Media Unspun will suspend publication Dec. 13, a week from today. That's right: Our luck runs out on Friday the 13th.

If you have any questions or comments you'd like to relay privately, please write me at guterman@vineyard.com. If you're more interested in being part of a public discussion, our subscribers-only Weblog is at http://www.mediaunspun.com/weblog.html .

JG

The man who defined modern sports and news broadcasting died yesterday. If that sounds like an exaggeration, take a peek at the five-page obit he pulled on the New York Times Web site.

Maybe the name Roone Arledge doesn't mean much to you. Try this instead: producer of the most successful sports program ever, "Wide World of Sports" (1961). Inventor of "Monday Night Football" (1970), the show that brought sports into prime time -- and deep dough. Creator of slo-mo, instant replay, helmet cams, and live coverage of international sports. The man who told sports owners to stick it and hired Howard Cosell. Creator of the megabuck Olympic phenomenon. Producer of the first live coverage of a terror attack, the Black September murder of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games.

Arledge's mark on news programming is equally daunting. As head of ABC News, he built the careers of Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, Ted Koppel, and Barbara Walters. He helped push Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw to the top spots on their networks by trying to recruit them away to ABC. He created "20/20," "World News Tonight," and "Prime Time Live." He revived Sunday news programming with "This Week With David Brinkley," and invented the late-night news genre with "Nightline." Arledge took home 36 Emmys, including one awarded this September for lifetime achievement.

As you might expect, reporters celebrated each of Arledge's innovations as an achievement. "Just about everything that's good in television has a Roone Arledge trademark on it," ran one quote in the Times. Perhaps so, but his mark's on the bad stuff, too. He created "up close and personal" segments in sports programming, which paved the way for broadcasts that now have every athlete battling a broken heart, bone, or home.

More troubling, he carried an emphasis on personalities into his vision of the news. One of Arledge's big revolutions was to turn all news into the story of one hero or another. Does that help to explain certain blind spots in coverage of the U.S.-Iraq conflict? At the least, it accounts for this treat in tonight's lineup for that august news magazine, "20/20": "Married to an Imposter: Kathi Spiars thought she had married her dream man, but he wasn't the man she thought he was." As Sir John Gielgud told Dudley Moore's Arthur, "I'll alert the media." - Lori Patel

Television Icon Dies
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/arledge_obit_021205.html

Pioneering ABC television executive Roone Arledge dies at 71 (Associated Press)
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/340/sports/Pioneering_ABC_television_exec:.shtml

Giant of the Small Screen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16092-2002Dec5.html

Arledge put a face on sports
http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl/articles/20021205/443568.html

Roone Arledge, Pioneering TV Executive, Dies at 71
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/obituaries/05WIRE-ROONE.html

Roone Arledge, created Monday Night Football
http://espn.go.com/classic/obit/s/2001/0501/1189828.html

ARLEDGE, ROONE
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/arledgeroon/arledgeroon.htm

Television Pioneer Roone Arledge '52:
http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/win99/18.html

If you needed any more confirmation that Wi-Fi (802.11 wireless Internet access) is huge and still growing fast, look no further than today's news about Cometa Networks. It's a venture composed of IBM, AT&T, and three VC firms, one of which is run by Intel. Cometa plans to strew 20,000 Wi-Fi hot spots across the American landscape by the end of 2004 and to make money doing it. That's an effort at least 10 times the size of any hot-spot network now in place (news reports mentioned T-Mobile's 2,000-strong presence in Starbucks, and the smaller players Boingo and Wayport).

Cometa will sell services to ISPs and large carriers and will place hot spots in shopping malls, airports, coffee shops -- all the usual venues. The company will not sell services directly to end users. Several news accounts mentioned Cometa's intention to have a hot spot within a five-minute walk in cities and a five-minute ride in suburbs, in the 50 largest metro areas by year-end 2004. So still no luck if you're looking for Wi-Fi in Watervliet, Mich.

Few scribes managed to dig out any details beyond Cometa's public statements. Given the number and the quality of the diggers, Unspun suspects that Cometa execs were unusually well-prepped and were fanatical about staying on-message. One detail that nobody managed to learn is how much capital is going into Cometa to begin with. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times attempted back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate how much the company will need to deploy 20,000 hot spots, and came up with minimum figures of $10 million and $40 million respectively.

AT&T will provide the backbone network behind Cometa's service, and IBM will do hot-spot installation, service, and back-end systems. Intel's place in the picture was less immediately clear. The Register and the San Jose Mercury News brought into the picture Intel's planned new mobile chip, code-named Banias. It will have Wi-Fi capability built-in, justifying Cometa CEO Lawrence Brilliant's assertion, quoted in Information Week, that by the time Cometa is deployed, the potential Wi-Fi-enabled population will have grown tenfold.

Cometa's coming-out party caps at least six months of speculation centered around what was at first called Project Rainbow. News.com ran a good background article on this rumor of the big players embracing Wi-Fi when it surfaced last July, and followed up in September. The initial Project Rainbow leaking spoke of involvement by Verizon and Cingular Wireless, in addition to the companies that participated in the Cometa announcement. Of the stories Unspun read, only the AP's speculated that Verizon's separate announcement last month of its intention to sell Wi-Fi to businesses may have represented its backing away from Project Rainbow (and out of Cometa). - Keith Dawson

AT&T, Intel, IBM Form Venture Betting on Wi-Fi in Public Places
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1039109828499400393,00.html
(Paid subscription required)

High-Speed Wireless Internet Network Is Planned
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/technology/06WIRE.html

IBM, Intel, AT&T unveil US Wi-Fi JV (ComputerWire)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/28454.html

Tech giants' wireless Web plan
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/4679328.htm

AT&T, IBM, And Intel Form Wireless Venture
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021205S0002

Big names create Web firm Cometa Networks (AP)
http://tinyurl.com/3a6u

Tech titans launch Wi-Fi compay
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-976225.html

Is roaming coming to Wi-Fi? (Sept.2002)
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-957411.html

Tech giants huddle on wireless union (July 2002)
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-944226.html

Intel, AT&T, IBM in wireless Net venture (Boston Globe)
http://tinyurl.com/3a32

IBM, AT&T, Intel unite in US broadband deal (Financial Times)
http://tinyurl.com/3a6v

Startup To Offer Nationwide WiFi
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,748630,00.asp

Union Files Complaint On Layoffs At Journals
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11026-2002Dec4.html

Verizon Will Expense Options, Slightly Cutting 2003 Earnings
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1039128469639963713,00.html
(Paid subscription required)

The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/dumbestgm/10057318.html

Streisand: 'This kid Eminem is really interesting' (AP)
http://www.salon.com/ent/wire/2002/12/05/streisand/

Copyedited by Jim Duffy (jimduffy86@yahoo.com).

Editor and publisher: Jimmy Guterman (guterman@vineyard.com).

Media Unspun is produced by The Vineyard Group Inc.
Copyright 2002 Media Unspun, Inc., and The Vineyard Group, Inc.