The paper's TV beat is strong enough to sustain the loss—wunderkind Brian Stelter can easily take up his duties along with the paper's longtime TV maven, Bill Carter—and the paper's education beat can really use the help.

Last October, at The Times' state of the newsroom get-together, Throw Stuff at Bill, Mr. Keller admitted, "When we went through that excruciating exercise to figure out how to lose 100 jobs in the newsroom, we decided we could come down a little bit on the education department." It rankled one staffer, who wondered why the education department had been essentially wiped away, but Mr. Keller reminded her that it's still a priority for two desks—national and Metro.

Since he'll be doing a primarily digital gig now, his announcement memo is written by national editor Suzanne Daley and digital editor Jon Landman.

Here it is:

For almost 20 years, Jacques Steinberg has brought his innate curiosity and limitless enthusiasm to a variety of beats -- from Westchester County, to education, to newspapers. In his six years covering television, he has had encounters with luminaries like Dan Rather, Don Imus and the entire cast of "The View." He wrote about "Mad Men" before anyone knew how hot it would become.

Now, Jacques is taking on a new challenge. He is joining the National Desk’s education team and will be the anchor of a blog about college admissions called The Choice.

As a former education reporter and the author of a book about the admissions process at Wesleyan University called "The Gatekeepers,"

Jacques is uniquely qualified to lead this enterprise. He hopes to create a site that prospective college students and their parents will turn to regularly for information and advice about applying to college and finding the money to pay for it.

He’ll be getting a lot of help from others who cover higher education, including Tamar Lewin of the National Desk, Lisa Foderaro of the Metro Desk, and Jane Karr, editor of Education Life.

The Choice officially launches on Monday (March 30), to capture the moment when high school seniors are receiving their acceptance letters and struggling to decide which school to go to.

And Jacques is asking for your help. If you’re at any stage of this process -- starting a college savings fund; mapping out a summer college tour for your high school junior; dealing with the prospect of your triplets leaving the nest -- please let him know at [redacted]. We’re hoping some staff members could be coaxed into telling parts of their stories to a wider audience.

Suzanne Daley and Jonathan Landman

According to Mr. Carter:

Under the new arrangement, Conan O'Brien will film his version of The Tonight Show in a new studio and Jimmy Fallon's show—which debuted online last night—will shoot in New York. (Unmentioned was soon-to-be father Carson Daly.)

Perhaps this is what NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker meant when he told the crowd at UBS's 36th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference that he was operating under a "safety first" mentality.

The reporters who cover movies, television, books, newspapers, movies, and all the titans of those industries will be moved out of their second- and fourth-floor offices in the business and culture departments and into a new third-floor space, as a new “mini-department.”

In many ways, it’s a return to the old days.

“In my time here, I think it’s the third time there’s been a separate media pod,” said Bill Carter, the paper’s television reporter since 1989.

There have been all sorts of configurations, which have been constantly updated to adapt to the rapid changes that seem to happen so often in the media world: Sometimes he’s worked for business, other times culture, other times in the little pod.

Mr. Carter, for one, is happy about it.

“I think this is being done for logistical reasons and those reasons make a lot of sense,” he said.

“There have been different iterations of the media desk over the years,” said Sam Sifton, the culture editor at the paper. “This is certainly the largest and I hope the best.”

One reporter said that there was occasionally a “culture clash” between reporters in business and in culture that resulted in “wobbly” coverage.

“It’s not that anything is broken,” said Larry Ingrassia, the paper’s business editor. “The feeling is that things can work better.”

The reporter said that the masthead wants more A1 features from media, and it wants a lot more news.

(More news? That sounds like The Wall Street Journal! Which, incidentally, consolidated its media team onto the corporate news desk back in April).

The media editor on the business desk, Bruce Headlam, will be the top editor, and Mr. Ingrassia and Mr. Sifton will oversee it all.

A memo that the editors sent out to the newsroom announced that the media desk would consist of a dozen people, though there are only 11 names listed there. (As to the rhetorical question asked by a writer for the Web site Gawker, why media columnist David Carr wasn’t included in the memo: Mr. Sifton said that Mr. Carr is still a part of the media team, but will continue his Monday columns for business, and his Carpetbagger blogging.)

And: “There is one open slot,” he said.

Brush up on your Murdoch, kids!

jkoblin@observer.com

This post, by the way, was for those of you looking for some hot media on media on media on media action....

