Libertas on Paramount's firing of Tom Cruise:

Stars of Cruise’s caliber - whatever you may think of them personally - do not fall off trees, and are not easily replaced. I’m reminded (painfully) of what happened to the Lakers after they traded Shaquille - who was also expensive to keep around. Shaquille is now wearing championship bling in south Florida while the LA Kobes (previously known as the ‘Lakers’) hope to reach the 2nd round of next year’s playoffs. So Redstone and his shareholders may feel like Big Men on Campus right now, but they may be asking themselves later why they traded their cash cow away while he was still young enough to do action films. Harrison Ford can’t, Arnold can’t, Willis usually won’t, and Mel Gibson’s mostly a director these days. Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington can kick ass when they feel like it, but neither can open a film like Cruise, and neither of them have shown Cruise’s good judgement (for the most part) in picking projects. Basically there are very few action stars of Cruise’s caliber left, and the new generation isn’t producing very many.

Back in 2002, Howard Kurtz looked at a different kind of script reader:

As the 70-year-old Rather, 64-year-old Jennings and 62-year-old Brokaw head into their sunset years, the programs will no longer be shielded by their prestige.

"When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire, it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it," said Ken Bode, a former NBC correspondent who teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone."

If that happens, it would be the biggest change in news consumption in the half-century history of television, an erosion caused in part by the striking failure of these programs to attract viewers younger than 50. Thus, they have the same problem plaguing "Nightline" -- an aging audience that is gradually dying off.

This is prediction is off only slightly--the network news isn't going away: it's simply remaining as legacy programming for an aging generation that doesn't understand the Internet--but, like the superstar-driven era of Hollywood, its impact is being rapidly diluted by a Long Tail of options.