Jeff Zucker (Getty Images)

Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reports that Jeff Zucker, executive producer of the decently-rated if not world-beating new talk show Katie, may already be on his way out; the former NBC chief is said to be a candidate to take over CNN when current president Jim Walton's contract expires at year's end.

Mr. Zucker, who worked with Katie host Katie Couric during her tenure as host of Today, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011 that "Katie is a unique brand in television... Our hope is that we take that into the program." In the same interview, Mr. Zucker expressed regret over what had happened to NBC during his tenure as president of that network, when it fell from first to fourth among broadcast networks.

Zucker's current work in media, however, is a bit up in the air. Last month he was pushed out of his position atop NBC by the incoming Comcast brass, and has not yet announced his next move. Some have predicted that the one-time boy wonder of NBC programming will take a stab at running for office.

The Hollywood Reporter said that the event will be held at The Pierre, and will be attended by Lorne Michaels, Katie Couric, Mark Feuerstein and Brian Williams, among others. The speeches are traditionally in "roast" style, meaning we're particularly excited for Mr. Williams' minutes on the podium. If the hidden wit he's shown on "30 Rock" and "The Daily Show" comes through, his remarks should be a treat.

nfreeman@observer.com

Twitter: @NFreeman1234

Nicolas Roldan, this year's polo paramour and rumored beau of equestrienne Georgina Bloomberg, arrived at the event with Lupe Roldan and greeted Delfina Blacquier warmly in Spanish.

"I still have one more tournament, but it's a low-goal tournament in Southampton," the Argentina-born horseman told the Transom in an unmistakably American accent. "Then I'm off to South Carolina and then to Argentina."

What have been the highlights of the summer?

"Everything. I love it out here. The weather has been beautiful and the polo's been fun." Roldan, who calls Palm Beach home, lives with sponsor Michael Barico while mallet-wielding on the east end.

Montauk veteran Dick Cavett made his way to the makeshift car park in the backyard of the private home on Goose Creek Road.

The Transom stopped him to ask if and how the fishing village has changed over the years.

"Not at all," Mr. Cavett deadpanned. "It's just the same little sleepy village of fishermen that it always was, sort of like Sleepy Hollow. There are no glitzy people there, no schmucks from Southampton. It's sort of a Brigadoon really."

"Now do you wanna really know?" the New York Times blogger smiled mischeiviously. "I'm sorry to see it change. It was a nice quiet place when I first came there. I know that Richard Nixon would be upset because when he came out here years ago he said, 'I'm glad I'm not in Southampton or East Hampton but in Montauk where the real people are.' Now they aren't all real people," the former talk show host paused, "but they're more real than Richard Nixon."

"If you don't wanna use Nixon's name you can say the great unindicted co-conspirator."

Over his shoulder as he walked away the former Tonight Show writer added, "you might Google some of my pieces on Nixon."

Handsome polo mascot Nacho Figueras wore his uniform of a cashmere cableknit draped over the shoulders of his button down, artfully unbuttoned to his sternum and tucked into belted dark wash jeans. He informed the Transom of his post-Hamptons polo season itinerary. "We're here one more week. I do my charity polo game on Sunday and then back to Argentina. On October 10 I'm playing a match in LA, sort of an exhibition like the thing in New York with Prince Harry, at the Will Rogers estate, where we're going to raise money for the Will Rogers Park." He combed his hair behind his ears before continuing, "so Argentina, LA, back to Argentina, then Australia and then Florida."

Will Mr. Figueras' blonde wisp of a wife and three young sons be joining him on his travels? "They always come with me. They probably won't go to LA because it's a short trip, but they come everywhere else with me. I love to be with them."

Turning to Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, Mr. Franken accused him of coming to his office the previous week and spinning him about rules that govern which channels are carried by cable and how consumers access him. It’s an abstruse point, but essentially Mr. Franken thought Mr. Roberts was praising rules designed to protect consumers from mega-mergers like this one while simultaneously challenging the same rules on the basis that they violate the First Amendment. “Looking to get approval for this merger, you sat there in my office and told me to my face that these rules would protect consumers,” Mr. Franken told Mr. Roberts.

“And then, to add insult to injury, I asked you right after you made this assertion in my office whether you were aware that your company had litigated this, and you said, ‘I don’t know.’ And so I said, ‘Well, why don’t we ask one of your lawyers?’ Because you had a number of lawyers there.” And we turned to your lawyer and your lawyer said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we did that; we did this.’”

