If Attorney General Richard Blumenthal gets into the Governor’s race, we at The Laurel pledge to personally cater the Christmas, Hanukkah or other holiday dinners taking place at the home of each of our readers.

Let’s all take a deep breath and remember that it’s a politician’s job to keep his or her name floating out there in the media sea. Now repeat after us, “Richard Blumenthal doesn’t want to be Governor, he wants to be a U.S. Senator….”

This morning the WNPR program “Where We Live” included some political types talking about — what else? — Governor Rell’s exit from the 2010 race. One guest was former Hartford Courant reporter Mark Pazniokas, who is now working for “The Connecticut Mirror”, a news web site formerly referred to as “CT News Project”. Mark says there is a staff of five which will focus on “policy and politics.” He expects the site, www.ctmirror.org, to go live in early 2010 before the February 3rd start of the legislative session.

Charla Nash, the Stamford woman who was attacked by a chimp and criticially injured, is scheduled to appear on Oprah this Wednesday, 11/11.

A friend of The Laurel sent us a recap of how the Rell story played out on the breaking news tool of 2009, Twitter. The source is http://twitter.com/#search?q=Rell and the time stamp was provided by the individual RSS feeds:

http://twitter.com/WTNH/statuses/5570434573 11/9/2009 5:06:01 PM

http://twitter.com/NBCConnecticut/statuses/5570529922 11/9/2009 5:09:40 PM

http://twitter.com/wfsbnews/statuses/5570757371 11/9/2009 5:18:22 PM

http://twitter.com/nhregister/statuses/5571124623 11/9/2009 5:32:27 PM

http://twitter.com/WTIC1080/statuses/5571171744 11/9/2009 5:34:14 PM

http://twitter.com/hartfordcourant/statuses/5571186499 11/9/2009 5:34:47 PM

We at The Laurel aren’t big on assessing “who got the story on air” first;  it seems to us it’s more important to get it right.  But we were provided with this interesting assessment of how the story played out on the local network affiliates (WFSB, WVIT and WTNH) which we thought we’d share:

WVIT was the first station to report the news with an anchor reading the headline about a minute before WTNH and a few minutes before WFSB.

Mark Davis of WTNH was the first TV reporter on the air, doing a telephone report on WTNH about eight minutes later.

WFSB’s Hallie Jackson was the first reporter on camera at about 5:29pm and we think WVIT got the first video on the air of Rell making the announcement a minute or two after that.

Everyone was on the air at 6pm.

We expect to get a few comments correcting this. Go for it.

That’s how much time most of the news media were given to assemble for Governor Rell’s momentous Monday news conference announcing she won’t seek reelection.  Here’s the e-mail that was sent out at 4:14 pm Monday:

From: Liegeot, Adam [mailto:Adam.Liegeot@po.state.ct.us]
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 4:14 PM
To: Undisclosed recipients
Subject: Rell to Hold Media Availability TODAY at 5 PM in Capitol Office

contact: 860 524-7313

Media Advisory for Gov. M. Jodi Rell

Gov. M. Jodi Rell will hold a media availability in her State Capitol office at 5 PM today.

Topics: general

First District Congressman John Larson (far right) pictured on the front page of the  Sunday New York Times.

The National Association of Consumer Advocates is an organization of attorneys who represent clients dealing with consumer fraud issues. George Gombossy, editor of CTWatchdog.com and a former Hartford Courant consumer columnist, has been awarded its 2009 Print Media award.

Soledad O’Brien
CNN Anchor & Special Correspondent

November 10/5:30 p.m.
“Diversity in the Media: Behind the Scenes and In Our Lives”
Yale Law School
Levinson Auditorium
127 Wall St.