a list, and Mediaite rules.

  • NBC's Today Show has now been the No. 1 morning show for 800 weeks straight. Bwahaha! It's just so ridiculous. What do you even say? Congratulations on 800 weeks, at the top? Fine, congrats! What the hell kind of anti-competitive practices are going on in this bizarro world of "morning television," anyhow?
  • New York Times Co. first quarter financial results highlights: earnings per share and operating profit both declined significantly since last year. Circulation and ad revenues were down, with the exception of digital advertising, which, as usual, did only a little to offset significant print advertising losses. The silver lining: the NYT says it's already gotten 100K new customers who've signed up to pay to read the paper online. That's a fairly good sign. Although how much that revenue will eventually offset the declining ad revenue (and how much it will hurt digital ad revenue) remains a very open question.
  • Booted former NPR chief Vivian Schiller has a message for NPR: internet radio in cars is coming to take all your listeners. Shake things up! "If you don't aggressively reach out to new audiences on new platforms, someone else will. There is no such thing as lasting media loyalty, especially in this age of media promiscuity." You can't afford to keep fucking the same boring associate professors of American literature, NPR. Fuck a rock star once in a while!
  • The following "media" people have been named to Time magazine's completely random and meaningless list of the 100 most influential people: Arianna Huffington, Oprah Winfrey, Julian Assange, Joe Scarborough, and several foreign media figures who probably really are influential about whom Americans are, of course, ignorant and unqualified to judge. But hey, we mentioned this. Time magazine wins again.
  • Journalists, satirists, comedians, and political commentators alike: confused about where to turn to adjudicate disputes over what is and is not an appropriate joke—and how, exactly, to mock certain public figures or institutions in various situations? Turn to Mediaite. They are the accepted arbiters of this sort of thing. I think they've earned it.

[Photo via Getty]