Hank Price

In a ruling that would be more at home in the 1960s than the third decade of the 21st century, the FCC last week reaffirmed its commitment to long out-of-date regulations that threaten the long-term viability of local television service.

Specifically, the FCC slammed the door on the idea of combining any two ABC, CBS, Fox or NBC affiliations in a single market. Adding insult to injury, the FCC broadened the prohibition to include secondary channels and low-power TV stations.

Pretending that America still lives in the era of LPs and 45s and console radios, the FCC’s three Democratic commissioners proclaimed that musty, typewritten rules formulated in the days before word processors are still valid because all is well with local television station competition.

One can’t help but think of Lt. Frank Drebin from the Police Squad movies standing in front of a raging fire yelling into a microphone: “Nothing to see here! Please disperse!”

Never mind the fact that consumers now spend more time viewing streaming content than watching network television.

Never mind the fact that network owners have gutted their primetime television schedules to feed their insatiable streaming platforms.

Never mind the fact that Google, Facebook and now Amazon, as well as dozens of other national players, are sucking revenue from local television markets at a record pace.

Never mind the fact that local television news viewing continues to decline, due in part to a massive oversupply.

And perhaps most importantly, never mind the fact that none of local television’s new competitors are regulated.

None of this seems to matter to the FCC. Instead, and this is hard to believe, the commission actually said combining any two networks would “result in the remaining networks paying less attention to viewer demand for innovative, high-quality programming.”

The FCC also claims that keeping the current rules “increases the bargaining power of local broadcast affiliates and enables them to influence Big Four broadcast network programming decisions in ways that better serve the interests of their local communities.”

What innovative, high-quality programming is the FCC talking about? What local station influence on network programming? It has been a long time since any network expressed interest in what local general managers thought about network programming. Quite the opposite is true.

As for innovative programming, all of that is at the station or group level these days, not at the networks.

The FCC’s decision is hard to understand because it reaches illogical conclusions that fly in the face of reality. It’s as if the FCC believes nothing in the world of local media has changed since 1980. Do these commissioners own smartphones? Do their cars have cruise control and airbags?

Not content with making a specious argument, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel even added a red herring by saying: “No entity can own all the television stations in a single market.”

To my knowledge, no group owner has suggested there should only be one owner per market. There is a small market where one company is affiliated with all four networks, but that is an outlier and not the norm.

All stations want is reasonable consolidation that would allow fewer, but stronger, stations to compete against each other. A market that now has five or six separately owned stations might end up with three or four.

Some station consolidation is essential because the current business model is unsustainable. Continuing threats to advertising revenue and retransmission payments, combined with an explosion of competitors, means the alternative to consolidation will be the eventual demise of weaker players, leading to a last-man-standing scenario. In other words, chaos.

Strengthening and ensuring the viability of over-the-air television is critical to the well-being of our nation. At a time when the FCC should be encouraging innovation, it is instead throwing up roadblocks from a long-past era.

The current FCC majority is entrenched in the past. Let’s hope either Congress, or a more enlightened future commission, is willing to take a more constructive approach to today’s broadcast issues than simply saying “no” to the future.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post FCC Gives Broadcasters A Lump Of Coal For The New Year appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Working in television can be a great career, but launching that career usually means beginning with a low salary at a small station. This is true not just in news, but in virtually every other department.

Some of the better companies have begun to upgrade salaries, but the fact is that most of us came up in an era when starvation wages were the norm. In my case, it was several years before we stopped living hand to mouth.

I’d love to say everyone who “paid their dues” ended up with well-paying jobs, but that would be far from the truth. For each one of us who landed in good positions, there were dozens of others who never attained anything close to financial security.

No station owner wanted any of their employees to end up in poverty. The problem is that with approximately 210 television markets, the majority are small operations servicing small communities. There is simply not enough money coming in to pay large salaries.

Why then, you might wonder, didn’t underpaid staff members quit and find jobs in other industries. Many did, though making a mid-career change is easier said that done. Those that stayed the course did so because they loved the business. Like me, and maybe you, they couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Looking back, I remember so many journeymen broadcasters who worked hard and contributed to the success of their stations but were still squeezed financially. Many of those folks are now retired, some with only Social Security to live on. They may be making it day-to-day, but when a major health emergency or other personal disaster happens, they sometimes have no place to turn. That’s when the Broadcasters Foundation of America can be there to help.

The problem is just as serious for broadcasters who spent their lives in radio. I have a number of friends from college who did that and some are still working past retirement age. They’ve had great careers serving their communities and loved every part of it except the financial struggle. Few have the reserves to handle a personal emergency. The Broadcasters Foundation helps them, too.

The foundation also aids broadcasters who have become sidelined because of a disability. I know of a photographer who had to have a leg amputated due to diabetes. The Broadcasters Foundation helped him recover, then continued to help for several years as he transitioned into a new career.

Over the years the Broadcaster’s Foundation of America has given millions in grants to our colleagues facing financial emergencies. In some cases, the foundation has been their last resort.

I’m sharing all of this because I believe those of us who have been well rewarded have an obligation to remember those who have not. That’s why for the past several years my wife and I have contributed to the Broadcaster’s Foundation of America. It’s not a lot, but the Foundation can use every dollar.

Please consider helping. Click on this link https://broadcastersfoundation.org and select the red “donate” button on the upper right side of the page. Give what you can, and please do it today.

The foundation is a 501c3 charity, which means your gift is tax deductible.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post The Broadcasters Foundation Deserves Your Support appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the number of FAST (free advertiser-supported television) channels is exploding. No one is sure how many are currently up and running, but one research company estimates it to be north of 1,600.

As the latest bright, shiny objects, FAST channels are the space everyone wants to be in, including many local television stations. Don’t say OTT, that would be so old fashioned. The word FAST sounds more exciting.

And what content, you may ask, is available on those 1,600 or so channels?

To help answer that question, my son and I recently went through the FAST directory of a new TV set to find out how many channels were offered, what specific content was available, and how appealing that content might be to viewers. The set we used provided a handy FAST button on its remote, right between the buttons for Netflix and Prime Video.

Going through the cable-like directory, we counted a total of 326 continuously streaming channels. Twenty-eight were in Spanish and another 36 were dedicated to music or music videos, but that still left 262 English language channels, all featuring commercials that could not be fast forwarded.

Many of the channels were unwatchable, but there were a few jewels such as a Midsomer Murders stream that carries multiple seasons of Great Britain’s most popular crime drama. Perhaps it’s time to cancel that Acorn subscription.

We also landed on the That Girl channel. The Marlo Thomas sitcom ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. We sat through two full episodes, proving that people will watch almost anything. Having been off the air for 52 years, maybe That Girl qualifies as new product.

I searched for a ZIV channel, hoping to see episodes of Highway Patrol and Sea Hunt, but apparently there isn’t one. Yet.

With everything but my uncle’s home movies now available in the FAST universe, one must ask just how profitable these streams are. Is there a pot of gold at the end of every FAST rainbow?

Probably not, but we do know that a few brand name streamers such as Paramount’s Pluto, seem to be doing quite well. Pluto, combined with Paramount+, increased ad revenue 18% last quarter.

To put this into perspective, let’s remember that Pluto, Tubi and Freevee, to name some of the more successful FAST services, are primarily on-demand apps that also offer continuously streaming channels. Because of that, a fairer comparison might be to think of Pluto and the others as ad-supported competitors to Netflix, Peacock and Amazon Prime.

With subscriber fees for Netflix and the other streamers soaring, it makes sense that the use of free, ad-supported competitors would grow.

Let’s remember also that Pluto, Tubi and Freevee are not new entrants.  Pluto had 15 million users’ way back in 2017. Paramount acquired Pluto in 2019 for $340 million and grew it from there. Tubi and Freevee have also been available for a number of years.

Though on-demand’s premium product gets far greater usage, the FAST linear channels try to make up for that by offering a wide variety of content in bulk. The sheer volume of programs can pull you into the FAST universe before you can say That Girl twice.

As someone who still has both cable and satellite, I’m not the best person to judge the FAST channels, so I turned to my son, an early cord cutter who considers cable to be a waste of money.  He also watches local television news via an antenna, streams almost everything else and, unlike me, is in a preferred advertiser demo.

