The Breakfast Meeting: Isaac Crashes G.O.P. Convention, and Whither \'Nightline\'?

By NOAM COHEN

Tropical Storm Isaac is now projected to veer away from the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and toward New Orleans, but it still promises to take the spotlight away from the convention to nominate Mitt Romney. If Isaac hits the Gulf Coast states it could become a breaking news event that pulls attention away from the convention. Under one unpleasant scenario, Jim Rutenberg and Michael D. Shear write, the networks could go to a split-screen, pairing

the revelry and partisanship surrounding Mr. Romney's nomination with the threat of the storm making landfall in Louisiana or Mississippi seven years to the week after Hurricane Katrina left an American city in ruins.

• The cancellation of Monday's convention events because of the storm means that the “big surprise” from Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and reality TV star, was canceled as well. Still, Mr. Trump, who has no spea king role at the convention, was in Florida to accept the Statesman of the Year award from the Sarasota County Republican Party, Politico reported, where he brought up the recent joke Mr. Romney told about no one asking to see his birth certificate. “He did make a joke, and some people thought it might not be a joke,” Mr. Trump said. “It happens to be an issue that a lot of people believe in.”

• The problem the political parties have in getting the networks (and the public) to care about the conventions should be no surprise, David Carr writes, because they have little of the spontaneity that we come to expect from television. He asked experts in reality TV what they would suggest to liven things up, but their ideas - for example, showing more of the (nonpolitical) partying that goes on, or behind-the-scenes footage of how the stagecraft is produced - show why the conventions are perhaps destined to keep losing audience and network TV time. The suggest ions involve giving up control of the message â€" maybe the only thing more worrisome than having a smaller audience.

The decision by ABC to move up Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show to 11:35 p.m. means he will be able to challenge directly David Letterman and Jay Leno. Lost in the shuffle, Bill Carter writes, is what the move means for “Nightline,” the pathbreaking news show that is being pushed back an hour. It will now follow an entertainment show instead of the 11 o'clock news. Some “Nightline” hands interviewed were blunt, saying the move would inevitably be a hurtful and possibly fatal blow to the show.

The British newspaper The Guardian backtracked on Friday over a controversial hiring for its United States Web site. Joshua Treviño was brought in to give a conservative perspective to the site's coverage, but was immediately under attack for extreme posts to Twitter he had made in 2011 about an international flotilla headed to Gaza to challenge Israel's naval blockade of the Palestinian territory. But Mr. Treviño and The Guardian said they agreed to part ways for another reason entirely - a commentary he had written as a freelancer.

Two members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot have fled Russia, the band announced in an online posting, in order to avoid prosecution for the anti-Kremlin protests that led to a two-year prison sentence for three other members of the group. These other two women have never been publicly identified by the police, Andrew E. Kramer writes, and they have been referred to only by the nicknames Balaclava and Serafima. “Two members have left the country because they are wanted,” the Twitter post said. “They are recruiting foreign feminists for new protest actions.”