When Mr. Roberts tried to respond, Mr. Franken cut him off. “Look, I think Minnesotans have their answers. Thank you very much.”

Mr. Franken wasn’t done yet. He then turned to NBC and its chief, Jeff Zucker—“look, we’re friends”—and said he had worked with Mr. Zucker’s “lovely” wife, Caryn, at SNL, “and I loved my time at NBC, I want you to know that.” Those caveats aside, Mr. Franken had a bee in his bonnet about regulatory changes in the 1990s that allowed production studios and TV networks to be owned by the same company, leading to a wave of consolidation and a heavy reliance on studio-owned product despite promises to the commission that independent producers would not be shut out. By 1992, Mr. Franken said, the majority of programming on NBC was its own. Mr. Zucker didn’t come to D.C. to rehash a 20-year-old debate, and suggested that it might be more relevant to talk about “what’s happening today.” In fact, he noted, NBC had just ordered a bunch of pilots for new shows for next year, and roughly 40 percent of them were projects that the network has no financial interest in. Mr. Franken had none of it, invoking the Jay Leno debacle: “I think what you did was put an NBC-produced show on at 10 for five nights a week, is what I think you did.”

It was all over very quickly. A snowstorm was coming, and there will be a year or so of further regulatory grandstanding and wrangling before the NBC-Comcast deal is done. The reality is that there is little basis for regulators to prevent Comcast and NBC from combining. From an antitrust perspective, the two companies don’t really compete.

But Mr. Franken was tapping into a bigger, more ingrained fear: that the bigger these media companies get, the less weight consumers, or viewers, will have in influencing what they do.

That can be hard to argue, though, given that past media mega-mergers have generated very mixed results. Successes like Disney–Capital Cities and Time Warner–Turner are overshadowed by flops like Viacom-CBS, AOL–Time Warner and (as noted last week) Vivendi-Universal. With their merger, Comcast-NBC will control roughly 24 percent of cable subscribers in the country and account for 12 percent of what is viewed on television.

But this merger is really about what television is turning into; Mr. Roberts noted that Comcast is spending $1 billion on a superfast Internet service called wideband—forget broadband!—and in this new era, Mr. Roberts promised the new company would be “reliable stewards for the national treasures of NBC and NBC News.” Apparently, Minnesotans will be watching with a wary eye.

editorial@observer.com

"This week, the video game publisher Electronic Arts announced they are continuing their relationship with Tiger Woods," said Mr. Leno. "The good news for Tiger: They're going to name their joystick after him."

The audience chuckled. Who's having fun? Mr. Leno turned up his palms, and shrugged. It was Friday, Jan. 8., and the lame-duck comic was taping the Jay Leno Show at his studio in Burbank. Outside, the world was buzzing over the news of NBC's counter-reformation. The 10 p.m. thing was over, the bosses had told him. After the Olympics, Mr. Leno would be restored to 11:30 p.m. What would happen to Conan O'Brien, who since June had occupied the slot? The Internet was mad with speculation. 

It was like 1991 all over again. One desirable time slot. Two ambitious comedians. One capricious network. And another late-night clusterfuck in the making. What does NBC stand for, Mr. Leno liked to joke? Never believe your contract. He gazed at the crowd and kept riffing. He joked about the stupidity of the underwear bomber. Gay marriage in New Jersey. Lady Gaga's partnership with Polaroid. Americans' disinterest in soccer. A man selling a potato in the shape of a cross on eBay. Maury Povich.

Again and again, Mr. Leno bemoaned his own predicament. Along the way, he took a jab at his old rival-pal, David Letterman. "I'm sure you heard these rumors that NBC is talking about canceling our show," he said. "You know what that means? I didn't sleep with any of my staff, for nothing.

"To be fair," he added, "NBC is working on a solution, they say, in which all parties will be screwed equally. It's that certain NBC touch."

In the days that have followed, seemingly everyone with a media column or a Twitter account has taken a turn marveling at the network's hamfisted management of its talent. Most of the sympathy seemed to bypass Mr. Leno in favor of Mr. O'Brien:

"He did all the right things," wrote TV critic Aaron Barnhart, "and NBC is punishing him anyway."

"I've felt strongly that Conan was getting shafted," Chevy Chase said at the TCA tour.

"If Conan doesn't leave NBC by the end of the day," wrote comedian Rob Corddry on Twitter, "I will eat Burbank."

