Guy Fieri is so upset! (NBC)

– Jay Z was not "right next to De Niro" the other night at Leonardo DiCaprio's birthday. The Taxi Driver star gave the Jigga a Meet the Fockers-level awkward greeting when Jay-Z tried to approach the King of Comedy only to get rebuffed because he had never returned Bob's phone calls. Even Beyoncé couldn't calm De Niro down. We're not sure whom we would less like to be mad at us, but that sounds like a party-stopper if there ever was one.

- If you want to get angry, here's a video of Gwyneth Paltrow talking about her "writer" personality in a behind-the-scenes look at her new Max Factor ad. Why do we need a behind-the-scenes look at an ad? STOP ASKING QUESTIONS!

- Hilariously, Guy Fieri thinks that The New York Times’s restaurant critic had "another agenda" when he wrote his hit piece about Fieri's Times Square palace of shitty food. We're pretty sure the agenda was just a good Samaritan's public service announcement.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

– Yikes, the Matt Lauer story just keeps getting worse. Like apparently Izzy Povich was passed over for Jim Bell's job because Lauer didn't like her? Steve Capus says the $25-million-a-year host doesn't have that kind of editorial control, but these rumors are getting a little more spiky every day.

– Oh, boo! Aaron Sorkin will not be addressing the Petraeus scandal in next season of The Newsroom, even though he really, really wants to!

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

On a recent post-NFL season Monday night, 7.3 million people watched a remake of Hawaii 5-0. Another 6.7 million watched Castle, a crime procedural that’s safely avoided buzz for four seasons. A crowd less than half that size, 3.2 million, watched an American furniture manufacturer tearfully repent for outsourcing the family business, met a real-life moon colonist, and saw a chimpanzee flip through a children’s book. “They like to look at the pictures,” the voiceover explained.

They had landed on the three-month-old newsmagazine Rock Center, NBC’s prime time bid to recapture an audience for TV news by offering a looser format in which to showcase Brian Williams’s formidable charisma. Mr. Williams’s sensibility is so deeply ingrained in the programming that Rock Center executive producer Rome Hartman likes to say that, when it’s working, it feels like “Brian’s playlist.”

“He’s got tremendous personality,” Mr. Hartman said in a phone interview with The Observer. “We wanted to give him an opportunity to show the breadth of his experience, his knowledge, his news sensibility, and the range of his personality.”

Since when do news anchors need a personality?

The previous generation of TV news gods—Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw—didn’t have personalities; they had jawlines, which were square, and brows, which they knit when they told us with patriarchal gravity how the country’s day went.

In 2010, network news lost more than 750,000 viewers, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. Although NBC shed the fewest, the report noted that network news is on “a slide so long and gradual that few imagine it can now be abated, except perhaps by moving to new platforms.”

Mr. Williams has a lantern jaw and an expressive brow too, but he also has the comic timing and pop culture antennae that make him the kind of guy you’d want to make you a playlist. These traits, though by all accounts genuine, might have been reserved, in another era, for the anchor’s close friends and off-the-record confidantes. Instead, they’ve been drilled into us in what seems, retrospectively, like a company-directed cross-platform Brian Williams congeniality campaign.

He hosted SNL capably. He skewered himself on 30 Rock and he skewered his medium on Fallon, slow-jamming the news. As part of a roundtable assembled on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the biggest media story of 2010, Mr. Williams delivered a satiric monologue about The New York Times’s “discovery” of Brooklyn so uncannily pitch-perfect that it felt like watching Skynet (the Terminator’s artificial intelligence overlord) become self-aware. It knows it’s an anchor.

It seems to be working.

“When he got the anchor job, I distinctly remember having zero opinion of him,” Eric Cunningham, a 27-year-old sketch comedian told The Observer. “But then it’s almost like he went out of his way to let people who weren’t news junkies know that he was cool.”

Interestingly, NBC opened up programming space for Mr. Williams’s personality at the same time the ratings of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart were surpassing those of every Fox News host’s except Bill O’Reilly. NBC Universal tried to lure Jon Stewart away from Comedy Central more than once, according to sources familiar with the matter. But judging from Mr. Williams’s 2007 turn as the host of SNL, they didn’t need to.

