Discovery Communications, which owns the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, hopes to turnaround its failed efforts to get a foothold on the Internet by buying the popular website HowStuffWorks.com for $250 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Discovery will use this popular base to make its library of videos more easily available to the public.

HowStuffWorks.com, a privately held company whose best known owner is investor Carl Icahn, was founded by Marshall Brain in 1998. Brain is a university professor in North Carolina. He built the audience for the site by analyzing what people were searching for on the Internet and creating content to answer those queries.

In addition to HowStuffWorks.com, the purchase will include several other digital properties including a map database, which are not yet profitable. Discovery hopes that by controlling a website that already gets 3.8 million unique U.S. users each month it will have more success drawing Internet users to its online content. Chief Executive David Zaslav, who has been redesigning Discovery in his own image since taking over in January, told the Journal he believes this acquisition will give Discovery the "online firepower" it's been lacking.

In yet another sign of the decline of network television news, General Electric Co.'s (NYSE: GE) NBC dumped "Dateline" anchor Stone Phillips. He won't be the last high-priced talent to be shown the door.

As ratings continue to decline for news programs at NBC, Walt Disney Co.'s (NYSE: DIS) ABC and CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) profit pressures are intensifying as shareholders demand to see a return for the money being poured into these shows.

That's why Phillips won't be earning nearly as much at his next job as the $7 million USA Today says he earned at NBC. Odds are best that he'll wind up at News Corp's (NYSE: NWS) Fox News Channel, Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE: TWX) or another cable network such as the Discovery Channel which is now home to former "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel.

In the wake of Philips' departure, TV personalities up and down the dial are probably quaking in their designer clothes wondering whether they will be next. It's a well-founded fear.

Networks are less patient than ever.

If entertainment programs don't immediately catch on, they are gone after a handful of episodes. Ratings are just as important to news programs. Though nightly news programs have been in decline for years, they still make good money for the networks.

Ratings points translate into advertising sales which translates eventually into profits. No TV star is immune from fiscal realities.

That's why Philips got pushed out the door. "Dateline" has morphed into a program dedicated to catching pathetic sex offenders. His services as a newsman were no longer needed.

In a broad and sweeping move that will send out reverberations similar in impact to the first sixteen bars of a Van Halen song, the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau announced that they shall have nothing further to do with a major attempt to commoditize television advertising time by making that time available for purchase in an online auction type venue. New York Times.com (registration required) reported that the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, a New York based trade group, has officially backed away from the proposition citing a quote from Sean Cunningham, president and chief executive of the cable association clearly stating that, "We don't believe that eBay is going to get this right."

Using the word "boycott," cable entertainment providers including ESPN, Discovery Channel, and Lifetime have officially exited the program, leaving the eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) headed project without any air time to sell. A consortium of heavy hitters were backing eBay in the experiment and had committed up to $50 million to build and test the model. Now though, they may be left high and dry, wondering if they have hired eBay expertise for zero gain after all.

Perhaps the most powerful statement in this situation so far is the reluctance of Google to issue any statement at all regarding the cable television pullout, as evidenced in a Jupiter Research blog post by David Card. Being that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is so deeply entrenched in the internet as an advertising sales vehicle, one must suppose that they have taken this development pretty hard. That is, of course, unless they approached it with a "wait and see" attitude right from the start. If no statement issues from Google in the coming week, we might be tempted to think that Google suspected that the effort could fail miserably from the time it got off the ground.

I warned of this development quite some time ago in a comment section right here on a BloggingStock eBay post. I cited the fact that the television advertising industry has had a very firm grip on what they are doing for about 50 or so years now. I find it silly to think that the program would be changed over night. Just because a few talking heads say they want to take over the sale of television advertising time won't make it so. Personally, I think trying to change the dynamics of how television advertising is sold would be something similar to trying to sink the USS Enterprise with a .22 pistol.

But that's just my opinion.

Remember when James Cameron directed the Terminator movies and he was unequivocally regarded as awesome? Then he made this little period piece about some boat sinking, proclaimed himself "King of the World," which was perceived as arrogant but was really just a quote, traded in wives, and was never really heard from for nearly a decade.

So what's the best way to move back into the limelight? Find Jesus. And not in the same way that Stephen Baldwin has. The Oscar-winning filmmaker said yesterday that a group of stone boxes, originally discovered two decades ago within a hillside tomb in Jerusalem, once held the remains of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.