Outside Cable News

Via Loudoun Times
Confessions of a CNN junkie
By Betsy Allen

I’m watching my back. My time may be coming. You see, I have an addiction of my own. I haven’t seen it on the show. I don’t know if there are any treatment centers in California or Arizona that help with this kind of thing.

But the ugly truth is, I gotta have my CNN.

I admit I wasn’t that bad before the presidential primary season. There was the occasional check-in when a big news story broke, but that was about it.

But somewhere in the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, I got hooked. The dizzying highs of the state-by-state projections! The staggering lows of the exit polls! The exhaustive dismantling and analysis of every word spoken by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama (and all those other guys – Huckabee, Edwards and the rest of the peanut gallery) over the last six months.

I’ve loved the Tuesday night coverage of the primaries – the blow-by-blow from Wolf Blitzer, the touch-screen run-down of each state’s voting peculiarities by John King, the sensitive post-mortem by Anderson Cooper.
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Via Business Wire
ServiceBench to Host Retail, Manufacturing Leaders at Service World 2008

FAIRFAX, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ServiceBench, a subsidiary of N.E.W. Customer Service Companies, Inc. (NEW) and the leading provider of web-based service management solutions, today announced Service World 2008 will be held Aug. 20 to 22 at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C.

Chris Wallace, veteran broadcast journalist and host of Fox News Sunday, will give the keynote address on the morning of Aug. 21. He’ll provide his unique perspective of current political affairs and the leadership skills needed to attain the highest office in our country. A dinner event on Aug. 21 will be held at the newly opened Newseum.

>Read the rest at Business Wire.

Via Broadcast Engineering
FOX News acquires fiber transport links

FOX News in New York City has acquired 50 MultiDyne HD-1500 HD-SDI fiber links for HD fiber transport.

The links will help FOX News meet its changing broadcast requirements for HD. FOX News announced in May that it had begun offering an HD version to Time Warner customers in select regions. Last fall, FOX also rolled out the FOX Business Channel in HD.

The MultiDyne HD-1500 provides looping, equalized, reclocked inputs and dual outputs. The product provides for fiber-optic transport and distribution of nearly any digital signal of 5Mb/s-1.5Gb/s. Supported standards include SMPTE 292M 1.485Gb/s, SMPTE 259M with operation of 143Mb/s-360Mb/s, SMPTE 310M 19.4Mb/s, M2S or DVB-ASI 270Mb/s, SMPTE 344M 540Mb/s and SMPTE 305M SDTi rates. The systems will transparently pass any embedded audio and data. Audio and data must be embedded and extracted separately.

For more information, visit www.multidyne.com.

Via Shreveport Times
Chamber to honor businesses at luncheon
From Staff Reports

The Greater Shreveport Chamber of Commerce will give “A 5-Star Salute” to its top businesses of the year on June 18.

The luncheon will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Summer Grove Baptist Church event center.

The Port of Shreveport-Bossier will be honored as the J. Pat Beaird Memorial Industry of the Year.

Stuart Varney, business and financial journalist for FOX News will be the keynote speaker. Varney’s speech is titled “21st Century America: A New Day in Politics, Culture and Business.”

Other businesses to be honored include Praeses LLC, Insty-Prints of Shreveport, High Lifter Products, Inc., Synapse Multimedia, Henderson Construction Services, Inc., Aillet, Fenner, Jolly and McClelland, Inc., JEB Design/Build LLC
RSI Building Products LLC, Drew LeBlanc’s Elite Fitness, Prevot Design Services Dais Apparel and the Training Academy of Dental Assistants.