“Brian was funny before Jon Stewart,” said Alexandra Wallace, a senior vice president at NBC News and a longtime executive producer at Nightly. Ms. Wallace said that his move toward entertainment was organic but that the network opened up to his comedic outings when it saw they didn’t cost him any credibility.

“The news has become more personal,” she explained. “As the viewer, I want to feel more of a connection, and I want to feel that I’m getting to know the person who’s telling the news.”

Some NBC insiders said the laid-back, on-air Brian belies managing editor of Nightly News Brian, who has an assiduous, Type A personality and whose staff abides by a strict code of punctuality and professionalism. Mr. Williams has been through five executive producers in his seven-year tenure (the survivors went on to higher posts at NBC) and has said he wouldn't wish the job on anyone.

“You don’t get where he is without having really high standards for yourself and the people who work for you,” Ms. Wallace said. “I think Brian has a ton of fun, and the staff has a ton of fun but it’s a lot of work. So I’m sure there are some rules. But we might be getting on at 6:45 if there weren’t any.”

Last summer, Mr. Cunningham and some friends started a semi-serious Brian Williams for President campaign. Not because they viewed him as a paragon of trustworthiness and authority, but because he was funny.

The real signal of the anchor’s “indie comedy cred,” he said, was Mr. Williams’s turn on ASSSCAT, a regular improv show put on by the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Mr. Cunningham doesn’t watch broadcast news religiously—especially now that it appears BriWi (a nickname Internet gadabout Rachel Sklar takes credit for) won’t be running for office—but said that he’s seen Rock Center, and likes it. “It’s a lot like Dateline, but if Dateline were allowed to not do stories on cheerleader-murderers,” he noted.

For people accustomed to digesting news through a Twitter stream that contains both CNN breaking news and Onion headlines, it’s no big deal to see the man in the anchor’s desk toggle between hard news and comedy.

“I was talking with a friend of mine about how Brian Williams manages to make you truly care about tragic-but-evergreen stories you hear about nearly every day—in a way that’s hard to pin down,” Mr. Cunningham explained. “Then four minutes later, he’ll do a segment on the ‘Shit Girls Say’ videos and it doesn’t feel weird.”

Given Mr. Williams’s obvious chops as an entertainer, we wondered, does Mr. Cunningham think Mr. Williams is wasted doing the news?

“I would be shocked,” he replied. “He’s got it together up there and is too sharp to be drunk at the desk. No offense to Pat Sajak, but going toe-to-toe with Jon Stewart comedically is a lot harder than remembering which letters are vowels.”

Um, actually, we meant wasted as in, Is his true talent going to waste behind the news desk, reading other people’s words? Mr. Williams reportedly abstains from alcohol.

“Ha, oh man—sorry, BriWi just did a segment on Sajak being drunk last night, so I thought that’s what you were referring to,” Mr. Cunningham replied.

Just because Mr. Williams is allowed to loosen his tie once a week does not mean that NBC executives are preparing for hard news doomsday. Mr. Hartman noted that NBC News’s viewership is up, and Ms. Wallace believes the glut of information online has increased the demand for TV news’s distilled synopses. Still, it would be wise for the network to experiment with repurposing its talents sooner rather than later. In 2002, when Mr. Williams was Mr. Brokaw’s heir apparent, eight out of ten 18- to 29-year-olds got their news from television, according to Pew Research Institute. By last year, more than 40 percent of them had disappeared.

But watching a news anchor pander to a generation of news consumers who don’t remember his Peabody-winning Katrina broadcast can be a little bit painful, like watching someone’s freshly divorced dad try to figure out what he missed while he was off the market.

For example, if the new BuzzFeed is banking on the idea that breaking news is a viral meme, Rock Center is banking on the idea that viral memes are breaking news. Mr. Williams has already interviewed Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and the girl from “Shit Girls Say”—not just the comedians behind them but the memes themselves.

During the Marcel the Shell bit, Mr. Williams asked viewers to look at the number of times the video has been viewed, adding, “A lot of network prime time shows would kill for 14 million plus viewers.”