(Mr. Corddry nearly got his wish on Tuesday, when Mr. O'Brien released a letter to the people of Earth making it clear that he would not accept a move to 12:05, but stopped short of leaving the network.)

But largely lost in the furor over the apparent undermining of Mr. O'Brien and his crew was the potentially laudable shift in strategy signaled by the move. On the heels of December's purchase of NBC by Comcast, NBC managers had wasted little time in listening to upset affiliates and scrapping The Jay Leno Show-and perhaps with it the much-bemoaned strategy of managing shows for margins (i.e., low costs) instead of high ratings, which Mr. Leno's misadventure in prime time had come to symbolize. In a largely dispiriting age of crumbling media, NBC's reversal of course at 10 p.m. might just be one of those rare sunny moments when a media company sets the unusual precedent of failing by aiming too low. For once, cynicism about our tastes got routed.

ROUGHLY 40 YEARS before NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker gave up on his network's legacy of high-quality scripted dramas at 10 p.m. in favor of a cheapo five-nights-a-week variety show starring Mr. Leno, Mel Brooks wrote a comedy about a similarly dispirited producer. Like Mr. Zucker, Max Bialystock had seen his once-great programming fall out of favor with the public. Years of successes had been followed by years of failures. His audience was aging. Creating another beloved hit seemed like a Herculean task. "I am being sunk by a society that demands success," says Mr. Bialystock at the start of The Producers, "when all I can offer is failure."

Yet shortly thereafter, Mr. Bialystock and his accountant, Leo Bloom, stumble upon the kind of solution that might appeal to, say, a struggling broadcast network long mired in fourth place-that is, a way of creating a money-gushing production without having to win over an audience. "It's absolutely amazing," says Mr. Bloom during his epiphany. "But under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than he could with a hit."

Sometime around the year 2008, Mr. Zucker and his then entertainment deputy, Ben Silverman, happened upon a similar solution. They could win the 10 p.m. prime-time hour, which had for years bedeviled the network brass, not by beating the competition but by losing to them. Let everybody else try their hand at the frustrating, expensive and incredibly difficult process of creating the next great scripted drama. Those days were over. A mediocre variety show, on the other hand, was not only imminently achievable but also so cheap as to be guaranteed to be profitable. In The Producers, the winning-while-losing strategy inspired Mr. Bialystock and Mr. Bloom to create Springtime for Hitler. At NBC, it inspired Mr. Zucker and Mr. Silverman to create The Jay Leno Show. Now, four months after its debut, NBC managers appear to be saying goodbye to all that. The question remains: How far will the purge go?

WHILE THE LENO experiment was the most visible manifestation of NBC's managing-for-margins strategy, the same approach was applied elsewhere in the network-most notably to NBC's local news divisions. For years, WNBC-4, like NBC's "must-see" prime-time lineup, had dominated the competition. But in recent years, WNBC-4 had slipped and was struggling to reverse the slide.

Rather than trying to beef up the newsroom in an effort to restore WNBC-4 to ratings and editorial prominence, in the spring of 2008 Mr. Zucker decided (à la Leno) that creating a better local news broadcast was a lost cause. WNBC-4's ratings struggle was seen as evidence that viewers no longer wanted polished local newscasts, and as justification to blow the whole thing up. The traditional newsroom was soon scrapped for a so-called content center. Dozens of experienced (read: expensive) beat reporters were let go and replaced by a new breed of young, inexpensive content producers. The same blueprint was drawn up for stations around the country.

In Washington, D.C., NBC executives rolled out an experimental soft news show, Daily Connection, that was largely made up of repurposed news packages from a hodgepodge of NBC divisions, such as NBC Sports, Bravo and the Weather Channel. The product may never bring in big ratings, went the theory, but it would be virtually free for NBC and its stations to produce. Some longtime Peacock observers saw the show as yet another creeping manifestation of the managing-for-margins strategy-sacrificing quality local news programming in favor of the reliable profits that come from lower costs.

At the same time, back in New York, WNBC-4 scrapped its 5 p.m. newscast and replaced it with a live lifestyle show called LX New York, catering to the supposed interests of female viewers. (Shopping! Cooking! Lessons in love!) Like Leno, the show was inexpensive to produce relative to the programming it was replacing. Like Leno, it has predictably struggled to find an audience.