He has been using FAST channels for some time via his Roku. He sees them as competitors to YouTube, which he prefers because it’s easy to find specific content and most of the commercials are skippable. He also volunteered that he hates the idea of commercials on Netflix and will probably watch less once that happens.

When it comes to news, his first choice is a local station’s news app because to him local news and local stations are synonymous. He prefers station apps because he says, “I want control of what and when I watch.” Though on-demand is his preference, he is still willing to sit through a reasonable number of commercials when watching a station’s OTA newscast.

All of this reminds us that today’s consumer uses a wide variety of services in multiple ways. On demand is the current growth engine, but linear television continues to have great value. That’s because consumers use everything, depending on when, where and what they want to watch.

This brings us to local stations, many of which are already in the FAST business.

Over-the-air television stations, with their premium content, are the original FAST channels. The best stations have also spent years building valuable on-demand businesses through their station apps. A streaming-based platform is a natural extension of both.

There is also a strong financial incentive for getting in the FAST business. Right now, stations pay a fortune for third-party content they sell as part of digital packages. Advertisers love those products because they are fully measurable. Building a local product that will eventually produce the kind of analytics needed for sales success would reduce the cost of buying inventory from outside suppliers.

The key, of course, is the quality of content. Quality never comes cheap, so significant corporate support is essential.

A number of companies have already committed to FAST channels in their local markets. Like everything else, the quality of those channels will depend on the quality of the company supporting them.

Local television has come a long way from the old one-channel, one-revenue stream world most of us grew up in. FAST channels are one of many fresh opportunities we will see in the future. In the meantime, I’m going to hit that center button on my remote and find out what Marlo Thomas is up to.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post TV Hearts Beat FAST For Latest Streaming Trend, But There’s Nothing New About It appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Last week, TVNewsCheck carried two excellent pieces on the current employment crisis in television news. Both were good follow-ups to Emily Barr’s recent case for increased pay in news departments.

On Monday, Syracuse University Journalism Professor Bob Papper detailed the burnout issue that is front and center in newsrooms across the country. Then on Tuesday, recruiter Gary Brown talked about the industry-wide producer shortage. Like Barr, both Papper and Brown cited pay scales as important touchstones in what has become an increasingly complex issue.

As the newsroom crisis grows, companies are finding it harder to ignore the unrest in their stations. As Barr noted: “The best are trying to find ways to improve their benefit packages,” but “that does not replace the need for a living wage.”

How did things become so bad? What happened to the overwhelming hunger to work in television news? The simplest answer is that companies took advantage of that hunger by paying low salaries. After all, there were hundreds of applicants for every opening. Then one day everything seemed to change. The applicant pools dried up. The hunger to eat had superseded the hunger to work in our business.

Salaries are clearly the right place to start, but I think we must also broaden the conversation. Pay scales and hours aside, has something else changed about television news that makes it a less appealing career choice?

When I entered television, it was an aspirational calling. Going to work was an adventure because we were pushing the envelope, righting wrongs and impacting the communities we served. Creativity was expected, even glorified. Working in television was exciting and fun. We were inventing the future.

Fast forward to today. Most young people see television news as old fashioned, something their parents or grandparents watch. The problem is not really the linear platform, it’s the locked in regimen, predictability and lack of challenge. That’s because in many newsrooms creativity, fresh thinking and energy left long ago.

In other words, television news has a motivation problem.

Talk to students who still want careers in broadcast journalism, and you will hear about the mechanics: standups, anchoring, packages. Yes, they still want to be on television, but few display any sense of calling, greater purpose or even excitement.

Although they don’t use the term, most college students — and our own employees for that matter — understand that television news has become an assembly line product, producing the same thing, the same way, day after day. Only station labels are different. It takes no aspiration to turn out yet another box of Cheerios. That’s what happens when you work in a factory.

The regimentation of television news has been coming for a long time, but the current crisis also has roots in the last recession, which forced many companies to change their business models.

Before the recession, stations prioritized ratings, revenue and expense controls in that order. Loss of revenue inverted that list by making expense reduction the top priority.

So many people lost their jobs as a result of the drive to reduce costs that the business was transformed almost overnight. Without anyone realizing it, the employees who were pushed out the door took the light of mission with them.

Control rooms and studios became bare of people. Automation forced producers to emphasize locked-in rundowns, reducing freewheeling dynamics. The great photographer/journalists lost their jobs, taking away the team creativity that was always the mark of significant journalism. Reporters had to also become photographers, forcing stories into more simplistic formats. Video essays went away because there was no one to produce them. I could go on, but you know the list.

Not only did staffs shrink, but stations also started to expand their number of newscasts. With the syndication market no longer producing mega hits, owners realized that under the new goal of reducing expenses it was far cheaper to add an additional hour of local news than to buy a new syndicated show. Once that kind of thinking took hold, it became logical to expand news into other areas. After all, local news is usually the lowest cost option.

On paper, it seems so easy to produce more hours of news. Add a person here and there, stretch schedules, use the same content that is already being produced for other shows. Not a problem at all — unless you are the person being stretched.

When you add it up, the current burnout crisis is a result of all of the above.

Better salaries and hours, along with adding new employees, will fix the mechanics, but we also have an opportunity to turn this crisis into something positive by bringing our news staffs into the conversation, especially the younger members.

This new generation of employees is also the one we are trying to attract to our digital and linear products. In addition to newsroom issues, we need to know how they think, what attracts them, what changes in the product would they make?

Asking and listening are the first steps toward employee empowerment and motivation. Some of their ideas will not be workable, but remember that diamonds are always found in the rough.

Adjusting salaries, adding people and other changes should come in response to a staff conversation, not before, because genuine response is a powerful employee motivator.

I’ve worked places with highly motivated teams, and I’ve also seen the other side of that coin. Motivation always shows up on the air. It makes a difference in the product, and that makes a difference in the bottom line.

Why should a company do this? Those locked into the cheapest possible product will not, but for the best companies, those committed to the long run, this would be an investment in the future.

As a bonus, companies willing to genuinely respond to their staffs would not have to worry about newsroom morale. That would once again come with the job.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post TV News Confronts Its Motivation Problem appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

After almost two years of internal strife, backbiting, press leaks and management turmoil, things have suddenly become very quiet at CNN. No more tales of employee anger. No more revelations of management incompetence. No more negative press.

Apparently CNN is back to its pre-Chris Licht self.

Perhaps we were naive to believe David Zaslav’s bold proclamations about returning CNN to its former glory. Perhaps seeing Licht overwhelmed by the system caused Zaslav to decide trying to change an entrenched culture was too hard a task. Or perhaps David Zaslav simply has a glass jaw.

When Zaslav first took over the failing network as part of the Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio, he was quick to identify CNN’s obvious problem. The network was slowly dying. Rather than the straight news channel that had made CNN nationally recognized for fairness and balance, under Jeff Zucker the network had been transformed into a poor copy of MSNBC.

Seeing an obvious opportunity to rebuild CNN’s credibility, Zaslav named producer Chris Licht to head the network. That allowed Zaslav to exercise his penchant for micromanagement while Licht took the criticism. Perhaps this would have worked had Licht been a stronger manager, but we will never know.

What we do know is that with Licht gone, Zaslav had to make a fateful decision:  continue to try to rebuild CNN while dealing with employee unrest and a hostile press, or simply give in.

Zaslav not only gave in, he did so in a big way, naming former BBC and New York Times chief executive Mark Thompson as chairman and editor in chief.

Not that there is anything wrong with Mark Thompson. He has a strong track record as a successful executive, especially during the New York Times’ transition from print to digital. But remember that he was also the CEO when Times executive editor Dean Baquet famously declared that balanced political coverage was over. There is no evidence Thompson disagreed with that decision.

In fact, one can make the case that the Times’ change from balance to advocacy was a smart business move since it drove digital growth among true believers on the left. And don’t think Thompson was merely a bystander during the Times transition. When asked about Thompson’s new appointment, Baquet recently declared him “the perfect hire” for CNN.

Baquet is not the only voice from the left supporting Thompson’s new job. Press coverage has been overwhelmingly positive, including from those who had been quick to condemn Licht’s performance.

Thompson also understands something about television news. Writing in The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan said that while director general of the famously liberal BBC, Thompson “demonstrated a solid understanding of the newsroom mission.”  In other words, Thompson was no centrist.