Mr. Williams comes by his new media interests honestly. He has two 20-something children. The elder, Allison, has been linked romantically with Ricky Van Veen, the College Humor founder, and is a star of Girls, Lena Dunham’s HBO series about emerging adulthood in Greenpoint.

But his apparent awareness of the declining influence of the medium he’s mastered gives his coziness with Gawker a whiff of desperation.

On Jan. 15, Mr. Williams wrote to Gawker owner Nick Denton, a friend, to praise one of the site’s new weekend hires and shoot the shit. “I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage,” he wrote, adding, “Brooklyn hippster [sic] Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night — booked on the strength of her TWO SONG web EP, the least-experienced musical guest in the show’s history, for starters.”

Mr. Denton forwarded the email to Gawker’s new editor in chief A.J. Daulerio, who promptly published it.

The post drew hundreds of thousands of viewers for several reasons. It had America’s news anchor piling on Lana Del Rey, a high-artifice songstress whose SEO, if not her record, is gold. It employed the term “Brooklyn hipster.” And it revealed a bit of in-house cattiness—the face of NBC News sneering at SNL’s booking!

But really, like most people who find themselves in Gawker’s inbox, Mr. Williams was asking the site—which attracts more than six million monthly visitors (twice as many as watch Rock Center each week)—for a little attention.

“I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage.”

NBC asked Gawker to take down the email. It declined. Others internally said they thought it was good for Mr. Williams’s image.

“We’re very busy with this show we put on,” was all Mr. Hartman would say of the matter.

In fact, the next week, a team of Rock Center producers were busy invading Gawker headquarters to film an upcoming profile of Nick Denton Gawker Media.

Though some bloggers presumed the segment was a public hatchet-burial, it had been in the works for weeks.

Next week, Rock Center will move from Monday nights to an earlier slot on Wednesdays, going head-to-head with ABC’s Emmy-laden Modern Family, a new Fox reality show about flash mobs and yet another crime procedural, Criminal Minds, on CBS.

“Prime time is valuable real estate,” Mr. Hartman said. “It’s a tribute to NBC News from NBC Universal and the Comcast Company that they have made this valuable real estate available to us.”

Indeed, some sources consider the creation of Rock Center a sop to the news division from the network’s new owners, which were then busily gutting its ranks.

Although the general interest newsmagazine appears to be trying to be everything to everyone, in many ways, Rock Center’s strategy is a concession to the fact that viewers consume news in many, disaggregate forms. At its core, Rock Center its an assemblage of videos in YouTube-friendly lengths that can be dismantled, liked and shared across platforms. Some Rock Center stories are posted online long before they air.

“I aspire to have people sample the program, people who might not be what we consider traditional viewers,” Mr. Hartman said.

With blandly palatable long form content and a host who is, by now, enough of a celebrity to carry even the dullest interviews, the show sometimes feels like an extremely well-placed billboard for Mr. Williams and his NBC News Superfriends like Kate Snow, and, yes, Chelsea Clinton.

But if NBC puts any stock in the notion that Brian Williams’s personality will outlast the waning primacy of the news anchor, the parable of Lana Del Rey might be instructive. In the Internet echo-chamber, even the most finely calibrated persona delivering expertly produced material isn’t immune to the negative impact of overexposure.

On Jan. 23, Mr. Williams moderated a GOP debate under the Rock Center banner. The spectacle was mostly put on by NBC’s politics and special events teams, but as a strategic branding opportunity for Rock Center, it was a triumph, doubling the usual ratings.

The next day, Mr. Williams’s friends at Gawker featured more TV coverage on the front page, deriding the “orange hipster” for overdoing it.

“Williams would not shut up,” John Cook wrote. “He uttered almost precisely the same number of words last night as Ron Paul, who was ostensibly there as a participant.”

If the criticism stung, Mr. Williams shouldn’t feel too bad. Ms. Del Ray has survived much, much worse.

kstoeffel@observer.com

Michael Isikoff, who has worked for Newsweek since 1994, has been hired by NBC News as a National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News president Steve Capus announced today.

Mr. Isikoff has been one of the best in his field, leading coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Abu Ghraib abuses and 9/11-related U.S. intelligence failures.

