News Round-up

WHERE ARE THEY NOW: Soap vet Charles Keating
When Charles Keating steps onto the Memorial Auditorium stage Thursday night to portray the jealous husband in Carolina Ballet's "The Kreutzer Sonata," he'll be in another world -- far from the TV soap operas, Broadway shows and movies that have made him famous. In Tolstoy's controversial 1889 novella, the embittered Pozdnischeff narrates the tale of how his paranoid suspicions of his wife's infidelity drivehim to murder after finding her alone with her violinist friend.

"I've spent my life playing Shakespeare, so it's a good preparation for the part. This time I hope to go even deeper. Pozdnischeff is so pompous, you just want to poke him one," Keating said, laughing. "But it's all Tolstoy's doing. It's just my job to uncover what's there."

ITV’s woes throw move out of city into doubt
Last week the company denied that it planned to move production of the long-running soap EMMERDALE to Manchester but rumors persist that it plans cutbacks at its operations in Leeds.

ITV Studio MD has ambitions to launch CORONATION STREET in America
Speaking last week at a Broadcasting Press Guild event Lee Bartlett, an American himself, relayed his desire to make the last 50 years of the soap's archive available there on-demand.

He is reported to have stated: “I am always working on this… this is something I personally am interested in."

Bartlett went on to outline his vision, noting: “What an interesting proposition if I could get 20 people to go, 'Oh, this is really cool and I can even understand it', and then they tell their friends, and they tell their friends, and I could have 10 million people streaming it in six weeks."

He added that he was “a huge believer in non-linear distribution of television.”

EXTRA website gets traffic with Mario Lopez, giveaways
Last summer, Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey, EXTRA's senior executive producer, was fooling around on Facebook when she realized her TV show needed to follow a similar model if it was going to remain appealing to young audiences. So she brought in Mario Lopez to host and fully revamped both the show's format and its Website.

Those changes—which include more giveaways, interactivity and community features—have paid off. Last August, ExtraTV.WarnerBros.com received 2.8 million page views. By January, it was up to 7.7 million page views, according to Web research firm comScore Media Metrix. Since October, the site's unique visitors are up by 118%, and its total visits are up by 94%. In December, the site hit all-time highs of 997,000 visits and 685,000 unique visitors.

Defamer Merging Into Gawker
4-year-old Defamer is being merged into Gawker, the company's flagship gossip blog, and will continue as Gawker's entertainment column.

Kate Walsh a ratings winner for ABC
On Thursday, ABC had 18-49 bragging rights as 9 p.m. anchor GREY'S ANATOMY (5.9/15, 15.6 million viewers) posted its best demo numbers in three months with an episode that featured Walsh's Addison Montgomery character in a patient drama at Seattle Grace. At 10 p.m., Walsh-toplined PRIVATE PRACTICE (4.4/12, 11.2 million viewers) posted a solid demo score, though nowhere near as strong as the previous week's number (5.7/15), in which PRACTICE had a direct storyline crossover with GREY'S ANATOMY.