Meanwhile, at CNN the entrenched culture endures. Look no closer than Anderson Cooper’s statement that he still has no idea what Chris Licht was trying to do, to understand that nothing at CNN has really changed.

Under Thompson, CNN will probably accelerate its proud quest of trying to be a smaller version of MSNBC. Ratings will of course continue to dwindle, but oh how wonderful the press will be until one day a headline will ask: “Does Anyone Remember CNN?”

We must now wonder why, after only one feeble attempt to center the network, did David Zaslav give up so quickly?  I think there are two answers. The first is that it wasn’t simply negative news stories, it was the personal attacks in the press. Considered a genius less than two years ago, everything from his personality to his business acumen had become fair game to multiple writers.

As someone who had not been in the public eye for most of his career, Zaslav apparently did not know how to absorb press criticism. Like Licht, he became too concerned about his own image.

The second reason is that sometime next year, with ratings temporarily boosted by a presidential election, CNN might well be put up for sale. Much better to sell it then, while the brand still has value, than to wait until the decline inevitably steepens. Naming a respected liberal business executive to head the organization was a smart move because it tamped down staff discontent while improving press coverage.

The disappointing thing about CNN throwing in the towel is that political polarization has become a cancer in our country. The loss of reasoned debate among people who disagree, yet still respect each other, is the great tragedy of the 21^st century. CNN had a chance to build a small bridge over that chasm of partisanship, but the opportunity now seems to be gone.

Maybe I’m wrong about all this. Maybe Mark Thompson is a Trojan Horse who will center CNN’s mission, but his background makes that seem unlikely.

Where does that leave people looking for straight news?

NewsNation is trying very hard to fill the center, and I hope it succeeds, but is it any wonder survey after survey shows a loss of public trust in most national news organizations?  Distant and unconnected to mainstream viewers, the majority have no accountability to end users other than falling ratings, which are routinely ignored.

No one should be surprised that local newscasts, which remain answerable to the communities they serve, are the last trusted voices.

If Zaslav does sell CNN, perhaps the new owner will have a better plan for restoring the network to its previous eminence, but for now if you are interested in news from the left, continue to go to MSNBC. If your preference is news from the right, go to Fox. Sadly, I’m not sure why you would go to CNN.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post CNN Throws In The Towel appeared first on TV News Check.

Those were hard words, but perhaps understandable from a retired CEO turned elder statesman who felt free to speak frankly about the industry. The former head of Disney clearly had no idea that within a few months he would be back in his old job running businesses funded by linear television.

Iger’s problem now is that today’s reality and tomorrow’s divinations are two very different things. Streaming may represent the future, but for the moment it is a bottomless pit, sucking up cash like a Hoover vacuum. With so many players competing for the same user base, the word profit is nothing more than a distant hope.

Hank Price

And where does the cash to produce Disney’s streaming product come from? ESPN, the O&O station group, and thanks to retransmission consent, billions in rights fees paid to the ABC network. Moreover, like Mark Twain, Disney’s linear businesses can rightly say that so far “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Cash flow is also the reason ESPN, despite recent declines, has never really been for sale, though Iger has said he is interested in a partnership. Needless to say, such a partner would need to be quite wealthy.

Another issue, raised by Iger himself, is that without the ABC Network, Disney has no guaranteed distribution partner for a good portion of its programming. Seeking to become a pureplay product company with an entertainment division is one thing, but giving up a guaranteed return on the cost of producing some of that programming is quite another.

Put a different way, ABC, the station O&O group, and ESPN are annuities that fund Disney’s ability to fight the streaming wars. The high cost of those wars is evidenced by recently announced price increases for the Disney+/Hulu streaming bundle.

Disney is going to need that additional revenue because a major issue in the writer’s strike is the pittance writers receive from streaming projects compared to regular series production. The other big strike issue is artificial intelligence, the use of which writers are terrified, but producers are loath to restrict.

No one can predict how the strike will be settled, but it seems reasonable to think the writers might end up with more money while the producers retain the future ability to develop and use AI. If that happens, streaming costs will go even higher, but like Esau, the writers will have given up their birthright for a pot of stew.

None of this means Iger’s attitude toward linear television has changed, especially now that total streaming viewership has passed cable and broadcast, so the two former Disney executives Iger has hired to evaluate selling the network are no doubt seriously looking at potential buyers. But selling ABC and its owned stations only makes sense if Disney receives a premium price for the properties. (How does one command a premium for an enterprise whose head has publicly predicted will eventually fall off a cliff?)

So, where does that leave the future of the network and stations? A clue may be in Iger’s search for a partner for ESPN. Would he also consider a partner for ABC and the owned stations? If so, what would that partnership look like?

If Iger does not find a buyer, or a partner that makes sense, then the most likely scenario will be the status quo. Sadly, that would leave thousands of loyal network and station employees continuing to hang in limbo, uncertain what their future might be. It would also shake the confidence of the affiliate body in Disney’s commitment to properly program the network.

That leaves Iger facing a fateful problem of his own making. He must sell the network and station group, find a cash-rich partner, or eat his previous words and reaffirm his belief in the future of linear television. The first option seems untenable, the second unlikely, the third unbelievable.

One thing we can be sure of: Sentiment will not play a part in the ultimate decision. ABC was sold to Cap Cities in 1985, followed by the sale to Disney 10 years later, so there are no sacred cows. This will be a stockholder value decision.

Stockholder value also brings a wild card into play. Iger and the board could simply sell the entire company to Amazon. In fact, Amazon might be a very good fit. Apple and even Alphabet could also be contenders, especially for a partnership rather than an outright sale.

Perhaps Iger has something else entirely up his sleeve, but whatever decision he and the Disney board ultimately make will have implications for the entire television industry, including the other networks and affiliated stations across the country.

One has the impression an industry tipping point is coming. What that turns out to be is impossible to say, but it will be fascinating to watch and see what happens.

The post Is ABC Really For Sale? appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

The First Amendment to our Constitution is often misunderstood. It was not written because the founders liked newspapers. Many of them did not. The goal was to make sure there would always be free voices, unfettered by government interference, to hold those in power accountable.

Only by giving news media blanket protection could free voices be guaranteed. Over the years, courts have determined that the First Amendment also protects the process of news gathering, including such things as reporter notes and unfinished stories.

All of this is why last week’s shocking Gestapo-like raid on the Marion County Kansas Record by local police and sheriff’s deputies is such an outrage. It was a gross violation of the entire point of the First Amendment, clearly designed to intimidate and chill the newspaper’s voice.

The image of a police chief injuring a reporter as he wrestled her cell phone from her hand should send chills down every journalist’s spine. Adding tragedy to the terror, the paper’s 98-year-old publisher died of a heart attack the next day.

If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere.

How were such appalling actions justified? The First Amendment does not give news media the right to break laws, such as trespassing, illegal entry, stealing materials and other statutes. Thus, when a local judge issued a search warrant for the newspaper’s offices, employee’s homes, and even personal cell phones, it was on the pretext of other laws being broken.

The problem with the Kansas outrage is the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. No matter what sanctions may be later applied to the judge and police, government officials now know every story, the details of every investigation, the names and phone numbers of every source and every other piece of privileged material gathered by the newspaper. They even know the details of completely unrelated material such as advertiser contracts.

Think the same thing can’t happen to a television station? Think again. In fact, television news departments are at even greater risk of government overreach.

Though we assert the same First Amendment rights and privileges as newspapers, television stations face two stumbling blocks. The first is that only the “press” is specifically mentioned in the amendment. The second is that we operate as holders of government licenses.

Both of these issues are seen as technicalities by broadcasters. The press reference is clearly a generic for news media and should be extended to coverage by modern technology. The license issue is a red herring, especially since the Communications Act requires broadcasters to operate in the public “interest, convenience and necessity,” which obviously includes news.

On a practical basis, there is constant tension between law enforcement authorities and television news departments, not to mention private attorneys seeking redress over news stories unfavorable to their clients.

Most judges understand that violating the rights of a news organization is serious business and would find it very unusual to issue an actual search warrant. Instead, judges routinely issue subpoenas demanding stations disclose specific information. Standard practice at most stations is to immediately forward such subpoenas to council, who then assert the station’s First Amendment rights while seeking a compromise that serves the needs of all parties.