Newsweek's loss is NBC's gain.

"[H]aving Michael join the ranks of Lisa Myers, Chris Hansen and Pete Williams makes our investigative unit the strongest in the industry," said Mr. Capus.

Mr. Isikoff has been a regular MSNBC contributor since 1999. Maybe there's some wisdom in the advice that Newsweek staff and editors shouldn't be allowed on television.

NBC's release:

NEW YORK – June 7, 2010 – Michael Isikoff is joining NBC News as National Investigative Correspondent.  The announcement was made today by NBC News President Steve Capus. Isikoff will report for all platforms of NBC News, including “NBC Nightly News,” “Today” and MSNBC. Isikoff will also contribute to msnbc.com in a branded destination for the web site.

Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the “Rachel Maddow Show” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”

"Michael is one of the most respected and distinguished investigative journalists in the business," said Steve Capus, President of NBC News. "I am extremely proud of our investigative team and having Michael join the ranks of Lisa Myers, Chris Hansen and Pete Williams makes our investigative unit the strongest in the industry."

Isikoff joined “Newsweek” as an Investigative Correspondent in June 1994. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the Abu Ghraib scandal, campaign-finance and congressional ethics abuses, presidential politics and other national issues. Isikoff’s blog “DeClassified - Investigative Reporting in Real Time,” written with Mark Hosenball and published on Newsweek.com, has become a must-read for senior U.S. officials. Isikoff and Hosenball’s previous web column, “Terror Watch,” also written for Newsweek.com, won the 2005 Society of Professional Journalists award for best investigative reporting online.

He is the author of two New York Times best-selling books - “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” co-written with David Corn and "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," which chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story.

Since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. Isikoff's June 2002 “Newsweek” cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of “Newsweek” reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned “Newsweek” the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.

Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998 and his coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned “Newsweek” the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's Lewinsky reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In  2009, Isikoff was named on a list of the 50 “Best and Most Influential Journalists" in the nation's capital by “Washingtonian” magazine.

Isikoff came to “Newsweek” from “The Washington Post,” where he had been a reporter since September 1981. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976. 

The promo crackled with action. A man in military clothing stormed a beach. Helicopters flew here and there. Men brandished guns. Tires screeched. Things exploded. The cast, three tough-looking guys in sunglasses (“Scott, Navy Seal; Roger, Green Beret; Adam, Journalist”), warned of international terrorists living among us. “This is not just a show to me,” said the former Green Beret. “It’s a mission.” Over the soulful notes of a wailing-guitar, the NBC logo popped up alongside a punchy catchphrase: “Truth is the real weapon.”

The Caves looked at each other in befuddlement. What was that? Journalism? Fiction? CSI—The Hague? As it turns out, they were watching the promo for a new show from NBC News called The Wanted, which will debut on Monday, July 20, at 10 p.m. On the hour-long program, NBC’s ensemble team of paramilitary journalists will track down and expose accused war criminals and terrorists who have managed to avoid justice, yet are living in the open. The target of an early episode, for example, will be Mamoum Darkazanli, a Syrian national who lives in Germany and is wanted by Interpol for, among other things, his alleged involvement with terrorist bombings in Spain.

The series is the brainchild of documentary filmmaker Charlie Ebersol, the son of NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol. On Monday, The New York Times reported that ShineReveille International has acquired the series for foreign distribution. 

The series has already attracted scrutiny from a range of media observers—who admittedly have yet to see the final product—who are concerned about the blurring of the line between journalism and entertainment, and between American reporters and the U.S. military. The series stars Adam Ciralsky, a former Dateline NBC producer, who is billed as the show’s onscreen journalist. Left unsaid is that a decade ago, before a public dispute with his former employers, Mr. Ciralsky worked as a lawyer for the C.I.A.

The decision by NBC News’ president, Steve Capus, to green-light the project despite the potential ethical conflicts has also raised questions within his news division. “Foreign governments already are suspicious of the independence of U.S. journalists who report overseas,” a source at NBC News told The Observer. “Iran and North Korea, for example, imprison legitimate journalists whom they suspect of being spies. The Wanted plays perfectly into their hands—showing an active U.S. journalist in bed with former State Department officials and U.S. Special Forces soldiers—all working to capture foreign criminals on foreign soil. This is what I’d call ‘not useful.’”

