Vice, a print magazine that is producing a TV newsmagazine that will debut on HBO in April, made international news by arranging a basketball game featuring flamboyant former N.B.A. player Dennis Rodman and three Harlem Globetrotters players before Kim Jong-un, in North Korea, Brian Stelter writes. Mr. Rodman and Vice’s film crew are the first Americans to meet the North Korean ruler since he inherited power from his father in 2011. Pundits debated on television and online over who gained more from the interaction, Vice or the North Korean government, and reporters at the State Department wanted to know why Mr. Rodman, who has returned to the United States, was not debriefed about his visit with Mr. Kim, whom he called a “friend.” Vice had no assurance that Mr. Kim would watch the game, but were familiar with his love of basketball, especially the Chicago Bulls.
AMC’s “The Walking Dead” has devoured the ratings, to the consternation of major networks, David Carr reports. The show was the highest-rated program among viewers aged 18-49 last fall, the most coveted demographic for advertisers, and three weeks ago the undead owned Sunday night, attracting 7.7 million viewers in that age range. Even “The Talking Dead,” a spinoff chat show, drew 2.8 million viewers, more than NBC enjoyed in all of February. The show’s popularity presents a different, cable-based model for television success that depends on a steady accrual of fans, edgier programming and the presence of past seasons on streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
Journalists covering crime and other stories in Oakland, Calif., have become the victims of brazen robberies in recent months, Carol Pogash reports. Every major television news station in the Bay Area has become a victim. In the most flagrant episode a group of men punched a KPIX-TV cameraman while he was still filming and then took off with his camera —viewers saw the reporter sign off and then an inexplicably wobbly image. The stolen cameras, both video and still, can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $50,000 and do not seem to be turning up locally.
Venerable British newspaper The Guardian has started a new advertising campaign to promote its brand and Web site to American audiences, Tanzina Vega reports. The commercials, a series of graphics created by Noma Bar that can be flipped upside-down, are designed to appear next to one another on billboards and show two sides of a hot-button issue. An ad on internet privacy, for example, shows a person sitting at a laptop above the headline “Keep Out of my Stuff”—when flipped it shows a masked face with the headline “Keep Out the Terrorists.” The ads are intended to help The Guardian catch up to The Daily Mail, a newspaper that draws a large American audience with extensive coverage of celebrity gossip.
Disney is taking a great gamble on “Oz the Great and Powerful,” Brooks Barnes reports. The film cost about $325 million to make and market, and stars James Franco, who has never anchored a mainstream production. There are few film properties as beloved as the original “The Wizard of Oz,” so Disney risks alienating audiences every step of the way. The company is under pressure to deliver a hit after flops like “John Carter” and ho-hum releases like “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.” Disney hopes “Oz” won’t fizzle like Warner Brothers’ “Jack the Giant Slayer,” which brought in just $28 million on its opening weekend.
PBS is close to deciding whether to air a weekend edition of “PBS NewsHour” for the first time since the program began in 1975, Elizabeth Jensen writes. The plan, which calls for a half-hour program on Saturdays and Sundays to be produced in New York, would give PBS a weekend news presence that it has been criticized for lacking.
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