Even so, at every television station I have managed we prepared a game plan should an unannounced search warrant be presented. Rule No. 1 was to comply.  To do otherwise risked an obstruction charge. Rule No. 2 was to turn out every available photographer to fully record the search. Rule No. 3 was to immediately get our attorneys involved.

At one station I ran we became so concerned about a possible FBI raid that the news director and I chose to store sensitive source material off site in private storage. Thankfully, we were not raided.

At another station I was personally threatened with arrest by a district attorney if I did not pull what he viewed as an illegal political commercial. We continued to run the spot, but I had a local attorney standing by with bail money if needed.

Every television station general manager with an aggressive news department has stories of First Amendment conflicts. The point is that if your station does not have a plan to deal with potential search warrants — a plan specifically approved by your attornies — you will be well advised to create one immediately. Not only that, but your staff needs to be aware of the plan because the last thing you want is an unnecessary employee arrest.

It is also critical that every news reporter and photographer be trained in basic laws, such as trespassing on private property and other violations that could end up hurting the integrity of a news story.

Though it is very rare, any rogue judge at almost any level can issue a search warrant for materials at your TV station. Neither the judge nor law enforcement has any obligation to give warning. You will discover the raid when they walk in your front door. That is why you must be prepared.

The First Amendment is unique to the American Constitution. In most countries, including Canada and Europe, judges have the ability to suppress specific stories from being reported by news media. Only in the United States is prior restraint of the press illegal. Only in the United States is freedom of speech fully guaranteed.

If you are in the news business, understand the First Amendment so that you can defend and protect it, because without the right to investigate, uncover and then speak freely without government interference, we risk the loss of liberty itself.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post Kansas Newspaper Raid Outrage Offers Warning To TV News appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

It’s been almost 40 years since Max Headroom, the fictional computer-generated news anchor, first appeared on the scene. Max made big waves at the time, with some pundits predicting the eventual end of real people anchoring newscasts. That talk quickly faded when it became obvious that animated newscasters were far too raw to be compelling.

Today, artificial intelligence has become so sophisticated, and is developing so quickly, that we are far beyond anything the creators of Max Headroom could conceive. Our technologically driven world means that the future is now. If you can imagine it, it can eventually be done.

Forget ChatGPT. That is only a crude first step. The real promises of AI in television, especially television news, are at the beginning of a very long runway that will offer both risk and reward.

Before you think this stuff is fantasy, know that experts are already using AI to manipulate video and voices of real anchors with the goal of eventually creating computer generated characters with human personas. We must assume that at some point fully developed AI generated newscasts will become a reality.

The questions you and I must ask today are not technical; they are ethical. How should the technology be used? How should it not be used? As AI rolls out, those conundrums will be among the formidable issues of their time.

What we know for sure is that there will be a further divide between best-in-class and worst-in-class station owners. The companies that have already cut newsrooms to the bone will welcome any advancement that requires fewer people. The best owners, those that understand the long-term value of quality local news, will see AI as a way to expand their content and thus become stronger.

Some job transitions will be inevitable. I remember years ago when robotic cameras were first introduced. A full system cost several hundred thousand dollars back then, but the accountants quickly pointed out the cost savings: “They don’t get benefits, don’t have health care and don’t go on vacation.” That made sense for appropriate positions, but with many newsroom staffs already below minimum levels, there are simply none of those optional jobs left, so let’s hope AI will be used more to improve product than to eliminate people. If anything, AI will require new, specialized skills.

The better companies will likely take a measured approach to this new opportunity, using AI technology to give their news departments an edge that helps employees produce a richer and broader product. It also seems unlikely those companies will rush to eliminate their anchors. You don’t need a research study to know viewers prefer to watch real people rather than a computer-generated re-creation, no matter how natural that pseudo being might appear to be. Don’t discount the genuine human-to-human connection that creates viewer loyalty.

In fact, don’t think of AI as something that replaces people at all. Instead, see it a revolutionary new tool that allows people to do a better job.

One obvious place is producing. AI could handle tasks such as graphic generation, story rewriting, video re-editing, archive searches, database manipulation, script checks and many other tedious, time-consuming functions. What producer wouldn’t want that kind of assistance?

AI-driven computers might allow directors to once again direct, rather than act as human robots hitting “advance” buttons. Instead of functioning as assembly line workers, directors and producers might actually have time to collaborate and thus create.

In the studio, intelligent cameras, displays, lighting systems and teleprompters could bring new dimensions to the look and feel of a newscast. AI could produce far more sophisticated cuing and prompts, eliminating the distraction of producers yelling in an anchor’s ear.

In the field, multiple AI-driven miniature robotic cameras and drones, perhaps controlled by a video expert, or possibly fully automated, could create a new level of story coverage that would make today’s single cameras look like Model Ts. AI programs that learned an individual reporter’s storytelling style could then produce a first video draft for the reporter to review and adjust.

The list goes on and on, but the point is that AI will have the capacity to make newscasts better and the jobs of people creating those newscasts easier. Stations will be able to produce a broader and more substantive product, far more advanced than today’s constant repeat of the same stories.

Keep in mind that every function I’ve just proposed is based on the way we currently think of news. The greater opportunity for AI may be in new and innovative ways to create and distribute news content. For instance, would there be a way to harness the power of thousands of consumer smartphones? This would require owner cooperation but could produce a new level of breaking news coverage, as well as a source of rich new video for other stories and even original work. What about news applications for the future addressability of NextGen TV? Tailoring specific content for hundreds of thousands of homes could only be done with AI.

Expanding products and services is not only important to the future viability of local television news, but it will also create new revenue, which can justify new jobs. And think about this: Today’s television news audiences are aging out. AI could potentially change that.

There are legitimate reasons for being wary of how AI will be implemented by some companies, but the bottom line is that properly deployed, artificial intelligence will give more creative control to real people, make their products better and open new horizons for television news. It also represents a unique opportunity to be a part of creating the future.

If you are a mid-career professional or younger, you are going to be faced with a decision. Do you embrace the future or fight it? Do you want to be part of inventing something exciting, or would you prefer to go the way of typewriters, fax machines and flip phones? I think the answers to those questions are pretty easy.

The unknown can always be fearful, but arguing the Earth is flat is a waste of time. Embrace the future and enjoy it.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post AI And The Future Of Local TV News appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

The latest RTNDA/Newhouse School at Syracuse University study of television news departments is must-reading for all station owners. Veteran researchers Bob Papper and Keren Henderson have produced an eye-opening look at growing problems that have been ignored for far too long.

Bottom line: News directors report that employees are becoming burned out. Stories of being “stretched too thin,” “exhaustion,” “quiet quitting” and “contract breaking” abound. Many newsrooms seem to be operating in crisis mode with a host of personnel problems piling on top of each other.

News directors are trying to face the problems head on by taking a wide range of steps, from changes in scheduling to team building exercises to, in some cases, more money.

Going beyond the study, it’s easy to see that news directors can only do so much to help because it is not within their power to address the root causes of so much employee discontent.

One cause is that we have a new generation of employees unwilling to become chattel for the sake of building a career in journalism. Old timers might be proud of having paid whatever price it took for success, but that doesn’t mean today’s staffers should be blamed for wanting more normal and balanced lives.

The bigger issue though, the elephant standing in the middle of the room, is that many news departments are simply understaffed. Over the past 15 years, the ratio of news employees to the number of local newscasts produced has dropped like a rock.

Going back to Papper and Henderson’s report for a moment, we learn that today’s “average” television newsroom employs 2.6 reporters, 5 MMJs and 5.5 photographers. That’s a total of 13.1 people spread over seven days a week.

What the study doesn’t show are the support people from engineering and production, such as teleprompter operators, who are no longer present. Advancing technology, such as the move from satellite and microwave trucks to cell-based coverage, has obviated the need for some of those people, but for the most part news department employees have been forced to take up the slack.

Larger markets will have more people, smaller markets fewer, but the bottom line is that an affiliate producing 25 or so hours of news a week 15 years ago might well be producing 40 hours today with a smaller total staff. Add to that the heavy volume of mobile, web and social media work and you have an overwhelmed newsroom.

