Phil Harris, who captained the crab fishing boat Cornelia Marie through its star turn on Discovery's Deadliest Catch, has died at the age of 53 as the result of a stroke he suffered last month. Fish in peace. [Discovery]

TV is dying, right? We read about it online. Kids these days spend all their time on YouTube, and television is left to geriatrics watching Depends ads, right? But no! One word, friends: Cable. Just today, news came out that the executives at Discovery Communications, home of the Discovery Channel, are some of the highest paid in all of the media—their CEO took home $20 million, right up there with the Viacoms and Time Warners of the world. How did little old cable get so rich? Good timing, good programming, and a little bit of luck. Learn and marvel!

Who needs a YouTube channel when you can have your own cable network? Estrogen-drenched media mogul Oprah Winfrey has formed a cashless 50-50 joint venture with Discovery Communications to launch the Oprah Winfrey Network in mid-2009. The channel will replace the Discovery Health channel and, in exchange, Discovery will operate the Oprah.com website. With her name all over the network — and her aspirations for global dominance spelled out in the channels acronym — Winfrey appears fully committed to this latest venture. Unlike her last cable channel, Oxygen.

Discovery Communications, owners of popular cable networks like the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, and the Travel Channel, hopes purchasing popular web property HowStuffWorks for $250 million will help it transition to the Web. On the surface, the topical match between the cable net and the website looks like a marriage made in heaven. But while it's true that established media companies have mostly failed at building their own Web sites, there's no guarantee that buying will work out any better. The plan will begin by integrating Discovery video segments into the HowStuffWorks site, followed by producing television content using HowStuffWorks's library of articles. Right, sure, sounds good — but really, how do you mesh "Shark Week" and "Mythbuster" video into HowStuffWorks' wonkery?

• In his memoir, former Time Inc. EIC Norman Pearlstine paints NYT honcho Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., as a lightweight for that whole "not caving to federal prosecutors like Time did" thing. [NYP]
  

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the guy who directed secret Discovery Channel smash hit The Lost Tomb of Jesus, the documentary that calls into the question the faith of millions upon millions of Christians by suggesting that their Savior may have knocked up Mary Magdalene, seems not to be a particularly modest filmmaker. In chatting with TV Week about his plan to release a director's cut of his movie, which will include the aforementioned post-knocking-up scene excised from Discovery's broadcast version of the doc, Tomb-raider Simcha Jacobovic sang the praises of his important work, which he believes surpasses the controversial, Jesus-related efforts of a couple of Oscar-winners:

Though derided (or celebrated, we suppose, depending on your perspective) as "archaeo-porn," the James Cameron-produced documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, which makes the kinds of whimsically blasphemous claims (you know, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, had a kid, etc etc) that so delight Christian groups already predisposed to think that televisions are devilboxes that flicker with programs broadcast directly from the thorny member of Beezelebub himself, was quietly a big hit for Discovery Channel on Sunday night. So why hasn't Discovery been trumpeting their huge ratings win to the Heavens, you ask? Because they're classy that way, reports TV Week: