Liz Smith is reporting that many ABC News employees have switched their blue “Never Never Ever Give Up” rubber bracelets to a new lighter blue model with the inscription, “What Would Peter Do?”
This caught my attention, not because of its worshipful nature (a la “What would Jesus do?”), but because it so beautifully reflects the mood in the industry right now — a longing for the days when everything was predictable and (seemingly) safe. That is certainly not the case today.
In the last week, 24 television stations — and I assume around 2,000 people — learned that they’re being sold. On Monday, Emmis Communications reported it was selling nine of its 16 stations for $681 million to LIN TV, Gray Television, and Journal Broadcast Group. And yesterday, Raycom Media announced it was buying Liberty Corporation’s 15 middle and small-market stations.
Writing in Media Daily News, Wayne Friedman noted that these deals are taking place in a time of diminishing spot sales.
A slow-moving station sales market has been blamed on the weakening local TV advertising sales marketplace.
In several of the markets affected, the buyers of these stations already own a station, and the FCC will waive its rules that used to prohibit such. Staffs will be combined, which will mean greater efficiencies, which will mean people out of work. You only have to look as far as the radio industry to see what’s ahead for local television.
To some, this may appear to be the apocalypse, but I view it as both the natural maturation of a high-margin business and a time of unprecedented creativity, as we evolve from a Media 1.0 world to Media 2.0. There has never been a time like this in history, and if you aren’t excited, you’re not really paying attention.
We all need to get out of the past, and that’s why these bracelets are so meaningful. Conjuring the ghost of Peter Jennings may seem noble and all that, but the truth is that his memory is representative of something bigger — something we’d all do well to let rest in peace.
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Thursday, August 25th, 2005
USAToday featured retailers that blog yesterday but missed the point of why this is such a big deal. It’s the RSS feed, stupid! The article looks only at the direct connection between retailer and consumer for providing news and information.
For instance Bluefly.com, an online retailer of designer clothes, updates customers on fashion-related news through its blog Flypaper (
flypaper.bluefly.com).
The blog “encourages them to visit often to check postings on styles, designers and fashion faux pas,” says Melissa Payner-Gregor, CEO of Bluefly.com. The company’s fashion spotters around the country post items on Flypaper, which launched in April.
Flypaper’s customers typically have relied for fashion news on magazines such as Vogue. Now, they also have the blog as an information source, and the company has an opportunity for an interactive relationship.
I’m not saying this isn’t important, but the real value of retailers using blog technology is its ability to ping and deliver RSS, and I’m convinced that aggregating retail feeds will be a big profit center for somebody. For retailers and their agencies, it’s a real-time way to specifically target retail focus and to turn on a dime. This is new in the advertising firmament, and it’s going to be huge.
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Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
Before the days of computer games (there actually WAS a time like that), a TV news assignment editor spent a lot of time staring at the wall while on hold. In the 70s, when I ran the desk at WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, I passed those minutes by looking through the Milwaukee phone book and writing down the funny names. The area has a rich German and Polish heritage, and there were some hoots. My favorite was LaRue Dingledine. The game I played was that the humor of the name had to come from the combination of first and last name, and often the funniest included a middle initial. Here are two more I remember: Kilborne D. Klapsaddle and Ronald W. Pinkipank.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been collecting forged “from” names in spam, and I’m happy to report that these bastards at least have a sense of humor. While I truly HATE spam and have to delete hundreds of emails daily, I can appreciate humor when I find it — especially because this humor reminds me of my days wasting away the minutes by studying the damned phone book.
Here are a few of the best that have arrived in my (and Allie’s) inbox in recent weeks.
Litton S. Encoder
Quarks R. Transact
Shifty B. Fatty
Jiffies H. Stopwatch
Offeratory V. Manliness
McNamara M. Assavage |
Effecting T. Reassigning
Creator H. Mouthwashes
Kampala U. Incomparable
Pasteurizes F. Cheese
Dangering B. Distortion
Pickiest B. Entrenched |
Reiterate S. Redounded
Aspirins F. Bladder
Sirius H. Upholstering
Intersect M. Laterals
Bracelet D. Lagoons
Motivate H. Miasma |
LaRue would be proud.
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Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
From Media Daily News this morning comes a report that the traditional five-week TV ad campaign should be cut in half, because viewers get sick of the repetition (Who knew?). The study comes from The PreTesting Company’s MediaCheck initiative. The company is studying viewing habits of 2,500 homes via its system in Omaha, Nebraska.