What else has befallen our favorite medium of late? Janet Jackson’s left breast, for one thing. For others: Two groups of people were marooned on desert islands (the casts of CBS’s Survivor and ABC’s Lost) and made their respective networks mints in the process; NBC was marooned in broadcasting, losing Katie Couric, Friends, Frasier, a billion dollars and its grip on Thursday nights; CBS News screwed up big time, a few times; the anchors of all the major-network newscasts left their chairs, none particularly of his own volition; Fox got American Idol; NBC president Jeff Zucker got promoted, and promoted, and promoted; CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves got Julie Chen and half of Viacom.

Mr. Carter breaks no big news in Desperate Networks, and what little nuggets he offers have already been picked over by the blogosphere or rendered obsolete by the passage of time. We could probably do without the sections on Katie Couric’s mental dalliance with the prospect of becoming—get this—the anchor of the CBS Evening News. But such are the challenges of media writing. Television itself is ephemeral, and daily journalism about television has all the longevity of a gnat. A book full of daily journalism about television, therefore, might as well be printed on sand.

There’s no greater evidence of this than Mr. Carter’s titular allusion to—and obvious fascination with—a little show called Desperate Housewives. He uses the boffo Sunday-night soap opera as a prime example of the vagaries of the TV business—which is a business, make no mistake, that he loves. Before it was picked up by ABC, every network, including Lifetime, passed on Desperate Housewives. Along the way, Marc Cherry, the creator, was duped by his agent, humiliated by the industry and insulted by everyone, including his mom. Then, as has happened many times in the industry (and so likewise in the book), a prescient executive had the good sense to champion his cause. Teri Hatcher signed on and the show made it to air, drew 25 million viewers for its first-season finale, lost its buzz and faded into the background—all before copies of Desperate Networks hit the shelves. It must have seemed like a really cool, relevant title when Mr. Carter came up with it, though.

So why write, publish, buy or read a book like this in the first place?

A recent Nielsen study of television viewership—about as trustworthy as a General Mills study of cereal adoration—suggested that the average American household watches eight hours of TV a day. A day! What else do Americans spend that much time doing? Not working, not eating, not going to movies, certainly not reading newspapers, not exercising, not praying, not shopping, not attending political rallies, not balancing checkbooks, not yammering on cell phones, not contemplating the meaning of life. Television is a pre-eminent cultural force: our most ubiquitous medium, certainly, and our most influential.

But much of it is so bad, you object. Exactly!

All of which is to say that television deserves good journalism. This is the implicit message of Desperate Networks, which as far as I can tell contains no explicit message other than “It’s difficult to find a hit show” (which it is—really difficult—and that’s why the networks are “desperate”). Mr. Carter is not a defender of the medium he’s covered for so long; nor an extoller, like some, of its innumerable virtues. He writes about television for the same reason most of us watch it: because it’s full of beautiful people, eccentric characters, exorbitant sums of money, familiar plotlines, canned humor, suspense, betrayal, sex. All the good stuff.

A longtime TV reporter for The Times and the author of The Late Shift (1994)—a book about how Jay Leno maneuvered his way into hosting the Tonight show that was turned into a grotesque HBO film—Mr. Carter has more access to television people, and probably cares more about television itself, than anyone in the industry. A network executive—who’s quoted favorably, anonymously and at length in the book—once told me that what separates Mr. Carter from all the other reporters on the beat is that he’s actually seen every single show on every network schedule. While some reporters may deign to watch a screener of whatever pap is coming up on the WB, Mr. Carter typically has favorite characters, an opinion about the sound editing and concerns with particular plot points.

He plainly respects TV people and TV, even in its seediest forms, and this is why his work is valuable. He devotes, for example, many studious, deferential pages of Desperate Networks to one Mike Darnell, the stringy-haired Fox executive who created Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and a thousand other cringe-inducing programs in which fame-seeking morons sacrifice most of their dignity or nearly their lives. Mr. Carter loves Mike Darnell. He loves everyone, really, especially Leslie Moonves. One of the few television people who haven’t yet torn through a galley of the book asked me recently who its villains are. I’ve only found two: the cast of Friends, who are greedy jerks, and the corporate overlords of Disney, who are cheap.

Otherwise, according to Bill Carter, it’s a business full of smart, aspirational, creative, occasionally vicious but generally well-meaning individuals forever at the mercy of timing and luck. The networks may be desperate, but the people who run them and the shows they produce are reflections of America itself—full of enterprise, optimism and populist spunk. And if not, as Jeff Zucker used to say in the control room of the Today show, “Who gives a shit? It’s only television.”

Rebecca Dana writes NYTV for The Observer.

