Excerpts from "Top of the Morning"
The New York Times Magazine's cover story:
"Today" had stuck to the same camera angles and scripted intros and outros since the 1990s. Some suggested that the show was getting stale. Others privately wondered if Lauer’s star power was beginning to fade. By January, Bell had another culprit in mind: Ann Curry. So insistent was Bell that Curry was the problem — that she was “out of position,” as he put it in an e-mail to his deputies — that he had been talking about it with friends for months. One morning-TV veteran suggested to him that firing Curry, who had been co-hosting for only about six months at that point, would be tantamount to “killing Bambi.” Undeterred, Bell hatched a careful three-part plan: 1.) persuade Lauer to extend his expiring contract; 2.) oust Curry; 3.) replace her with Savannah Guthrie. According to this source, Bell called his plan Operation Bambi…
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The Huffington Post also excerpted a part of the book that describes the differences between "Today" and "Good Morning America" in 2012…
Perhaps the other difference was on display not far from Lauer's home in the Hamptons on a Saturday afternoon in July, when Josh Elliott and Sam Champion attended an ovarian cancer charity event that counted Spencer as one of the hosts. Spencer brought her husband; Champion brought his boyfriend. (Champion got married in December, becoming the first openly gay cohost of a network morning show.) At the charity event Denise Rehrig bumped into one of her counterparts at Today, Debbie Kosofsky."I don't get it," Kosofsky remarked to Rehrig when she saw the three GMA hosts hanging out together on a day off. "Did everyone just meet here?"
"No," Rehrig said, "everyone came together."
Kosofsky gave her a quizzical look. She asked, "Are you shooting something for the show?"
It took a little while for Kosofsky to suspend her disbelief. But this was just a typical Saturday afternoon, not some setup for a future segment on GMA.
Then Kosofsky gave Rehrig this look of awe. She said, "That's why you guys are winning."