In recent days, many of the local NBC newshounds who were collateral damage of the winning-while-losing strategy have been watching the Leno do-over with added interest. With NBC now scrapping the managing-for-margins strategy in prime time, is it possible they'll do the same on the local level? Could the end of prime-time Leno hold the promise of the end of LX New York, repurposed news shows and content centers?

"Everybody is dealing with the same reality, which is that the revenue has changed dramatically in broadcast TV," said Jay DeDapper, WNBC's former political ace, who was let go in the station overhaul. "Jeff Zucker and Jeff Immelt's strategy was to cut the cost no matter how badly they did in the ratings so that they could make money regardless. Other companies have had different strategies. CBS in particular. They have decided that they want higher revenues through higher ratings."

Whether the reversal will eventually trickle down to the local level remains to be seen. But Mr. DeDapper, for once, seemed hopeful about the new precedent. "It's the first significant sign that there's a new sheriff in town, and that Comcast has a different way of looking at this," said Mr. DeDapper. "I don't think they are necessarily going to come in and throw money at everything. But it's the first signal that they also aren't a company that believes you win by losing."

fgillette@observer.com

A quick canvassing of our sources failed to turn up anyone who could remember the last time WCBS-2 had scored such a victory in the 11 p.m. news battle. "It's the first time in a generation," said one source.

Somebody at the station might want to send a thank you card to Jeff Zucker.

To wit: much of the credit for WCBS-2's revival at 11 p.m. undoubtedly goes to the CBS local stations chief Peter Dunn and his team, who have done much to improve the station's products. But among local news observers there's also a pervasive belief that the resurgence of WCBS at 11 p.m. wouldn't have been possible without a strong assist from decisions made in recent years by NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker.

"Channel 2 had been running last in the ratings for years and years," said David Diaz, a professor of media and politics at City College. "The contest for number one was always between Channel 7 and Channel 4. Not anymore. The way I see it, NBC dropped the ball, and it was the best thing that happened to Channel 2 in a long, long time."

Mr. Zucker helped out WNBC's crosstown rivals, goes the theory, by (a) rapidly dismantling Channel 4's once proud newsroom in favor of a more cost-efficient "content center" and (b) eroding the 11 p.m. news' lead-in audience by replacing the network's once proud series of 10 p.m. dramas with a more cost-efficient (and lower-rated) variety show starring Jay Leno.

The latter experiment in managing for margins looks to be coming to an ignominious end.

On the morning of Thursday, Jan. 7,  the Web site FTV Live reported that NBC was on the verge of pulling the plug on the Jay Leno experiment. By the afternoon, TMZ was reporting that The Jay Leno Show would go on hiatus beginning with NBC's February Olympics coverage. And, moreover, that NBC executives were already in discussions to move Mr. Leno back to 11:30 p.m. following the Olympics. In a series of subsequent statements, NBC spokespersons reiterated their support for Mr. Leno but failed to shoot down the reports of his potential move back to late night television.

Almost immediately, observers sized up the potential shakeup as a move, in part, to placate NBC affiliates around the country. The news comes just a few weeks after a much talked about article in Broadcasting & Cable in which various NBC affiliate general managers went on the record, bemoaning the effect The Jay Leno Show was having on their 11 p.m. newscasts. "When asked to grade Leno as a late-news lead-in—a focus of the NBC affiliates board prior to the show's launch—the marks were Ds and Fs," wrote Michael Malone of B&C. "One general manager suggested a WTF?"

On January 21, the general managers of those stations are scheduled to arrive in New York for an annual meeting with NBC executives. On Friday morning, New York was buzzing with speculation about whether Mr. Zucker's about-face on the Leno at 10 p.m. experiment would be enough to avert a riot at the coming meeting. "He didn't want to look down at 250 really angry people, who just lost their 11 p.m. news," one TV insider speculated to The Observer. "Now, Zucker is going to have a bunch of affiliate guys saying, hey, you tried something and you moved fast. You failed fast. And now you're getting out of it. Okay."

For its part, WCBS-2 (like various NBC competitors around the country) is enjoying the fruits of its newfound resurgence. This week, fresh off its 11 p.m. victory, the station began work on a new updated, state-of-the-art newsroom.

In the winter of 2000, Mr. Harbert was running NBC Studios in L.A. when network bosses passed him over (along with a field of other strong potential candidates) and announced that a young news producer named Jeff Zucker would be NBC's new president of entertainment. Some three years later, Mr. Zucker himself bypassed Mr. Harbert and chose then-FX chief Kevin Reilly to come in and oversee the network's struggling prime-time programming. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Harbert left the Peacock.

