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WJZ meteorologist Bernadette Woods is leaving the CBS-owned station to join a non-profit firm in New Jersey focused on climate change, she said Wednesday night. Woods, who has been with WJZ for seven years, said she will remain at the station helping with the transition for the next month. After that, she, her husband and their two children will be moving to Princeton, N.J., where she will join Climate Central as staff meteorologist. "I'm very excited about the opportunity in Princeton," she said.

Nationally, the TV audience for the first night of the NFL draft was down a bit from last year, but Baltimore tuned in in a big way. ESPN's round one coverage earned a 4.6 overnight rating Thursday, according to preliminary Nielsen figures supplied by the channel. That's the third highest-rated overnight since round one began airing on Thursday in 2010. That year's telecast earned a 5.4 rating, while last year's Thursday night coverage scored a 4.8. Locally, Baltimore finished fourth among metered markets behind Buffalo, New Orleans and Kansas City.

Angie Miller and her steely-eyed focus transmitted into the homes of 10-plus million American Idol viewers won her 50,000 followers in the Twitterverse the week of the show's Top 10 reveal -- nearly 18,000 more social media fans than her next highest competitor. More than two months later, the 18-year-old  Beverly, Mass., native tripled her followers, effectively blowing away the other wannabes on the cyberspace portal. Why then didn't the magic of the 140-character phenomenon carry her into Thursday's finale?

The AT&T commercials with the little kids gathered around the classroom table answering questions ("Is it better to be bigger or smaller?") from the smarmy focus group leader? They were cute the first time around. Maybe the first 10 times around. But around the 10,000th time around, they got really, really annoying. And since it's apparently a law that no NCAA tournament game can be broadcast without 15 or 20 of these spots, the annoyance level has now reached epic, gouge-out-your-eyeballs, please-make-it-stop extremes.

The inner workings of at least one piece of the criminal justice system can be viewed on the Internet 24 hours a day, courtesy of Web cams in the Maricopa County jail in south-central Arizona. Four cameras make up the Jail Cam (www.crime.com), which lets visitors view detainees being led into the jail in handcuffs, being fingerprinted and booked and being taken to holding cells. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, said he had installed the Web cams as a deterrent because he figured that viewing a holding cell on the Web would convince some people that they never wanted to wind up in one. Arpaio said he had also set up the Web cams as a response to critics who accused his officers of mistreating inmates.

E very so often in reporting on the media, a fact comes along that is so impressive it warrants a second look. Last week, there were three facts like that. And most remarkably, they all seemed to be pointing to the same conclusion: TV continues to be the principal storyteller in American life, despite more than a decade of pundits insisting that the medium was one step away from the boneyard. The first number that raised some eyebrows came when Nielsen announced that last Sunday's Super Bowl was the most-watched show in television history.

T here are more reasons to watch the Golden Globe Awards show tonight than at any time in its history. The biggest one is that for the first time the live telecast will have a host, and he's an unpredictable one who could create some genuine, unrehearsed fun: Ricky Gervais. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has also given more control to Dick Clark Productions with the mandate to create a television event worthy of prime time - rather than an awards dinner geared to a hotel ballroom in Beverly Hills filled with celebrities.

WJZ -TV enjoyed one of its most successful ratings books ever in January winning all competitive weekday news time periods with viewers 25 to 54 years of age, the demographic on which most TV news ad sales are made. WJZ also won in total viewers in those time periods. The CBS-owned station was Baltimore's leader at 5 and 6 a.m. in the locally-produced newscasts that precede network morning shows. WJZ was also number one at noon, 5, 6 and 11 p.m. The last time that happened was in 2008, when WBAL, WJZ's long-time rival, topped all newscasts.

The final presidential debate drew a TV audience of 59.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media. That's down from the 67.2 million and 65.6 million for the first and second debates, respectively. But it still shows huge interest -- particularly when you consider that the debate was up against a game seven in the National League Championshop series and"Monday Night Football," each of which together drew more than 18 million viewers. That old dinosaur, the medium of television, is still drawing a few viewers, hey?

The November sweeps ratings period is one of the first major milestones of the TV season. Usually, network and station executives can't talk enough about what they have to offer during the month in hopes of attracting viewers. Unless, that is, one of the things you have is "The Jay Leno Show" airing at 10 p.m. thanks to a risky move made by NBC in hopes of cutting costs this fall. If you are an NBC affiliate manager such as Jordan Wertlieb at WBAL-TV in Baltimore, you are more interested in talking about December when the other networks will mostly be in reruns.