(Lee Weinblatt, CEO of The PreTesting Company) said that TV advertising reaches a saturation point faster than most advertisers and agencies realize. Other advertisers scored as low as an 11% rate of commercial completion. Weinblatt wouldn’t reveal the names of those companies.
So far, Weinblatt said the major takeaway from this test is “that TV works [for advertisers]. But the things killing TV commercials are overexposure and poor creative.”
After two weeks of watching commercials, viewers generally become fatigued, said Weinblatt. The remedy? “Give them more interesting commercials,” he said. One advertiser–Subway–kept changing its creative during the test, and experienced less weariness among viewers.
Like this is a bulletin? It’s interesting that the ad industry will probably agree with this information, when they’ve (we’ve) intuitively known all along that it was so. One of the quirks of our Modernist culture is that we don’t believe our gut until it’s validated scientifically.
Meanwhile, another bit of advertising common sense was revealed over the weekend in a Miami Herald article about erinMedia, a south Florida company that’s trying to compete with Nielsen. The company culls data from various set-top boxes (digital cable, TiVo, etc.) to provide very precise measurements of viewer activity regarding commercials.
The line denoting the number of people watching a baseball game holds steady through innings and commercial breaks, with minuscule blips as a few viewers tune in and out.
Then the line suddenly dives to the bottom of the screen and stays there.
“This shows people tuned out and didn’t come back like in previous commercial breaks,” said Frank Foster, chief executive of erinMedia, pointing at the chart on his laptop. “So we look back and we see that was when a life insurance commercial came on.”
Channel executives might conclude that although the ad pulled in revenue, it cost them in audience.
These types of common sense discoveries that science is providing ought to raise a few eyebrows along Madison Avenue. What they really reveal is the extent to which broadcasters have been killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Is it too late to change?
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Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
Pat Robertson thinks we should kill Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, because he’s a “terrific danger” to the U.S. I used to work for the guy (Robertson, not Chavez), so the story got my attention. Robertson’s extreme views on matters political not only distance him — and by proxy his followers — from the very people he wishes to evangelize, but also provide great fodder his political enemies.
My liberal friends wonder how anybody could possibly be fooled by this kind of nonsense.
So later, Ed Cone points to a New York Times piece on religion and science, where this statement is found above-the-fold:
Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?
Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and sharp. “No!” declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.
Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, “this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race.”
Oh really?
To those who believe in God — and especially those with a passionate, evangelical zeal — this is even more outrageous than the idea of assassinating a South American President. And yet we wonder how a televangelist can get away with such stuff.
It is the extremes that make news. Meanwhile, the rest of us keep searching for sanity.
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Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Get Back in the Box, promises to be a good read. In a nutshell, he’s saying that for all the noise about innovation these days, it mostly comes from the outside looking in and usually in the form of consultants and their re-thinking, re-branding or re-packaging whatever any particular business is selling — something he calls the American business obsession with “window dressing.”
The age of mass production, mass media, and mass marketing may be over, but so, too, is the alienation it engendered between producers and consumers, managers and employees, executives and shareholders and, worst of all, businesses and their own core values and competencies.
American enterprise, in particular, is at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process — and fun — of discovery.
Surely this is true with television news, and I agree with Rushkoff that this is a time for innovation
within the core competencies of broadcasting. What is it that we do really well, and how can we innovate within that?
When you cut away all the blue smoke and mirrors of hyperbole (window dressing), television news entities do a few things VERY well.
- We take people TO the news and we do it live. As Steve Friedman said 25 years ago when he began emphasizing LIVE on “The Today Show,” people want to feel like they’re participating in history. This we do better than other forms of media. The problem, of course, is that this is tough to pull off every day, simply because the events don’t justify the coverage. So we manufacture event status through window dressing, and soon it all just becomes hype.
- We touch people emotionally. The right combination of writing, pictures and sound can transcend events to make people laugh or cry, and we’re very good at doing this. Of course, not every story justifies this type of storytelling, and when we try to make it so, it just comes off as manipulative window dressing.
- And because we can touch people emotionally, we can inspire people to action for good. Local television’s involvement in community assistance in this country is one of its true strengths and something for which the industry really doesn’t get enough respect. Of course, as stations move forward with a “cause of the month,” focus is split, and soon it all disappears in the sands of familiarity.
- We provide our communities with celebrities through the real core competency of a TV station — mass market reach and frequency. We offer role models and people to talk about. But this is the two-edged sword of local news. Live by celebrity; die by celebrity. Lots of window dressing here.
- We produce complex television in real time. This is another disrespected aspect of local television, but it’s one that offers broad room for innovation. Little window dressing here.
