Dylan Ratigan is the host of MSNBC's Morning Meeting which airs weekdays from 9 to 11amET. He went to MSNBC on the heels of a successful stint hosting Fast Money, the CNBC show he co-created in 2006. Since joining MSNBC in late June, Ratigan has made a bit of a stir with his quick-wit and sometimes confrontational style. His interview with Betsy McCaughey over the Health Care debate got a lot of attention for being "one of the most brow-beating interviews in history," as McCaughey called it. (more...)

5QQ Vivian Schiller is the president and CEO of National Public Radio, which she joined at the end of 2008 after seven years at The New York Times Co. During her tenure at the Times, where she was most recently the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, she oversaw a complete overhaul of the paper's website and dismantled TimesSelect, an early attempt at charging for content online. Schiller's leadership at NPR has also meant a redesigned website. With her experience at the premiere newspaper website and now at NPR, which she touts as the oldest pay model in broadcast, Schiller knows as much as anybody about online pay models. Earlier this week she came to New York to prove it, participating in a debate with Journalism Online founder Steve Brill — "The Great Digital Debate: Free vs. Paid Content Online." Now she answers our 5QQ — Five Quick Questions. (more...)

5qq Deborah Norville's career in media has spanned from network to cable, morning to evening. She's anchored evening newscasts at NBC and CBS, did a stint on both the Today show and The Early Show and hosted a show on MSNBC. But now she is the long-time anchor of the popular syndicated news show Inside Edition. She's also the author of several books, from Children's to Nonfiction - the latest being "The Power of Respect: Benefit from the Most Forgotten Element of Success," which came out this week. With back-cover blurbs ranging from Sean Hannity to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the book highlights what can be gained by "respect" - both professionally and personally. Now she's the latest to give her thoughts for the Mediaite 5QQ - Five Quick Questions. (more...)

Gina Trapani knows how much time you waste. Not because she's secretly watching you through your computer — though she probably could, she's that smart — but because, as the founding editor of Lifehacker, she's made a career out of finding ways to improve productivity and efficiency in your wired life. She's probably saved thousands of people hundreds of hours in the process, making her very popular, as indicated by her book, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better, cracking the top ten on multiple Amazon "Computer & Internet" lists) (perspective: Her overall Amazon Sales Rank is 7,054, just ahead of Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do? at 7,366). Trapani is also a Sun-certified Java programmer and builds things like Firefox extensions, Twitter data crawlers and  WordPress plug-in-mods. She also apparently knows what "WordPress plug-in-mods" are. She has regular blogs/columns at HarvardBusiness.org, Women's Health, and alma mater Lifehacker,  and has contributed to Popular Science, Wired, PC World, and Macworld, and pretty much any other world you can think of. Thank God she uses her powers for good. We hacked into her brain for today's 5QQ - Five Quick Questions, and already we're feeling more efficient. (more...)

Nora Ephron is what's known in the business as a quadruple threat: writer, director, blogger and chef. Somehow she manages to pull all of those together in her latest film, Julie & Julia —which she directed and for which she wrote the screenplay, about a cook, a blogger, and blogging about cooking. Okay that's putting it mildly: The cook in question is none other than the delightful (and vicariously delicious) Julia Child, author of the hugely influential Mastering The Art of French Cooking, and the blogger is Julie Powell, whose blog The Julie/Julia Project chronicled her attempt to make all of 542 recipes in that book, inside a year. Powell's book about the experience, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen became the basis for the movie, from which Ephron adapted the screenplay. Whew! Lots in there. Oh yes, it also stars Meryl Streep. Too bad Ephron couldn't get a decent actress, eh? Sheesh. Ephron, it should be duly noted, has written and/or directed a long list of films including classics like When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless In Seattle, has written about as many books, contributed to pretty much every publication going, and is the Editor-at-Large of the Huffington Post and one of their most popular bloggers. She may feel bad about her neck but she should feel pretty good about her career — and her answers to today's 5QQ - Five Quick Questions. (more...)