“The Wanted has been reviewed by NBC News management and lives up to our standards,” said a network spokesperson. “We look forward to continuing this dialogue after people have viewed the program when it is broadcast next Monday.”

What do traditional foreign correspondents make of NBC’s nontraditional foray onto their turf? “My first thought, from the preview, was that it seemed like a very cold, Hollywood, heroes-vs.-villains treatment of the messy, messy world of war,” Mr. Cave, who spent 2007 reporting on the war in Iraq for The Times, wrote via email. “It made me wonder if the complex pain and suffering of such moments wasn’t being exploited, and turned into a sport in which the people that are supposed to matter—according to producers, and the promos—are the Americans parachuting in, rather than those who were actually involved.

“Are we supposed to believe that this is an example of how to take seriously some of the world’s most horrific, gut-wrenching events?” he added. “The risk is that this will look like a very childish approach to the world’s most serious problems.”

One TV news foreign correspondent told The Observer that it’s already difficult enough to work as an American journalist in countries with repressive regimes. Accusations of espionage and sudden visa revocations are part of the job. He speculated that something like The Wanted could make the job even harder, particularly for foreign correspondents working at NBC News.

“I wouldn’t want to work for a news organization in a repressive country knowing that my news organization was also responsible for a program that was essentially targeting affiliates of the repressive government,” said our source. “I’d worry there would be a backlash against me.”

On the other hand, whatever its journalistic merits, Aparisim “Bobby” Ghosh, the world editor of Time magazine, doubted that The Wanted would put foreign correspondents in any greater danger than they already are. “Regimes that accuse Western journalists of being spies know full well that the accusations are absurd,” he argued. “When journalists are arrested these days, it’s usually because those governments want a bargaining chip they can use.

“Yes, there are some people lower down the chain of command in Iran and NoKo who may actually buy the official propaganda,” he wrote via email. “But I doubt an NBC show will make them any more credulous than they are already.

“In my experience some jihadis believe ALL foreigners are spies—journalists, human-rights activists, aid workers, exchange students, even tourists,” he added. “But these nut-jobs also believe Jewish people kill and eat babies. Western societies can’t censor themselves on account of some lunatics. I would defend the right of the producers of The Wanted to make a stupid show.”

fgillette@observer.com

“By the way, that feline whitefish on a bagel, shmeared properly, is not so bad,” said Jim Cramer.

It was the night of Thursday, April 23, and the host of CNBC’s Mad Money was standing on a stage at the front of a ballroom in the New York Hilton, talking about what it was like to eat cat food on TV.

In front of him sat hundreds of guests in black-tie, who had gathered at the FDNY Foundation's annual Humanitarian Awards Dinner to slurp down cocktails, eat steak and raise money for fire-fighting causes in New York City.  

Mr. Cramer was emceeing the event. At a table in the center of the room, not far from the stage, sat Brian Williams, the anchor of NBC’s Nightly News, who was one of the night's honorees. (Big night for Mr. Williams, apparently: He also had a cameo on NBC's 30 Rock.)

Mr. Cramer gave a nod to Mr. Williams and noted that he was "the living embodiment of everything I am not in every single way, except that we’re both on TV at 6:30 p.m."

Mr. Cramer launched into a riff about how the men were different. He noted that Mr. Williams was suave and cool. His tie was always perfectly knotted, and he never seemed to eat cat food or wear a diaper while presenting the news. Mr. Cramer said that recently Mr. Williams had revealed his secret. “He said that he had what’s known as, ‘self-restraint.’” said Mr. Cramer. “Something I instantly had to Google because I’m not in the least bit familiar with the concept.”

The crowd clapped.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Cramer relinquished the floor to NYC Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. Mr. Scoppetta promptly referenced Mr. Cramer’s recent battles with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart. He joked that earlier in the evening, the fire department had received a call about a fire at a residence. But then en route they had learned that it was Mr. Stewart’s home on fire, and so they turned the trucks around. Mr. Cramer smiled.

