The New York Times
From Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC brought Milton Berle, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson into the nations living rooms, then broadcast local news to New York City for decades. Last Thursday, it was a stage for a cable takeover as Comcast announced a plan to acquire NBC Universal.
There, in Studio 6B, a town hall meeting for NBC employees opened with Jeff Zucker, the NBC Universal chief executive, introducing “our new friends from Philadelphia,” and closed with a formal welcome to the Comcast family by Ralph Roberts, the cable operator’s 89-year-old patriarch. Mr. Roberts received a standing ovation.
For employees of the oldest and most storied part of NBC Universal, the broadcast network, one question lingered: will we fit into this cable family?
The studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza–and shows like “30 Rock,” which parodies NBC’s corporate culture–will not be going dark as a result of the deal. But employees inside both the thriving news division and the ailing entertainment division of the National Broadcasting Company still have reason to be anxious about it. More…