What we THINK we do well is sell ourselves, but it just isn’t true. This, I think, is what Rushkoff is talking about. And perhaps if we paid a little more attention to those areas where we really do excel, the audience might stop fleeing from what we’ve become — an industry increasingly detached and self-absorbed.
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Monday, August 22nd, 2005
Steve Ramsey, GM of WSMV-TV here in Nashville passed away suddenly this morning. He had an appendectomy Saturday night, according to reports, and collapsed due to a blood clot as he was trying to get out of bed. He was only 52 years old.
My heartfelt condolences to Steve’s family and the entire Meredith Broadcasting family.
These kinds of things remind me of how precious life is and how all we really have is today. Take a moment to tell somebody you love them and don’t forget a hug here and there.
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Monday, August 22nd, 2005
If I may re-write Ellen Goodman for a moment: “Writing a blog is like being married to a nymphomaniac: Every time you think you’re through, you have to start all over again.”
Joel Achenbach reminded of this wonderful quote this morning in a hilarious WashingtonPost.com blog post about feeding the beast that is the blog. Take a few moments and read it. I’m still smiling.
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Saturday, August 20th, 2005
Since I’m in this article in Broadcasting and Cable, I’ll pass on any analysis, except to say that I think Allison did a good job of covering the whole citizens media/mainstream media intersection.
It’s the cover story of this week’s issue, and the piece is an overview of citizens participating in the process of news.
Nashville’s Paul Chenoweth gets the lead. (Damn!)
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Saturday, August 20th, 2005
Verne Gay has penned a nostalgic and romantic piece for Newsday that offers ten reasons why the solo network news anchor will (and should) remain an important fixture of our culture. Unfortunately, he — and many others like him — misses the bigger picture by focusing on the small.
This article is so full of Big-J journalism mumbo-jumbo that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s all irrelevant anyway, and I’ll get to that in a minute. First, here’s a particularly self-deluded paragraph: reason number two.
2 The safe harbor argument. This is predicated on the reasonable assumption that people, maybe even young people, will ultimately drift back to the tried-and-true when they’re sated on the blogosphere. Gerry Solomon, a veteran NBC News producer and now journalism professor at Queens College, says: “After a while, people will [eventually] become very leery of the blogosphere and … consumers will be left with a sense of ‘Where do we go next?’ Eventually, there will be a return to the tried-and-true that’s not ideological and that can be counted on to give you the plain facts.
Plain facts? Reasonable assumption? At very best, this is wishful thinking. “Let’s cling to this, because all this new stuff is just a fad anyway, and they’re going to need us when they finally (grow up and) realize how foolish they’ve been.” Oh my.
As long as news people continue to talk among themselves and ignore the thoughts of people who don’t consume news the old-fashioned way anymore, they will arrive at conclusions like the above. One of the marvelous revelations in my new media life came through a research project that actually had the courage to talk with people who don’t watch TV news anymore. Why this isn’t practiced throughout the industry is a mystery, until you consider that a fundamental concept of the “professional” press is that people are stupid and need guidance. Read this article with that in mind, and you’ll see what I mean. I am sick of this notion that a professional press is necessary for me, because they’re “standing in the gap” between me and the bad guys.
The problem is that people aren’t stupid. All we really need is the argument(s) that justifies — in the mind of the press — why story A gets more attention than story B. That’s how we make up our own minds, and it’s one of the energies driving the personal media revolution.
I think there will always be anchors, but I don’t see their role ever again being what it was. In Media 2.0 terms, a newscast is an aggregator of the events of the day, and the anchor is a part of that. The aggregator itself is shifting from the provider to the user, and there’s little or no need for an “anchor” in a Media 2.0 world. This is the ultimate reality that the high priests of journalism refuse to acknowledge, the turd in the punchbowl, if you will.
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I’m very proud of the online work done by my client here in Nashville, WKRN-TV. They’re dedicated to the blogosphere like no other station in the country, and they’ve maintained a constant stream of quality postings that have been very, very well received by the online community. At one point yesterday, the station’s weather blog, 
meteorologist, Lisa Patton, actually interacting with commenters on a blog, you must acknowledge that something new is occurring in the media world.
It’s quite a day to be a media person in the southeast. Everybody has only one thing on their minds — this darned hurricane named Katrina. I remember well what Camille did to the region, and we’re getting lots of reports suggesting this one will be similar.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has fired the photographer who copied the cover of a Richmond alternative weekly paper for a story about a candy maker. The photo on the left was published in December by Style Weekly; the one on the right graced the cover of the Metro Business section of the Times-Dispatch a week ago. Managing editor Louise Suggs