Then, there is the quality issue. The old saying that a great photographer can make a mediocre reporter’s work far better than they deserve remains true. You still see traditional crews in some larger stations, but for much of the industry that has become a rarity, reminding us that the mass conversion from reporter/photographer teams to MMJs was a Faustian bargain from the start, implemented for no other purpose than to save money.

The reality of producing more product with fewer resources means most news directors are pressed to simply get the news of the day covered. That’s why we see constant repeats of the same stories which, by necessity, are often much longer than the content deserves. We have come to the point that something as simple as a fresh live shot is seen as a differentiator.

I’ve written in the past about the pervasiveness of copycat thinking in television news, but there are good reasons for that sameness. The last thing a news director bogged down in personnel and coverage issues has time to think about is innovation.

So, whose fault is this? Certainly not the news directors. If anything, they are the biggest victims. As the study makes clear, news directors are trying their best, but they can only do so much.

What about general managers? Part of a GM’s job is to put employees first, and they can do many things to help, but GMs do not have ultimate control of staff size.

The solution to these problems doesn’t lie at the station level. It is squarely at the feet of corporate decision makers who are more concerned about quarterly earnings than the quality of local news coverage. More importantly, these are decision makers who place budget restrictions over the well-being of their employees.

Having run stations for more years than most people survive in this business, I get it. Profitability matters because without reasonable profit, no one has a job. Reasonable profit used to mean a minimum of 40%. It’s half that these days, but still a very good business. The wild cards no one likes to talk about are debt service and cord cutting, which is why there is so much downward pressure on the expense line.

Even so, station owners need to be aware just how tough things have become in their news departments. Television news has always been a high-pressure business, but for many newsrooms it has also become a struggling one. In a world of ever greater competition on ever expanding platforms, this inability to get the job done represents an existential threat to our business.

If linear television is to matter in the future, not to mention our product competing in the wider digital world, it will be because the innovative spirit of those that came before us is healthy and pushing boundaries forward. Right now, that can’t happen because many newsrooms are not healthy.

As we approach budget season this fall, I hope general managers will make the case for an appropriate number of news staffers in their 2024 plans, and I hope some of those additional positions will be approved. Given what the RTNDA/Newhouse study shows, newsroom staffing may be today’s most important station issue. It must be addressed now, before it becomes too late.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post Local News Burns Out appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Sinclair Inc.’s decision to close news departments at five stations and reduce staff at an unknown number of others continues to shake news departments across the country. The question now is whether other broadcast groups will follow Sinclair’s lead.

Sinclair has never been a particularly news-centric company, showing far more interest in the development of new technology, such as NextGen TV, than the quality of local news.

The company does own some fine news stations, but they are primarily the ones in larger markets that were leaders when Sinclair bought them. So far, the company is continuing to fund those operations, but that does not change Sinclair’s core focus, which has always been expense control. This is especially evident in their smaller stations.

Sinclair also has a history of trying to nationalize local news. Past efforts, which have included centralizing weather departments, have not been particularly successful. Undaunted, Sinclair has now launched The National Desk, a program already slated to replace local news on the five stations that had their news departments axed.

Given their history and operating philosophy, we should not be shocked by Sinclair’s decision to no longer serve unprofitable markets with local news. We should also note that since none of this has been officially announced, there may be other shoes to drop.

Why is this happening? Could it be the result of Sinclair’s multi-billion-dollar Diamond Sports disaster, or is there a bigger problem that could affect other station groups?

Some of the answer lies in Sinclair’s first quarter financial report. Compared to one year ago, revenue and profits dropped across all platforms, including those related to the Bally Sports bankruptcy. Political revenue was of course down, but there was also bad news regarding core revenue and profit. Regular advertising sales and retransmission revenues, the bulk of any television company’s profitability, were both down.

Looking forward, a softening ad market, continued cord cutting and predictions of a second-half recession are caution lights not only for Sinclair, but for every other group owner.

Today’s mega groups, with multi-billion-dollar debt services, have business models built on the growth of spot sales and retransmission fees. In this kind of environment, every group hopes for the best but plans for the worst.  That means contingent expense control plans have been completed for some time. If needed, implementation will be swift.

To fully understand all of this, we must also consider the big picture context of local television.

I’ve written extensively about the over-supply of look-alike local newscasts, so I won’t go into that here other than to say that at some point a shakeout is inevitable.

During the last recession, many groups gutted their newsrooms, firing photographers, engineers, live truck operators, control room staff and others. This time around the only options left may be the ones Sinclair is taking.

I am not suggesting any other company is about to exit local news. No group is anxious to make such a drastic move. Many are aghast at the idea of canceling any newscasts and will do so only if they have no other options. Television station owners also take their public service roles seriously and are very aware of what could happen in a community without access to severe weather coverage and other emergency services.

There is also a strong financial argument against exiting local news. Advertising sales will drop. Lucrative political advertising, a major part of profitability, will go away. Viewers will abandon other dayparts because without news image, there is no station image.

Sinclair knows all these things yet closed five news departments despite them. That says how serious the situation must be.

What will happen now? It is unlikely other broadcast companies will rush to follow Sinclair’s lead. Those decisions will depend on how soft the ad market becomes this year, along with how cord cutting plays out.

If we have a soft economic landing, then the oversupply of local news will last a little longer. If not, we may look back and realize Sinclair was the canary in the coal mine.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post Are Sinclair’s News Market Closures Canaries In Local TV’s Coal Mine? appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

As cord cutting surges, panic among the major media companies continues to grow. Poor earnings, heavy debt and falling stock prices have created an overwhelming wave of bad news with no good answers.

Having run out of ideas, the networks are turning to the three things they do best: cutting expenses, laying off employees and demanding more money from their affiliates.

A proud leader in network greed is Paramount Global, which is using the latest Fubo TV negotiation to not just pick affiliate pockets but turn them inside out.

During recent discussions with the CBS Affiliate Board, Paramount offered a new Fubo TV deal some call “untenable.” The background story is that Paramount lowered its offer to less than affiliates are receiving now. Adding insult, Paramount is reported to have also said “take it or leave it” with no room for compromise.

The Paramount abuse of affiliates goes beyond Fubo TV. The company is trying to reset the entire retransmission consent landscape. The Fubo deal will set a precedent for every future vMVPD negotiation. This matters, because without a reasonable share of retransmission dollars, few stations would be able to continue producing high quality local news and other critical services.

At last report, many local station owners had not succumbed to Paramount Global’s greedy demands and elected to go dark on Fubo TV, but in another outrage, Paramount is said to now be running a direct network feed with no local content in markets where affiliates have not accepted its ultimatum.

If the CBS affiliates cave to Paramount, it will not only affect their vMVPD contracts, but every other future retransmission negotiation with every other national network.

Paramount can play the bully because outdated FCC rules mean vMPVDs are not subject to the same regulations as cable and satellite. Owners of over-the-air networks can legally negotiate directly with the internet cable providers, cutting local stations out of the process. That’s why CBS affiliates have so little bargaining power in the Fubo TV negotiation.

Facing what many see as oppression, affiliates are dismayed that the FCC is sitting on the sidelines in an area that is clearly its responsibility. More dismay comes from the fact that the solution is so obvious and so simple: Make everyone play by the same rules.

The FCC has been foot dragging this issue for years. That’s hard to understand because this is not a partisan issue. It is about simply leveling the playing field. Giving one side an unfair advantage in a business negotiation is nonsensical.

I can tell you from personal experience that networks spend far more time thinking about stock price than about the local communities their affiliates serve, so there are real long-term consequences if the FCC allows Paramount to continue playing the bully on a tilted field.

Last week, TVNewsCheck Editor at Large Harry Jessell pointed out that FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel claims to support localism. If she is serious about that, now is the time for her to take action to protect the very viability of local service by amending regulations written when the idea of vMVPDs did not exist.

If the FCC remains on the sideline, it seems to me every general manager has a responsibility to lobby their local senators and members of Congress to pressure the commission to do the right thing. Hopefully the NAB, which is world class when it comes to lobbying, will lead the charge.

It cannot be pointed out too often that retransmission fees fund local news, emergency weather, local programming and other critical services. I can think of no higher priority than protecting those services in every community.

Bottom line, Paramount Global is trying to control local television services across our nation. If Paramount is successful, you can be sure every other network will follow, so the stakes are very high. That is why Chairwoman Rosenworcel must act now.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post Paramount Global Directly Threatens Local TV Services appeared first on TV News Check.

