NEW YORK – "Jon & Kate Plus 8" will soon be simply "Kate Plus Eight." That's the word from the TLC network, who announced Tuesday that its hit reality show is adapting to changes in the Gosselin household, which has been disrupted by the split up of Kate and Jon.
The renamed "Kate Plus Eight," which begins Nov. 2, will continue to chronicle the lives of the Gosselin kids (5-year-old sextuplets and 8-year-old twins) but will also focus on Kate's role as a single mother.
"It's not a huge shift, but it's reflective of where the show was already going," said Eileen O'Neill, TLC's president and general manager.
"Jon's going to be involved in the show," she said, adding that he will be seen less often than before. TLC retains an exclusive arrangement with him, as well as the rest of the family, O'Neill said.
The couple made their separation official on a "Jon & Kate" episode that aired in June and was seen by 10.6 million viewers.
The rupture came after weeks of tabloid reports of marital strains and infidelities, which both spouses denied. On the show, the parental co-stars barely spoke to each other.
Since then, media coverage of the squabbling exes has continued full-bore, and both Jon and Kate have made separate he-said-she-said talk-show rounds. They are in divorce proceedings.
It's quite a change since the series clicked with viewers two years ago for its heartwarming look at the challenges of raising eight young children.
Going forward, O'Neill said, "We hope for the sake of the family that things are more manageable. I don't think anyone asked for that amount of attention."
She spoke hopefully of a bright future for the series and dismissed a report circulating Tuesday that Kate Gosselin had posted a tweet that this season might be the last: Kate doesn't have a Twitter account, O'Neill said.
Although the audience for recent "Jon & Kate" airings has dropped below two million viewers, the current season has averaged a robust 3.2 million (even omitting its two record-setting "event" episodes), which represents an increase of 300,000 viewers over last season.
Discussions are under way with Kate Gosselin for another series that might debut in 2010, O'Neill said.
"I think there's an opportunity for Kate beyond her role as a supermom to explore her other interests," O'Neill said.
Meanwhile, with reality-based programming that also includes "Little People, Big World," "What Not to Wear" and "LA Ink," the network is boasting a year of consecutive month-to-month audience gains.
"We're not a one-hit wonder," O'Neill said.
The series airs Mondays at 9 p.m. EDT.
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TLC is owned by Discovery Communications, LLC.

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On the Net:

http://www.tlc.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) –
Warner Music Group and Google Inc's YouTube said on Tuesday they have reached a deal which will see music videos from artists such as Madonna and Green Day once again feature on the popular website.

Though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, executives said Warner Music would receive the majority of advertising revenue generated around the music clips.

"It sets us up for a sustainable partnership going forward by sharing revenues, where the vast majority of the revenues will be going to Warner Music associated with advertising when consumers watch or listen to the content on YouTube," said Chris Maxcy, head of Music partnerships at YouTube on a conference call.

Warner, the world's third largest music company, will have the ability to have a number of different YouTube channels representing artists, so will likely also sell against those various channels. Vivendi's Universal Music, the No. 1 music company, currently has the most popular channel on YouTube.

Music videos from Warner's acts were removed from the site after licensing agreement talks broke down last December over financial terms.

Music companies have long argued that popular social networking and online video sites should pay more to license music or music videos.

But such sites still generate small amounts of advertising revenue relative to their huge popularity and have pushed back against the labels in fraught negotiations.

The deal with Warner Music means YouTube will now feature videos from all the major music companies including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music.

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch and Yinka Adegoke)

BRIGHTON, England – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed to restore voters' faith in government and curb the excesses of the financial markets in a major speech Tuesday aimed at staving off an expected defeat at the next national election
Brown, who must go to the polls by June, sketched out a manifesto for the looming election with a blizzard of populist ideas in an address to an annual rally of his governing Labour Party — including plans to allow Britons to recall lawmakers who breach rules.
Labour has trailed behind the main opposition Conservative Party in opinion polls for more than a year and appears certain to lose power for the first time since 1997 at an election likely to be held in May.
The leader, whose conference slogan is "Operation Fightback," has pinned his hopes of a comeback on plans to curb youth crime, improve treatment for cancer sufferers and hold a referendum on major changes to Britain's electoral system.
"We can build a new economy which tames the old excesses. We can meet and master the challenge of an aging society with a national care service, we can in this generation be the first to beat cancer, we can transform our politics," Brown told delegates gathered in the southern England seaside resort of Brighton.
In a final conference speech before Britain's next election, the 58-year-old Scot sought to inspire activists with well received plans to halt the introduction of unpopular national identity cards, and to increase state pension payments.
Brown said that, following a scandal over lawmakers' excessive expense claims, communities would have the power to recall and sack errant legislators. He also pledged a referendum on changing how Britain elects its lawmakers.
Despite praise overseas for his handling of the financial crisis, Brown's domestic standing has been dented in recent weeks. Critics have taken aim at his meekness in the face of U.S. anger at the release of the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish jail, and his reluctance to quickly acknowledge the necessity of cuts to public spending to reduce Britain's spiraling government debts.
Even Brown's key Cabinet ally, the influential business secretary Peter Mandelson, said the leader must show more "razzmatazz," to entice voters disillusioned with his leadership.
An Ipsos MORI poll published Tuesday put Brown's Labour in third place for the first time since 1982 — behind both the opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
The Conservatives, who are widely expected to win power at the next election, had 36 percent, the Liberal Democrats had 25 percent and Brown's Labour had 24 percent. Ipsos MORI interviewed 1,003 people by telephone between Sept. 25-27, no margin of error was given, but in samples of a similar size it is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