Mr. Harbert later landed at Comcast, where he is currently the president of the cable provider's West Coast entertainment group, overseeing some of the company's more high-profile pro-gramming assets, including E!, G4, FEARnet and the Style Network. Following the Dec. 3 announcement that Comcast had purchased a controlling stake of NBC Universal from General Electric, Mr. Harbert once again finds himself in a familiar position: jockeying with other NBC executives for a top job running a prime piece of the network's entertainment portfolio.

Will the third time be the charm? Decisions about who will be running what at the new NBC-Comcast venture won't be finalized for another 9 to 12 months while regulators in Washington scru-tinize the particulars of the deal. But in the meantime, the NBC-Comcast parlor game is already in full swing.

Since last week's announcement, executives from both Comcast and General Electric have repeatedly stated that there are minimal redundancies between the rank-and-file employees at their two companies (the implication being that layoffs should be minimal). But what about redundancies at the executive level? Between Comcast and NBC, there appears to be something of a logjam of executive-vice-president types with proven track records of running profitable cable channels, including the likes of NBCU chief Mr. Zucker; NBC entertainment chief Jeff Gaspin; and Jeff Shell, president of Comcast's programming group (to name just a few). One TV insider joked to The Observer at a recent cocktail party that it looked like there were "too many Jeffs in the kitchen."

While most of the public discussion to date has focused on Comcast's stated long-term commitment to Mr. Zucker, employees within 30 Rock have kept busy speculating about the future roles of dozens of other top-tier managers like Mr. Harbert. With details scarce about how the management structure at the new joint venture will shape up, every scrap of information is being chewed over endlessly.

On the morning of the announcement, in an interview with CNBC, General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt set off tremors when he seemed to suggest that current NBC cable execs might oversee Comcast's entertainment group-not the other way around.

"I can talk about strategy and all the synergies, and I feel really great," said Mr. Immelt. "I mean, I look and see what a Bonnie Hammer or a Lauren Zalaznick can do with E! and Style, what Dick Ebersol can do with Golf Channel. There's lots of synergies there."

Before the panic button went off in Comcast's West Coast offices, Brian Roberts, Comcast's CEO, hastened during the same CNBC interview to praise the work of his programming executives, in-cluding Mr. Shell and Mr. Harbert. But whereas Mr. Roberts was effusive in his praise of NBC's current cable programming assets ("CNBC, USA, Syfy, Bravo, five different channels in the Universal NBC portfolio make over $200 million a year, so these are great businesses"), he seemed to acknowledge that Comcast's cable networks weren't in the same ballpark in terms of profitability.

"NBC Universal's margins-Jeff mentioned some of the channels-they have about 50 percent margins on their cable channels," said Mr. Roberts. "We've had great people like Ted Harbert run-ning E! We don't have the scale. We have wonderful brands."

Sure enough, a cursory look at the numbers confirms that Comcast's current entertainment channels aren't quite on the same scale as those run by NBC-although E! is pretty close. In 2008, according to data provided to The Observer by industry analysts at SNL Kagan, E! earned $164,800,000 in net advertising revenue with 94.1 million subscribers; G4 brought in $70,197,000 and 65.2 million subs; and the Style Network pulled in $84,020,00 and 59.1 million subscribers. The numbers have been up significantly at all three networks since Mr. Harbert took over in 2006.

But how the channels might eventually fit in with NBC's programming mix-and who will run them moving forward-promises to be the source of much competition in the months to come. Comcast leaders, for their part, are hoping for one big happy family. "Both of our teams are strong with incredibly talented people," a Comcast spokesperson said. "Together, we will create very exciting possibilities for the future of entertainment."

Beyond the people, what about the content? "The question I have is-can you find or extract any kind of benefits from owning these networks in one house, without homogenizing them?" Tom Eagan, a media analyst for Collins Stewart, recently asked The Observer. "You don't want E! to become Bravo. That's going to be important: keeping the identity of each network while still sharing some of the resources."

fgillette@observer.com

Today, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET-CWA) Local 11, which represents several thousand employees at NBC Universal, announced that they are celebrating the holidays at NBC by launching a web site, http://NBCStoleChristmas.com, highlighting "the 'Grinch' within NBC" and  threatening to disrupt the network's 12th annual "Christmas in Rockefeller Center" telecast, which is set to air on Wednesday night.