The reasons for this are myriad with virtually nothing lining up in the pro column to argue for major mergers or acquisitions to happen this year, although some stations will change hands in the margins.

Let’s start with the economy: with interest rates continuing to climb, money is expensive. That doesn’t motivate buyers to lever themselves up, especially when the future value of those assets is in question.

Justin Nielson

“The capital isn’t there to make large investments from the private-equity guys,” says Justin Nielson, principal analyst, SNP Global Marketplace Intelligence. “We won’t see these big takeouts this year.”

There’s also a possible recession brewing, and that could be coupled with an advertising recession should major brands decide they need to pull back on their marketing budgets.

“If we have an advertising recession, there’s no place to go as far as backups and there’s already such a heavy debt load out there,” says Hank Price, a former general manager for CBS, Hearst and Gannett, and a columnist for TVNewsCheck. A sudden drastic dip in revenue could lead heavily leveraged groups to miss payments, and that, in turn, could set off a negative chain reaction. “There’s a lot of fear out there.”

This is also an off year politically speaking, which means station group revenue will be flat to down. Deals don’t tend to get done when buyers aren’t feeling flush.

“Historically, if you look at M&A trends for station deals over time, you don’t see major transactions happen in non-election years,” Nielson says. “You don’t see those growth drivers that are going to get the private-equity guys excited.”

Next is the current administration. President Joe Biden, flanked by Justice Dept. antitrust head Jonathan Kanter and FTC head Lina Kahn, is no fan of mega corporations. The Biden administration has stated that it’s looking to break some of the tech giants’ hold on certain parts of the digital economy, such as Google’s online advertising business. While broadcasters are small potatoes compared to Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, the Biden administration is not seen to be tilling fertile ground for mergers.

Gigi Sohn

The FCC has been stuck with two Democratic and two Republican commissioners since Biden took office in January 2021. Biden’s nominee, Gigi Sohn, has languished in a tied Senate committee, even though she’s been through three hearings with the last one on Valentine’s Day. With the Democrats picking up one Senate seat this year to give them a 51-49 majority, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona becoming an independent, bringing Sohn to the floor for a vote and getting her confirmed is much more of a possibility.

Even if Sohn manages to get confirmed, that’s likely of no help to broadcasters who want changes made to broadcast regulations. The biggest broadcast groups — Nexstar, Sinclair and Gray — have been the big buyers in recent years, and those three are at 39%, 23% and 23% of the country, respectively. The national ownership cap is 39%.

Those groups’ actual coverage is far higher if the UHF discount, which counts stations that operate on UHF frequencies at half-power even though that former analog disadvantage no longer remains true in the digital age, is disregarded. Nexstar, for example, covers 68% of the country without the UHF discount. Sinclair is at 37% and Gray is at 34%.

“The top station groups don’t have much room to make major acquisitions anyway. Nexstar, Sinclair and Gray are pretty much done,” Nielson says. “Smaller operators that are still doing well, like Cox and Graham, may make some strategic acquisitions.”

If Sohn is confirmed, she’s unlikely to help big broadcasters grow bigger — moreover, her focus, and the Biden administration’s — is on Big Tech and broadband access. For broadcasters to get any real regulatory relief, they’ll likely have to wait for a Republican administration. That could happen as early as 2025, but it’s also possible that Biden, who seems to be signaling his intent to run, will take a second term. If that happens, ownership relief for broadcasters is likely years away and a lot could happen in that time that dramatically changes the industry.

Every year that passes sees TV stations get a little less valuable. For the past 15 years or so, TV stations’ fortunes have been largely made on retransmission consent fees paid to them by cable and satellite TV distributors in return for the privilege of carrying their network feeds, which include all-important live sports, local TV news and other programming.

In 2021, BIA Advisory Services estimated that total revenue for the top-30 TV station groups neared $27 billion, with $14.4 billion of that coming from advertising and $12.5 billion coming from retrans fees. BIA predicts that affiliates’ retrans revenue may drop from nearly 50% of station income to less than 40% in the next few years.

But TV stations are now in a sort of vise of their own making. Once their network brethren saw how much money TV stations were able to command from cable and satellite TV providers, they started demanding their share of that money — up to 70% for some networks.

But while the broadcast networks — facing their own profitability problems — continue to squeeze TV stations for higher and higher payments, TV stations are able to command less and less money from cable and satellite TV providers, who are facing cost-cutting and other issues.

“The networks are really hurting the affiliates by continuing to take so much of the retrans money, and retrans itself is going away,” says W. Lawrence Patrick, managing partner of Patrick Communications.

One of the most important things that TV stations offer local viewers — and thus pay TV providers — is exclusive access to live sports, especially the NFL, the Super Bowl and so forth. Already that is changing, with Amazon Prime Video exclusively carrying Thursday Night Football this past season.

“When live sports really goes to Amazon, YouTube TV, Apple, it’s a house of cards. Things are going to really break,” says a former TV station group executive.

Offering customers bundles of broadband internet, advanced wi-fi and mobile phone service is how cable companies make their money these days — layering programming on top of that high-speed network is just a bonus for customers. And with customers able to build their own programming bundles, cable companies are no longer concerned about whether customers get that programming from them. They can just get an app, put it on their Roku box and run all of that over their super-fast wi-fi provided by Comcast or Charter.

That said, vMVPDs (virtual multichannel video program distributors) like YouTube TV, Hulu+ Live TV, Roku and Sling also pay stations retrans fees for the privilege of being able to carry their programming, although not nearly what traditional cable and satellite TV operators pay. The National Association of Broadcasters is currently lobbying to get vMVPDs classified in the same category as traditional cable operators and thus subject to the same retransmission consent/must carry rules. That said, with very little getting done at the FCC, there hasn’t been much movement on this issue.

Soo Kim

Meanwhile, the opportunity to command high retransmission-consent fees is one of the main reasons Standard General, led by Soo Kim, wanted to acquire Tegna and its 64 stations, with that deal announced exactly one year ago today (Feb 22). But every day that passes sees those stations get a little less valuable and those retransmission consent fees fall a little lower.

Benchmark’s Dan Kurnos wrote in a Jan. 30 research note: “In our lengthy history covering broadcast and observing deal flow, this has to be the oddest case we have seen — we believe Standard General has bent over backwards to accommodate all demands/concerns, and we suspect that were A) Standard General one of the traditional broadcasters; and B) Apollo not involved, the deal would be much less heavily scrutinized. Our hunch is that the deal still gets done at the wire, although with that likelihood not much better than a coin flip, with a strong likelihood of an exaggerated downside move if the deal breaks.”

Besides quiet opposition to the deal by the Biden administration, the high cost of money might be one of the things that ultimately derails the stalled Standard General-Tegna deal.

Kim is relying on some $8 billion of borrowed money, including a sizable investment from Apollo Global Management, to finance the deal. Moreover, Standard General faces a $250 million break-up fee and a “ticking fee” of 5 cents per share to Tegna shareholders after nine months, 7 1/2 cents per share after one year and 12.5 cents per share after 15 months.

Should the Standard General-Tegna fall apart, M&A might heat up again with one of the country’s largest station groups again on the block. Smaller, privately held groups, such as Hearst and Graham, might be looking around for deals on well-run and well-located stations. And for now, TV stations do still turn a profit.

“It’s a worse business than it has been and there are a lot of forces working against broadcasters, but it’s still a very profitable business,” Patrick says. “Even if it’s not the 40% to 45% margins that you had 10 years ago, it’s still doing 20%-25% margins.”

The post Many Forces Working Against TV M&A In 2023 appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Every time I see a new general manager announcement, and there have been quite a few lately, I wonder how prepared that person is for the job.

My first year as a general manager was a disaster. Like so many other first timers, I had worked my way up through the ranks and thought I knew everything about stations. Was I wrong.

It’s one thing to watch from the sidelines and criticize what seem like dumb decisions, but quite another to suddenly have the responsibility of making those decisions. New GMs go overnight from great confidence in a department they have mastered to a new world of confusing issues no one thought to tell them about.

All of that is complicated by the fear of revealing just how little they know about the intricacies of other departments. The last thing any new GM wants is to look dumb in front of their boss.