LONDON – West of Karl Marx and just up the path from Charles Dickens' widow and daughter stands author Audrey Niffenegger, deep in the heart of London's Highgate Cemetery, the setting for her new novel, "Her Fearful Symmetry."
Niffenegger — who was propelled to literary stardom by her best-selling novel "Time Traveler's Wife" — is telling a group of tourists about one of the most colorful characters to end up in the Victorian burial ground, the menagerist George Wombwell, who died in 1850 and now lies in a tomb underneath a giant stone lion.
Niffenegger spent years researching the fabled London cemetery for her book — the final resting place for such luminaries as novelist George Eliot, actor Ralph Richardson, physicist Michael Faraday and poet Christina Rossetti, as well as Marx and a handful of Dickenses.
Now she's so familiar with it that she can guide tourists around with professional ease.
The labyrinth of Egyptian sepulchers, Victorian mausoleums, gravestones and Gothic tombs, perched on a hill above the smoke and filth of London, seems the perfect setting for a ghost story about a woman who dies of cancer and returns to haunt her lover and twin nieces.
But Niffenegger, who has developed a cult following for her lushly romantic tales of love, loss and obsession, originally had a less storied place in mind — a huge graveyard outside her hometown Chicago called Graceland.
"At the time I remember thinking: Graceland's fantastic, but if you're going to have a cemetery what's the great cemetery? And that would be Highgate," she said, recalling the days when the idea for the novel first came to her in 2002.
"I was always interested in the Victorian and Edwardian period, and Highgate is such a beautifully concentrated and unusual Victorian place."
The mythical pull of Highgate — where the spirits of the Victorian age seem to whisper around every corner — lies at the heart of "Her Fearful Symmetry." The book begins with the death of Elspeth Noblin at the age of 44, and the subsequent arrival of her American identical nieces to her apartment.
Noblin writes on her deathbed: "A bad thing about dying is that I've started to feel as though I'm being erased. Another bad thing is that I won't get to find out what happens next."
But Elspeth — who also has an identical twin sister — does get to find out: Her spirit remains in the apartment, which borders the cemetery, hiding in the drawer of a desk, and gradually learns how to haunt.
"The novel is about grief, about couples coming together, coming undone, or who seem to be together but will later come undone ... and there are other couples who are reforming, so it's kind of an exercise in symmetry, doubling, twinning, opposites and dark sides," said the 46-year-old Niffenegger, unmistakable in her flowing red hair, ghostly pallor and brainy glasses.
She said many of the cameos in the novel are sewn from the years she spent researching the cemetery, which opened in 1839, and even volunteering there as a tour guide.
Two of those characters are based on the former chair of the charity that looks after the grounds, Jean Pateman, 88, and her husband, John.
On her tours — as in her book — Niffenegger, takes visitors into the gothic wilderness beyond: tombs, graves, catacombs, and mausoleums, many topped by statues of angels.
To the south of this day's tourist group, at the end of a path that weaves fairytale-like through rain-battered graves, unkempt shrubbery, wild flowers and trees, is the tomb of the pre-Raphaelite Rossetti — whose melancholy verses about love and regret — hold particular resonance for Niffenegger.
"What's great about (Highgate) is it really is like a narrative. It sort of unfolds and you can't see very far ahead so you stop them periodically and let them look around and talk about whatever it is that you are standing in front of."
Niffenegger isn't alone among today's premier novelists to have been inspired by Highgate. Tracy Chevalier — author of "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" — set her 'Falling Angels" in the cemetery and calls it "the perfect setting" for a novel.

"Maybe writers are drawn to it because it provides a complete atmosphere — gothic, overgrown, steeped in death — that you don't have to make up. You can just go there and describe what you see," she said in an email interview.

"You can walk around and be quite alone and hidden. I think novelists like secret places, because we are secretive ourselves."

In "Her Fearful Symmetry," Niffenegger once again returns to her favorite themes of love, loss, and identity.

"They seem to run all through my art, not just these last two books but the artwork that I've worked on for the past 27 years, so it seems to be somehow intrinsic to what I think about. I'm not saying that I could never write about anything else, but they seem to get in there without any great effort on my behalf."

Niffenegger, also a successful artist and author of two acclaimed graphic novels, won't comment on media reports that she signed a US$4.5 million publishing deal for the new book.

She is now working on her third novel. Set in Chicago, it's about a 9-year-old girl with hypertrychosis — excessive body hair — and has the working title "The Chinchilla Girl in Exile."

She is also planning a show at her Chicago gallery a year from now — "and somehow while I'm running around I have to make some drawings," she says.

"Her Fearful Symmetry" publisher Random House declined to disclose the novel's print run.

While "The Time Traveler's Wife" has its soundtrack set firmly in the 1980s British and U.S. punk and rock scene, "Her Fearful Symmetry" has traveled a bit further back in time for its opening quote, from the Beatles song "She Said She Said."

"I originally wanted to use a lyric from "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder, but ended up using just the one Beatles' lyric from the album "Revolver," she explains.

Later, sitting in a local rustic pub a short walk from the cemetery, Niffenegger bursts into the song:

"She said, I know what it's like to be dead ... I know what it is to be sad. And she's just making me feel like I've never been born," she sings.

"It would be terrible spoiler for me to tell you why that's an apt quote," she adds with a twinkle in her eye.