New sheriff at the Star; also, what's the point of watching CBS on Fridays?

Well, regime change at the Kansas City Star seems to be complete for the next decade or so. By the time Mark Zieman retires as our publisher (he's the one on the left) and Mike Fannin takes his office, you'll probably be able to download the paper to the spillproof, kitchen-table-sized flat screen that you eat breakfast off of every morning.

Mike Fannin was my boss's boss's boss for the past two or three years. He gets the Internet, he deserves credit for putting out a sports section that's even more award-winning now than it used to be, and he's easy to talk to. He's the third editor-in-chief in my 11 years here and the first one from my side of the tracks -- the personality slash entertainment slash lifestyle side of the newspaper. Now, I suspect that people will wonder how such a person will run a newspaper well known for its enterprise and investigative reporting, its focus on hard news and its desire to play a major role in the public conversation about where Kansas City is going as a community. I think, actually, that sports and features are good training for leadership in these others. They are highly competitive news holes and arguably the areas of most rapid growth for blogs and online audience, which are just other words for conversation and community.

Hell, for years papers used to turn city reporters into TV critics and nobody ever batted an eyelash.

We'll be fine. As fine as a newspaper can be these days.

I've had my plate full, both at work and at home, and have only made it to see one upfront this week. Fox's is starting in 30 minutes, and that's streamed on the Internet, so I don't have an excuse to miss that one. If I felt confident that my time would be well spent looking at piles of new television product, I guess I'd be taking this week more seriously.

But take ABC's presentation. The big highlight (besides, of course, Jimmy Kimmel's insider-reference-filled monologue) was an extended preview of "Wipeout," a summer reality show that is an almost exact carbon copy of Most Extreme Elimination Challenge on Spike. If you've never seen MXC, I suppose this looks like a wild new concept in TV filler. If you're me, you're thinking: ABC's doing TWO Japanese game show ripoffs (here's the other)? Is the development pool really that dry? The strike was 14 weeks, not 14 months!

There haven't been any surprises coming out of the upfronts, either, with one mild exception: CBS decided to cancel "Moonlight," a show that most industry predictors felt had every reason to expect a renewal. You know, it seems that unless there's someone taking DNA off a corpse somewhere in the first scene, a Friday-night TV series has very little chance of making it on CBS. "Joan of Arcadia" died here before its time, too, and "Threshold" and "dr. vegas" and "The Handler." Even "JAG" was sent there to die, though CBS is not the only network that treats Friday nights as a sort of hospice for stricken series.

Now something called "The Ex List" is going to be airing on CBS Friday nights in the fall. The question is: Why should you even bother checking it out? While you ponder that, one of my readers has written in with news about a campaign to take "Moonlight" elsewhere. It won't work; the company that CW rented its Sunday-night schedule to has already passed, and I doubt Ion or cable have the budget to run with it (especially with HBO's vampire series, from "Six Feet Under" creator Alan Ball, coming soon). But I share her frustration with a ratings system that seems to be more obsolete by the week.