What else has befallen our favorite medium of late? Janet Jackson’s left breast, for one thing. For others: Two groups of people were marooned on desert islands (the casts of CBS’s Survivor and ABC’s Lost) and made their respective networks mints in the process; NBC was marooned in broadcasting, losing Katie Couric, Friends, Frasier, a billion dollars and its grip on Thursday nights; CBS News screwed up big time, a few times; the anchors of all the major-network newscasts left their chairs, none particularly of his own volition; Fox got American Idol; NBC president Jeff Zucker got promoted, and promoted, and promoted; CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves got Julie Chen and half of Viacom.

Mr. Carter breaks no big news in Desperate Networks, and what little nuggets he offers have already been picked over by the blogosphere or rendered obsolete by the passage of time. We could probably do without the sections on Katie Couric’s mental dalliance with the prospect of becoming—get this—the anchor of the CBS Evening News. But such are the challenges of media writing. Television itself is ephemeral, and daily journalism about television has all the longevity of a gnat. A book full of daily journalism about television, therefore, might as well be printed on sand.

There’s no greater evidence of this than Mr. Carter’s titular allusion to—and obvious fascination with—a little show called Desperate Housewives. He uses the boffo Sunday-night soap opera as a prime example of the vagaries of the TV business—which is a business, make no mistake, that he loves. Before it was picked up by ABC, every network, including Lifetime, passed on Desperate Housewives. Along the way, Marc Cherry, the creator, was duped by his agent, humiliated by the industry and insulted by everyone, including his mom. Then, as has happened many times in the industry (and so likewise in the book), a prescient executive had the good sense to champion his cause. Teri Hatcher signed on and the show made it to air, drew 25 million viewers for its first-season finale, lost its buzz and faded into the background—all before copies of Desperate Networks hit the shelves. It must have seemed like a really cool, relevant title when Mr. Carter came up with it, though.

So why write, publish, buy or read a book like this in the first place?

A recent Nielsen study of television viewership—about as trustworthy as a General Mills study of cereal adoration—suggested that the average American household watches eight hours of TV a day. A day! What else do Americans spend that much time doing? Not working, not eating, not going to movies, certainly not reading newspapers, not exercising, not praying, not shopping, not attending political rallies, not balancing checkbooks, not yammering on cell phones, not contemplating the meaning of life. Television is a pre-eminent cultural force: our most ubiquitous medium, certainly, and our most influential.

But much of it is so bad, you object. Exactly!

All of which is to say that television deserves good journalism. This is the implicit message of Desperate Networks, which as far as I can tell contains no explicit message other than “It’s difficult to find a hit show” (which it is—really difficult—and that’s why the networks are “desperate”). Mr. Carter is not a defender of the medium he’s covered for so long; nor an extoller, like some, of its innumerable virtues. He writes about television for the same reason most of us watch it: because it’s full of beautiful people, eccentric characters, exorbitant sums of money, familiar plotlines, canned humor, suspense, betrayal, sex. All the good stuff.

A longtime TV reporter for The Times and the author of The Late Shift (1994)—a book about how Jay Leno maneuvered his way into hosting the Tonight show that was turned into a grotesque HBO film—Mr. Carter has more access to television people, and probably cares more about television itself, than anyone in the industry. A network executive—who’s quoted favorably, anonymously and at length in the book—once told me that what separates Mr. Carter from all the other reporters on the beat is that he’s actually seen every single show on every network schedule. While some reporters may deign to watch a screener of whatever pap is coming up on the WB, Mr. Carter typically has favorite characters, an opinion about the sound editing and concerns with particular plot points.

He plainly respects TV people and TV, even in its seediest forms, and this is why his work is valuable. He devotes, for example, many studious, deferential pages of Desperate Networks to one Mike Darnell, the stringy-haired Fox executive who created Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and a thousand other cringe-inducing programs in which fame-seeking morons sacrifice most of their dignity or nearly their lives. Mr. Carter loves Mike Darnell. He loves everyone, really, especially Leslie Moonves. One of the few television people who haven’t yet torn through a galley of the book asked me recently who its villains are. I’ve only found two: the cast of Friends, who are greedy jerks, and the corporate overlords of Disney, who are cheap.

Otherwise, according to Bill Carter, it’s a business full of smart, aspirational, creative, occasionally vicious but generally well-meaning individuals forever at the mercy of timing and luck. The networks may be desperate, but the people who run them and the shows they produce are reflections of America itself—full of enterprise, optimism and populist spunk. And if not, as Jeff Zucker used to say in the control room of the Today show, “Who gives a shit? It’s only television.”

Rebecca Dana writes NYTV for The Observer.