In addition to my personal learning curve, my first group head was a micro manager who insisted I be one, too. I tried to do it his way but attempting to make every important decision for every department, then checking with my boss for instructions, went against my grain. Even worse, the department heads became frustrated by my asserting so much control, not to mention the length of time it took to get answers.

This went on for more than a year until I got a fateful call from my group head, who said he was “hearing things about the station.” He planned to fly into town and meet me at the airport restaurant. The old joke, “Meet me at the airport and bring your car keys,” immediately popped to mind.

That meeting turned out to be career changing. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I told him things were not going well at all. I had lost the respect of the department heads. They realized I had been calling him about every important decision. If that was the kind of general manager he wanted, it wasn’t me.

I expected to be fired. Instead, he said “You have to fix this.” I said I would but not to expect any more daily calls about station decisions. I could see he didn’t like that answer, but to his credit he did not say no.

Over the following months things got a lot better. Of course, I kept my boss informed about the things he needed to know and discussed major decisions with him.

Even though we had very different management styles, the boss and I came to respect each other. He was a brilliant guy who taught me a lot about financial and budgeting skills. Still, I was surprised a few years later when he promoted me to a top-20 market.

One of the many things I learned from that experience was that bringing different skills to the table is a good thing. Because I was incapable of micromanaging a station, I realized that to be successful I would need to recruit the best people available for every department head position, then let them do their jobs. My primary role would be to keep people on track toward station goals while giving each frank and honest coaching. In short, my best route to success was to do everything in my power to help each of my direct reports be successful.

Of course, it’s not exactly that simple. General managers must be fully engaged and there are some decisions only they can make, but hiring the best people, then challenging them to achieve big things, is a pretty good recipe for success.

Having coached many new general managers over the years, I’ve found most go through a three-year cycle. The first year everything is new, and I get a lot of calls. In year two, things become familiar, and I get far fewer calls. By year three, the new GM is comfortable in the job and calls become rare.

I’ve also found that every new general manager makes pretty much the same mistakes, so it’s easy to help them avoid common potholes. There’s nothing special about this. A little coaching by any seasoned GM can go a long way. Unfortunately, that is not the industry norm.

Ours has always been a sink-or- swim business, so we have a long history of throwing people into new jobs with little or no preparation. Once in the position, they are expected to instantly know everything about running a station. Add to this the natural reticence of someone to admit they don’t understand all of what they are doing, and you have the potential for failure.

When you think about it, why are we throwing untrained people into the most important job in a television station? Why take that kind of chance with a multimillion-dollar profit center?

It amazes me that most companies don’t offer any internal training for their general managers, or department heads for that matter. Even a well-thought-out workshop run by experienced GMs in the same company would make a tremendous difference. Following that with ongoing one-on-one coaching could pay huge dividends.

Having seen so many new general managers derail over the years, I am convinced companies have an obligation to do more to train, develop and support new GMs. Doing so is simply good business.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post New GMs Must Be Prepared For Success. Why Aren’t Station Groups Helping Them? appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Last year ended with a wide range of major media companies announcing layoffs. This year began with DirecTV and NBC News following suit. Battered by disappointing streaming results, a constant demand for new hit programs and pressure from rising interest rates, Big Media is in trouble. But what about local media?

Owners of television stations have their own challenges this year. Much of the programming that built local television, including sports, is now spread over multiple platforms. Captive audiences are long gone, as are the great syndicated shows and network hits that created audience flow. For the moment, both retransmission fees and local advertising remain relatively reliable, but neither is recession proof.

With so many other things out of their control, every group owner’s first priority this year must be to ensure the financial viability of local news, which is the key to any affiliated station’s prestige and profit. But what happens when local news becomes oversaturated with too much product jammed into too many time periods on too many stations? How logical is 24-plus hours of combined local news in a single 24-hour period?

Not only do television stations produce far more product than viewers are willing to consume, pick any station in any size market and you will find a sameness of look, feel and format that leaves one with an overriding sense of repetition, the result of an ingrained copycat mentality where one station leads and all others try to beat the leader at its own game.

Standardization over many decades has conditioned viewers to think of television news in a single dimension. That’s why every effort to substantively change the look and feel of television news has failed. Instead, stations have tried to differentiate themselves around the edges, but in the end everything from the order of news, weather and sports to how reporter packages are produced, has been homogenized.

This is not to say all television stations are the same. Some, through extrordinary service and long-term investment, have become powerful brands that stand out. A station with brand leadership is well positioned for the future, including the digital platforms essential to younger user growth. But with so many contenders seeking the same viewers the same way, the noise level alone makes brand a fragile thing that must be earned every day.

In the long-run, brand value will be the basis of any individual television station’s success, but what about the short term? How much difference will a strong station’s brand make to survival during a recession?

If we have a severe drop in advertising this year, endurance will depend more on a parent company’s financial stability than any individual station’s performance. That means a leading television station might still survive but eventually find itself with a new owner.

If not for outdated government regulations, stations would have consolidated under fewer owners years ago. Sadly, it is doubtful that even a severe recession would cause any change in regulatory policy.

Without relief, an owner unable to satisfy debt covenants would have few options. Jobbing out newscasts to competitors, regionalizing newscasts, producing bare bones news, even exiting news entirely would all be on the table. None of these solutions would work out in the long run, therefore the herd would thin no matter what because a station out of the local news business is simply out of business.

As TVNewsCheck Editor-at-Large Harry Jessell recently pointed out, some companies might be better off finding other ways to monetize their digital spectrum. There is a place in the future marketplace for a strong linear voice that is part of a bigger multi-platform brand, but four or five different linear providers? One thinks not.

There will be strong opposition to such radical change but looking beyond the pearl clutching tears of special interest groups, fewer duplicators of the same thing could be good for the viability of the industry and the consumers they serve. If television stations are to grow, they must do so through investment in relevant new products and services.

Why does local television matter to the future? Through their own arrogance and sense of entitlement, newspapers took themselves out of the game, leaving the field clear for what is now the only form of mass media still standing. Let the national services fight over the limited national ad market. The real growth potential is in the local markets where existing consumer and business relationships make the launch of new products possible.

If the herd thins would every surviving owner invest? Of course not. Some would simply squeeze short term profits, but that would mean being left in the financial wake of those willing to take advantage of a genuinely new opportunity. Just as newspapers did during the 1970s, one station in every community would likely rise to dominate the broader world of multi-platform local news and information.

Consider also the future of NextGen TV. Right now, ours is a business-to-business enterprise, selling advertising time and program streams to other companies. ATSC 3.0 will add a retail component, opening the door to direct consumer sales and subscriptions.

So, what is going to happen in 2023? If stations are hit with the kind of recession we experienced in 2008-09, spot rates could drop to the point even next year’s political revenue might be damaged. Consumer wallet tightening would also lower retransmission fees, further reducing revenue. Without obvious ways to cut already bareboned expenses, debt service would determine who survives and who becomes a memory.

Recession or not, a glance at ratings trends shows that consumers have been reducing their support for lookalike newscasts since the dawn of digital. That’s because linear television, though still important, is just one part of any consumer’s world of information and entertainment. On-demand entertainment is currently at the top of the list, but local news, severe weather, big events and other live programming continue to matter.

For the past decade the status quo of local television has been perpetuated by retransmission fees and political advertising. This has allowed owners to ignore the issue of oversupply, which is a roadblock to the future. Sadly, nothing will change until massive duplication of services no longer makes economic sense.

Depending on how this year’s economy goes, 2023 could be the year that begins to change everything.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post Local Television’s Pivotal Year appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

By any measure, 2022 was a seminal year. It was the year every major media company decided to go all in on streaming, only to learn there were not enough willing subscribers to go around. It was the year advertising revenue was rediscovered as the wave of the future, but without a clear picture of what that actually means. It was the year cord cutting reached a tipping point, creating layoffs and an uncertain future for the traditional cable network owners. It was also the year the Federal Reserve began to significantly raise interest rates, adding a wild card that could upend the industry.

In short, 2022 set up the coming shakeout of 2023.

Streaming’s Bottomless Pit

Big media has a profitability problem. According to business writer Madeleine Bruder, media groups shed $500 billion in stock value last year. How did such a thing happen?

Last year began with an Oklahoma land rush to streaming at the expense of everything else. Even the traditional television networks chose to discount their long-term affiliate relationships, along with the billions of dollars in program payments that come from those affiliates, in favor of a total concentration on streaming.

