You've heard of the Discovery Channel - if you want to learn about sharks, they're the place to go. Heck, they even whacked me this summer as part of their promotional campaign.
Unfortunately, if you want to see more than you can stand about the Shroud of Turin, that's also the Discovery Channel.
Animal Planet on the one hand and Jon&Kate Plus 8 on the other. There's no question Discovery Channel is successful, in large part due to the efforts of Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav, former chief of NBC Universal's cable effort.
When most cable companies are concerned about declining viewers, Discovery Channel was up 10.4% this last quarter. Revenue: $3.48 billion
http://www.science20.com/genomicron/blog/discovering_ardi_my_thoughts
http://www.science20.com/rugbyologist/blog/hype_i_mean_link
http://www.science20.com/adaptive_complexity/science_pr_blitz
Photo: Scanpix
"Ida is as far away from the human lineage as you can get and still be considered a primate."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7267/abs/nature08429.html?lan...
Making ridiculous statements like "This is like finding the Holy Grail for paleontologists... This is the first link to all humans," Hurun hyped the fossil (which he nicknamed Ida, after his daughter, as a nod to the famous fossil Lucy) with a BBC special, a press conference, a popular book, and, almost as an afterthought, a rather inadequate paper in PLoS One, written by his "dream team" of specialists.
