Product Placement

West Virginia, Stephen's favorite of the Virginias, has a bit of a problem that can't be cleaned up by trying to wash it away. That's because the problem is dirty water. Freedom Industries allowed bad chemicals (5,000 gallons) to enter Elk River. What that means is that 300,000 people have dirty water. The only thing they can safely use the water for is flushing the toilet. But, considering that they can't drink the water, I don't think they are going to be needing their toilet. The frosting on the cake probably came when the CEO of Freedom Industries apologized to everyone while taking swigs out of his bottle of clean water. You don't want to be caught on camera swigging water out of a bottle. Remember Marco Rubio?

Product Placement is very important and Roger Faxon of Mirriad has got another way of getting great content to you by reinserting all kinds of advertising into reruns. Viacom (Stephen's big boss) has decided to jump on that band wagon and therefore Stephen is providing all sorts of blank surfaces that will be able to be used in the future for great content. Basically, he has made a green screen out of many everyday products - products that all of us are familiar with and use on a regular basis.

As is to be expected, Stephen is quite creative. So creative in fact, that I'm not going to write about it here since, as you know, this is a family blog. And who knows? Maybe some day in the future, this blog will be retrofitted with great "advertising" content. That is why I have inserted a green screen at the top of this blog. It is all set and ready to go for whatever advertisers think is appropriate to cash in on great content.

Most guests on The Colbert Report are happy to be interviewed by Stephen. Last night was a bit different in that it was the biggest challenge of Stephen's career. It was an interview with David Fanning, executive producer for PBS news show Frontline. Was Stephen up to the challenge? Well of course he was. Stephen called his guest the "last dodo." Interestingly enough, after one report about Wall Street on Frontline, people started paying attention to what was going on Wall Street. So, that's a good thing.

If you want to produce a great news program, David Fanning had some advice. Stephen wrote it down so that he could remember and so I think we will start seeing even better content, not just great content, on the show. Here's what you need to do:

1. Pay attention.
2. Make it better.

Good advice no matter what profession you are in.