The move, according to the press release, reflects the union's growing anger with the network over stalled contract negotiations.

"We can't let the Grinch at NBC steal another Christmas from thousands of honest working people," said union president Ed McEwan in the release.  "This charade must stop. Christmas is supposed to be a time of goodwill, but the network's management is trying to hide behind their fancy lights while leaving their employees in the dark."

In recent years, the holiday season has been riddled with anxiety for many employees at NBC Universal, who have come to expect annual end of the year payroll purges.

Last year, as The Observer chronicled at the time, a number of WNBC-4 employees were informed that they were being let go while at the same time the rest of their colleagues were taping a holiday sing along that for years has served as the station's local promotional holiday-season piece.

"Every Who/In the crew/Liked the Christmas tree lighting a lot," reads a Dr. Seuss-inspired poem on the union's protest Web site. "But the NBC grinch just didn't see/Without them, the lights would light not!"

It was Wednesday afternoon, and Mr. Glassman, a senior producer of content at NBC's local owned-and-operated station in Washington D.C., was on the phone with The Observer talking about a newfangled, pioneering-type show called Daily Connection.

The program, which soft-launched on WRC-4 on Sept. 14 and currently airs every weekday at 3 p.m, is arguably the first show of its kind: a network-produced, "local" news show that is largely created at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City and yet airs in a local news market, several hundred miles away.

Call it a creative breakthrough in network synergy. Or call it a another example of NBC executives managing for margins, not ratings, ala The Jay Leno Show. But in either case, it's a radical attempt to re-imagine local news programming at the station level.

How does it work?

According to Mr. Glassman, every day, producers in New York comb through the myriad stories that have aired or are about to air across the range of NBC Universal TV and Web properties--including NBC News, the Weather Channel, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC sports, NBC mobile, etc.--and pick out a handful of breezy stories to repeat on Daily Connection.

Producers in New York then compose and edit the news elements and send the package to a control room in Washington D.C. From there, the local station takes over.

Every day, WRC-4 assigns two members of its newsroom, from a rotating cast of anchors and reporters, to host Daily Connection. Typically, the hour of programming begins with a brief bit of live (or live-to-tape) news about the day's big story--Congress debating a health-care bill; a shooting at Fort Hood etc.--and then segues into a playful hour of effervescent news stories largely tailored to female viewers.

Here and there, WRC-4 producers sprinkle in fresh content, such as a recent, original interview with NBC artist-in-residence Jon Bon Jovi. But for the most part, the majority of the news comes from repurposed material that has already appeared elsewhere in the NBC Universal universe.

Not long ago, for instance, NBC News pater familias Tom Brokaw interviewed actor Tom Hanks in New Orleans at the reopening of the National World War II Museum. A portion of the interview first aired on NBC News' Today show. Afterwards, editors repackaged the interview, and sent it to D.C., where it found a second life on Daily Connection.

Is anyone watching? Currently, Nielsen only provides limited local ratings to reporters, and WRC-4 declined to share any specific ratings information for Daily Connection with The Observer. NBC News representatives told us that Daily Connection is already competitive against a fierce line-up of syndicated shows at 3 p.m. in D.C., which includes The Dr. Oz Show, General Hospital, and The Tyra Banks Show. But they didn't hand over the actual ratings data.

In D.C., Daily Connection replaced WRC-4's syndication of Dr. Phil. In general, syndication is expensive. Airing, say, Dr. Phil in a market the size of D.C. could cost a station tens of thousands of dollars a week. Leftover news, on the other hand, is cheap. From an NBC perspective, the obvious appeal of the show is that it costs the network virtually nothing to produce. All of the on-air talent is already paid for. Ditto the content.

There are also more potential upsides to be had in the future. To wit: The bulk of the stories on Daily Connection are generic enough to air as news in cities around the country from D.C. to San Diego to Indianapolis. To date, WRC-4 is the only NBC station making use of New York's package of repurposed content. But multiple NBC stations around the country could also adopt the format, potentially saving the network millions of dollars in syndication fees at a time when revenue at broadcast stations is increasingly scarce.

Sources at NBC tell The Observer that former CBS News president Andrew Heyward, (who joined NBC News as a consultant back in June) helped create the pilot for Daily Connection under the attentive watch of NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker.

Afterwards, NBC executives tapped Rich Latour, a former CNBC producer, as Daily Connection's executive producer. He currently oversees the D.C. program from New York.