An hour or so earlier, the party had kicked off with cocktails and finger foods. Here and there, on the third floor of the New York Hilton, mustachioed men in jackets with FDNY insignia chatted with women in high heels. An ice sculpture bearing the fire-fighting symbols—a pair of flames, a fire hydrant, an axe—sat on a rotating plate, surrounded by pieces of sushi.

Guests mingled. Governor David Paterson shook hands. Potential bidders checked out the goods at a silent auction, which included a mounted fire axe, a silver caviar plate surrounded by shot glasses and framed black-and-white photographs of old fire engines that looked like primitive zambonis.

The wail of bagpipes signaled everyone to take their seats in the ballroom for a three-course dinner. A toy fire truck served as the centerpiece at each table. Dessert eventually arrived in the form of chocolate fire engines stuffed with pink confections.

At around 9 p.m., Mr. Williams took the stage. After thanking the foundation, he began reminiscing about the day he turned 17 in Middletown, New Jersey, and immediately signed up to become a volunteer firefighter. “I served with distinction that has yet to be proven,” joked Mr. Williams.

He gave shout-outs to “all my guys” at the fire house in Middletown, New Jersey, including his first captain. He donned his old fire helmet. And he recalled his captain’s preference for such things as a 1-inch rubber booster line and a high pressure pump, which Mr. Williams described as a “beautiful piece of apparatus.”

“I can’t talk apparatus at most dinner engagements I have in New York,” said Mr. Williams. “But I figured this was the night to whip it out.”

Everyone laughed.

Mr. Williams gave thanks to his wife, Jane Stoddard Williams, who was sitting at a table at the front of the room, and to his colleagues at NBC News, who had turned out to fete their managing editor—a large group, which included NBC News president Steve Capus and Bob Epstein, the executive producer of The Nightly News.

“The first rule when you enter a burning structure, as you know, is look behind you,” said Mr. Williams. “Someone is always supposed to have your back. You’re never supposed to be alone. I never am. This group of people has my back every day.”

In a letter to his staff, Mr. Shapiro said that since last spring, he has been considering whether he wants to continue in the job.

“Specifically,” he wrote, “I wondered if I would find the next few years as personally fulfilling as the first four I have spent as the President of NBC News. I also found myself missing the opportunity for the kind of creativity I’ve had in previous jobs.”

Mr. Shapiro’s last day will be Friday. His temporary successor is Steve Capus, a network hotshot who has catapulted through the NBC ranks, moving from executive producer of the Nightly News to senior vice president of the news division to interim head of NBC News in three months.

Speculation over who will ultimately fill the position continued apace on Tuesday afternoon, with staffers bandying about the same list of names of possible permanent successors that they have been for months: Mr. Capus; Paul Slavin, the senior vice president of ABC News; Phil Griffin, the NBC executive in charge of Today; former NBC Entertainment president Scott Sassa; Henry Schleiff, the chairman of Court TV; and a few handfuls of others.

One open question is whether NBC is searching for a replacement news chief or an “über-czar” who would oversee the cable network CNBC as well as MSNBC and the broadcast-network news.

Rumors that NBC wouldn’t be renewing Mr. Shapiro’s contract began last spring, when ABC’s morning and evening news shows began gaining ground on their long-dominant NBC counterparts. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Shapiro, known as a low-key leader, promoted executives David Verdi and Mark Lukasiewicz to senior vice-president positions, in which they assumed some duties previously handled by Mr. Capus. That move set Mr. Capus up as at least Mr. Shapiro’s temporary successor.

Thus, the announcement of his latest ascension surprised some network insiders only by the swiftness with which it was made. NBC president Jeff Zucker sent the announcement to NBC’s news-division staffers a matter of minutes after Mr. Shapiro notified his colleagues of his plan to step down.

Where Mr. Shapiro will go is also unclear. In his goodbye note, he said he might continue at NBC Universal or he might move elsewhere. But in Mr. Zucker’s note, he thanked Mr. Shapiro for nearly 13 years of service to NBC—which, said one insider, “seems like the sort of thing you say to a person walking out the door.”

An NBC spokesperson declined to comment.