The Homeshoppingista Crows About Beating ‘The Bible Of the Cable Industry,’ Her Ex-Employer, And That Other Home Shopping Blog

Mother, mother pin a rose on me. That’s what our childhood friend Diane’s mother would say if any of us kids bragged. Well, we’re bragging.

We beat our old employer, the guys that laid us off a year ago, and we beat the other home shopping blog with our blog Wednesday about NBC selling its stake in ShopNBC and the home shopping channel planning to get a new name and rebrand. We took the time to listen to ShopNBC’s first-quarter earnings, while others who claim to cover cable and home shopping, namely Multichannel News and Home Shopping Queen, apparently failed to bother to do.

We had an hour before we put on our makeup, fixed our hair and finished packing Wednesday before our cab picked us up. We were on are way to LaGuardia and Chicago.

But we still took the time to hear the call and frantically write the story, because it’s a pretty big one for the home shopping industry.

Multichannel News, the bible of the cable industry and our home for 16 years, thought the story was pretty big, too. They gave it pretty big play on their website about 24 hours after we wrote it.

Better late than never, guys. No credit to The Homeshoppingista, of course.

Home Shopping Queen wrote it up, we’re pretty sure after us, but she buried the freaking lead when she did. That’s what writers do when they get beat on a big story — they pretend it was not really so big.

But then, Home Shopping Queen says, “I don’t enjoy muddling through dense text filled with financial numbers.”

Well, The Homeshoppingista sure does. That’s where the best stories are. That’s where the real scoop and real news is. But then, our background is journalism.

We also gave our story to our friend Harry Jessell, who published it on TVNewscheck, with competes with B&C magazine, the sister pub to Multichannel News. How sweet it is.

We had to celebrate this little victory, so much so that we are writing this in the lobby of the Hotel Allegro in Chicago, paying $5.95 every 15 minutes on here. But we couldn’t wait until we got back to Jersey late Friday to write this.

At 8 p.m., we’ll be heading out to a fancy restaurant for dinner with our crew here. And we’ll be drinking a Bombay Sapphire martini, with olives, the celebrate Wednesday’s events.

There is a God.

Our next celebration will be when certain people get shit-canned from Multi, like we were. When that happens, we plan to walk to our favorite local watering hole, buy the bar drinks, and get “half a bag on,” as our dad would put it. Karma, we know you will kick in eventually.

Like Michael Corleone, Home Shopping Queen Gets Pulled Back In To Blog

Before there was The Homeshoppingista, there was the Home Shopping Queen. She’s back.

Before we launched our blog in November, we searched the Internet for any other blogs covering the home shopping industry, its gossip and the business of electronic retailing.

The only one we found was the Home Shopping Queen, aka Queen Bea. It was smart, insidery and nicely written. But the Queen blogger had not posted since June, we think it was, when her grandmother passed away.

Home Shopping Queen makes comeback

But March 23, she was back in action, and has been posting ever since. She also explained her absence.

“I decided after my grandmother died to just take a break from blogging and the home shopping universe in general,” Home Shopping Queen wrote. “I stopped checking my email, never looked at the blog, and even stopped watching all the home shopping channels (gasp!) It was a sudden and clean break from everything ‘Queen Bea.'”

But the addiction to home shopping is like the Mob. As Michael Corleone says in “The Godfather: Part III,” “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”

The Homeshoppingista and the Home Shopping Queen have vastly different writing styles and approaches. We hope QVC, HSN and ShopNBC fans will check us both out each day.