Brian Stelter, the insanely young prodigy who turned the TVNewser blog into the most influential media outlet covering that industry while he was still a college student, has just launched another, similar blog, TV Decoder, on NYTimes.com. Stelter was poached away from Mediabistro by the Times earlier this year to cover the media.
Assuming that his new blog will be identical to his old one in terms of coverage, it will be interesting to see whether Stelter can woo all his old sources over to the NYT, leaving Mediabistro's continued (under new management) version of TVNewser in the dust.
Many times, I have heard TV communications executives wax rhapsodic about the primacy of TVNewser. If the NYT can establish an equally powerful blog in its own domain, it will become the leader in coverage of the TV News beat-- including trade magazines and all.