Jay Leno had to know the head honchos at NBC were gunning for him when he told the following joke last Monday night: "You know the whole legend of St. Patrick, right?" he asked the audience in his opening monologue. "St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland -- and then they came to the United States and became NBC executives. " The harsh humor directed at the guys who hold his fate in their hands is just the latest sign that the star and the bosses pretty much detest each other.

After reading Steve Johnson's review of TV ads that ran during the Super Bowl , I have to wonder if we were watching the same commercials ("Ads surge, short-circuit," Feb. 4). Mr. Johnson praised the GoDaddy ad in which a supermodel makes out with a geek - which was just disgusting and was panned by most viewers - as well as the company's other "big idea" spot, which was decidedly uninspiring. He continued by judging both the Clydesdale/trainer ad for Budweiser and the ETrade baby to have been failures.

Sunday's Super Bowl telecast drew a record audience of 1.5 million viewers at its peak in the Baltimore market, according to preliminary Nielsen figures provided by WJZ-TV. The audience is believed to be the largest for any show on Baltimore TV since the introduction of household meters in Baltimore in 1992. The telecast earned a rating of 59.6, which means three out of every five TV homes in the area was tuned to the game. "We were excited to share the Ravens Superbowl victory with viewers throughout the region," Jay Newman, general manager of Baltimore's CBS-owned station said Monday.

Kevin Spacey calls “House of Cards” “the new television series that isn't on television.” And therein lies one of the biggest media stories of the year: Whether spending $100 million to hire an Oscar-winning star and one of the most gifted feature film directors in Hollywood can lead to a TV series compelling enough to change the way viewers have been watching television most or all of their lives. In one of the biggest media gambles of the decade, Spacey, David Fincher, Netflix and a production company you probably never heard of named Media Rights Capital are betting that the 13 episodes of a political drama they created in and around Baltimore last year can alter the basic TV business model that's essentially been in place since the 1950s.

CBS Sports will cover the Super Bowl with 62 cameras, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said in a teleconference Thursday promoting the Feb. 3 game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. "That includes all of the unmanned cameras," he said. "It includes any aerial cameras we might have. But listen, there are a lot of cameras ... " By comparison, the norm for Baltimore Ravens games, which were usually covered by second- or third-string CBS crews this year, has been 9 to 12 cameras.

The Baltimore Ravens double-overtime victory over the Denver Broncos Saturday drew the largest TV audience for an AFC divisional playoff in 26 years. That's as far back as CBS records go, the 1987-88 season, according to the network. An average audience of 35.3 million viewers (Persons 2+) watched the epic contest that ended 38-35 in favor of Baltimore. That was up 3 percent from last year's average audience of 34.2 million for Denver and New England, according to Nielsen figures provided by CBS Sports.

Jeff Sagansky, CBS' Entertainment president, is rather delighted when he thinks about what the competition is up to these days -- they're going after young viewers."

Outside of Barack Obama, one of Tuesday's biggest winners was CNN, which not only presented the best journalism but also finished first among cable channels in viewers. According to Nielsen's Fast Ratings, CNN was seen by an average audience of 8.8 million total viewers from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. election night. It also had audiences of 4.4 million adults ages 25 to 54 and 2.7 million viewers between the ages of 18 and 34. That topped perennial ratings winner Fox News, which had an audience of 8.7 million total viewers, with 3.5 million and 1.2 million in the key demos.

The last home game for Ray Lewis Sunday did monster numbers locally, but wound up finishing third for the week nationally among all telecasts with an audience of 29.6 million. The Washington-Seattle game finished first, with Green Bay and Minnesota second. Here's the release: For the third consecutive season, the Wild Card playoffs averaged more than 30 million viewers per game. Sunday's Seattle Seahawks-Washington Redskins game on FOX drew 38.1 million viewers ranking as the most-watched non-Olympic telecast since the Academy Awards (39.3 million on ABC, Feb. 26, 2012)

Baltimore TV viewers tuned in big time Sunday for the last home game of Ray Lewis. The average audience of all viewers (age 2 and older) was 877,700. Viewership peaked at 4 p.m. with 974,100 viewers watching on WJZ-TV, Baltimore's CBS-owned station. That was the largest audience in the Baltimore market for any show on any channel since last year's Super Bowl on NBC, according to WJZ and Nielsen. That would cover some pretty big events like the Olympics. The total number of people 2+ in the market is 2,707,000, which means one out of every three people living in this market was watching the Ravens victory over the Indianapolis Colts.