Media Circus (cont.)

Richard Deitsch's Mailbag Submit a question or comment for Richard. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND Follow Richard Deitsch on Twitter

6. Andrew Siciliano and Scott Hanson, Red Zone Channel hosts: The NFL has made a major push to get some attention for its NFL Network's Red Zone channel (hosted by Hanson), including setting up bloggers and writers with a free pass to watch it online. The results were good, with positive coverage from the Los Angeles Times and St. Petersburg Times, among other places.

The Red Zone channels are terrific for fantasy football players and gamblers because each switches to game action when a team is driving or in the red zone. (Both are in HD and show every touchdown from every game.) Hanson and Siciliano guide viewers ably, though Siciliano (a frequent fill-in for Jim Rome on his radio show) is allowed to show more snark and personality on his version. Are the channels worth the extra cost? Depends how much you love football and an assortment of graphics featuring red-zone percentages.

7. Hal McCoy, Dayton Daily News sportswriter: The best news involving the Reds this season is that Hall of Fame baseball writer McCoy, who announced his retirement from the Dayton Daily News after the paper opted not to cover the Reds next season, has agreed to continue working for the paper in a freelance capacity. McCoy covered the Reds for 37 seasons and will continue to write a Sunday column as well as interact with fans through his blog, The Real McCoy, on DaytonDailyNews.com.

8. Adam Freifeld, NBC Sports and Bill Hofheimer, ESPN: If either Al Michaels or Mike Tirico is reading this, you should drop a serious holiday bonus on these guys. Both men, members of their respective communications departments, have been pitching me (and no doubt other media writers) why their lead NFL play-by-play announcer is the best in the business. Plenty of media stories are generated by public relations officials proselytizing about their programming or talent, and these two gentlemen have been pushing the merits of Mr. Michaels and Mr. Tirico with the zeal of Suze Orman. Of course, this item basically guarantees I'll be hearing from their counterparts at Fox and CBS.

9. BET Television: Given the amount of flotsam floating through reality shows (Spencer Pratt, David Hasselhoff, any Real Housewives of New York), I have little problem with BET's partnering with Michael Vick for an eight-part pseudo-documentary series tentatively titled "The Michael Vick Project." Where I'd draw the line is if the show attempts to sugarcoat Vick's involvement in dogfighting or mocks the second chance he was given by both the NFL and NFL viewing public.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the show's producers (Vick's production company, MV7 Production, is one of them), said the tone will be serious and somber and focus "on his personal struggles since his release, including the strains on his relationships with his fiancée ... and his children." Vick told Philadelphia reporters that the documentary is not filming during the season. The smart play for Vick would be to wait until 2011 to air something like this, but smart and reality show generally don't intersect. The guess is that the ratings will be high but the risk for Vick is high, too.

10. Chip Caray, TBS: At this point it seems like piling on to amplify the reasons Caray continues to miss as a No. 1 play-by-play voice during the baseball playoffs. TBS has made its choice, and it's the wrong one from this seat. Plenty of evidence via social media, as well as those paid to write, supports the supposition that Caray's ascension to his network's No. 1 spot is a mistake. (If you have a Twitter account and searched "Chip Caray" during a game he broadcast last week, you would see negative comments flowing as fast as Usain Bolt.)

Caray's 10th-inning call during the Twins-Tigers tiebreaker will follow him for some time. The problem now for TBS is that every Caray error will be magnified, no matter how small. It's not fun to advocate for someone to lose his job, and I'd have much less of a problem if Caray wasn't designated by the network as the 'A' play-by-play broadcaster. But he's not cutting the mustard. The postseason ratings for TBS have been good (the network averaged a 3.1 U.S. household rating, up 11 percent from 2008), but it's hard for the network to bask in glory when its main voice is getting killed in every medium.