This belief in streaming as a holy grail was not driven by viable business plans, nor even a sense that consumers had lost interest in all other platforms. Instead, the major media companies thought Wall Street would reward the price of their stocks based on some hoped-for pot of OTT gold.

Those hopes were dashed when Netflix and Disney, both cherished darlings of Wall Street, saw falling stock prices due to a combination of subscriber lag and greater-than-expected churn.

By mid-year both Paramount+ and Peacock were seriously underperforming expectations. One analyst predicted Paramount’s streaming service would never be able to replace traditional network revenue. If constant promotion on CBS and NBC could not create streaming bonanzas, what hope did players such as Warner Bros. Discovery have?

Hope Turns To Advertising

Suddenly, advertising revenue took on new meaning. By the time last year’s upfront presentations came around, advertising was back in vogue and agencies were treated to the usual promises from the usual suspects. We won’t go into detail in case you just finished breakfast.

By the end of the year, confusion reigned. NBC in particular had egg on its face for signaling a giveback of the 10 p.m. hour to affiliates, then hesitating at the last minute. It is significant that the announcement of a possible delay was not made by senior NBC executives, but by their advertising sales department.

As we enter 2023, advertising revenue is the latest magic bullet that will solve all problems, bring peace to the world, and help us lose those 10 pounds we gained over the holidays.

The problem with advertising as a panacea is that the national market is finite, fully dependent on client and agency budgets. With so many new players now seeking a piece of the pie, there will not be enough money to satisfy everyone. The market, which has been fragmenting for the past two decades, will fragment even further.

Anyone who has sold national advertising also knows it is a tough, numbers-centric game that demands a guaranteed audience or your money back. Netflix learned this the hard way when its new ad-supported tier did not meet expectations. To add insult, Netflix’s stock price dropped even further for the same reason.

Just as streaming was not the answer to all problems in 2022, neither will national advertising be the ultimate solution in 2023.

Look For Discounts To Build Numbers

Whether counting subscriber fees or selling advertising, the bigger problem for streamers now is relevance. To make it through this year intact, providers must find ways to add eyeballs.

Just last week AT&T offered me a free subscription to HBO Max as part of my existing fiber internet plan. Look for other offers to come your way. Mine came by old fashioned snail mail.

Speaking of old fashioned, Disney has been running spots for a discounted Disney+/Hulu package on CBS’s television network, proving the point that when all else fails, do what might actually work.

Having stubbed its toe launching an ad tier, one also wonders how seriously Netflix will enforce its goal of reducing password sharing. Perhaps sharers would be willing to watch limited commercials?

Higher Interest Rates Increase Debt

Cratering stock prices are bad. Billions in debt can be even worse.

During the era of cheap interest rates, borrowing money was not a problem, but we no longer have cheap interest rates. Moreover, it is not only new acquisitions that will be affected. Long-term fixed rates are a thing of the past.

How much will higher interest rates affect media in 2023? It’s too early to judge, but the cable network layoffs we saw at the end of 2022 were not exclusively due to cord cutting. In 2023, interest rates will factor into every major decision.

Recession Affects All Media

With the Fed now signaling higher interest rates throughout this year, consensus has moved from “Will we have a recession?” to “How long and how deep?”

Prior to the last recession, media companies demonstrated a remarkable ability to weather economic storms. Belts were tightened, layoffs occurred, but in general media was a high margin business that seemed bulletproof. That is no longer the case.

Increased competition from all quarters, higher levels of debt and loss of spot dollars almost caused the last recession to be a game changer. As one station group head said at the time: “This might finally thin the herd.” That did not happen because of a newfound willingness to finally charge cable and satellite companies for retransmission of television signals. Retransmission fees saved the station industry as well as network owners. No such windfall is on the horizon in 2023.

Remember also that during the last recession television station owners slashed costs, permanently eliminating photographers, master control operators, production staff and many other jobs. Any cutting this time will require a bone saw.

Depending on how deep and how long it lasts, a 2023 recession might actually “thin the herd.”

Mega Mergers

Industry upheaval always creates leaders and losers. When that happens, look for consolidation to follow.

Wells Fargo’s recent prediction that Disney might shed both ABC and ESPN may have touched off the rumor mill, but it was only the beginning of coming speculation about any number of players. We don’t know who might buy whom, but we do know there are no public companies so successful, so secure, that an acquisition would be out of the question.

Look for disruption particularly among the cable network owners, whose properties have traditionally generated large cash flows. Those networks are now feeling the crunch of cord cutting. Streaming services and even television station owners are also suffering the bite of subscriber losses. A recession will accelerate those trends, lowering subscriber revenue along with retrans fees and network program payments.

And don’t forget the three wild card players: Google, Apple and Amazon.

When considering potential media acquisitions, one must also keep in mind that under the current administration both the FCC and the Department of Justice are likely to be merger averse, so swallowing up competitors will not be easy.

Consumers Assert Control

As businesses historically based on a top-down, gatekeeper mentality, it’s difficult to accept the fact consumers have now taken full control of the future. To understand 2023, let’s consider a few of the things we know about today’s consumers.

• They are willing to pay a premium for brands important to them but expect commodity pricing for everything else. Though increasingly rare, brand loyalty is the single most valuable attribute any media company can hope to achieve.
• Most consumers understand that watching commercials is a form of payment and are willing to do so on a reasonable basis, but they hate extended breaks. Television stations, cable networks and ad-supported streamers alike will do well to keep this in mind.
• Consumers constantly interact with a wide range of media, from music services to shopping sites. This matters because the real competition among media providers will be for consumer time.
• Today’s consumer is a savvy shopper who works the system, subscribing to and dropping pay services at will. Consumers are also keenly aware of their total monthly media costs and factor that knowledge into every subscribing decision.

The bottom line for 2023 is that consumers will determine who survives, who fails and who breaks out as the next runaway success. As my friend Professor John Lavine is fond of saying: “If you want to know the future, look to the self-interests of the people involved.”

Who will lead and who will lose in 2023? As this year unfolds, watch consumer behavior to find out.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post The Big Shakeout Of 2023 appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price: Emily, during the early 1980s, one of my jobs at Magid was overseeing the marketing department at KSTP. One day, Jeanne Kosek, KSTP’s promotion manager, called and asked me to meet a tape editor in the news department who had applied for an open producer position. She was a recent college graduate and Jeanne liked her. It was you.

On my next trip to the station, Jeanne asked you to come up to her office for an interview.  You said you were sorry, but you were on a deadline and had to finish your work first. I liked that answer, so I said to Jeanne, “Let’s go down to the news department and interview her there.”

You and I had an immediate connection. You were smart, outgoing with a big smile, professionally oriented, a good writer and not intimidated by a consultant; all things I value in a person, so I immediately signed off on hiring you.

Emily Barr: You were the first person in that newsroom who did not refer to me as “the intern.” You treated me like an adult and made me feel like I truly had something to offer even though I knew next to nothing about writing promos. I ran every piece of copy by you and when you did not like a script or idea, you carefully redirected me with humor and compassion. You made me feel like I could do anything.

Hank Price: You turned out to be the real deal. You were clearly going places and wanted to learn everything possible. You could also be a bit of a smart ass, which I’ve been known to be, so our connection grew. You were never afraid to say what you really thought.

My natural style is to coach, which fit well with your style of being friendly, frank and driven, so we were an instinctive fit. The relationship naturally progressed from there.

Emily Barr: When I left KSTP for D.C., you were instrumental in my getting that next opportunity. You gave me a reference and encouraged me to lean into the new role even when I was not all that thrilled with my new boss. Six months after my arrival, the promo manager then left to take a job across the street and lo and behold, you threw your hat into the ring.

I lobbied station management to hire you and we found ourselves working together again a short while later. A year later, you went across the street to WUSA and then I left for Houston (in part because of your positive reference) and my first management job. I considered you to be my guardian angel and since you don’t know when the next one will come along, I maintained that relationship like it was gold.

Hank Price: Your second job was as a producer at WJLA in Washington. I remember you called one day and said, “My boss just resigned, and I know you want to get off the road.  You should apply.” I did, and for the first time we were working together in the same office.  My wife and our kids got to know you and we later all went to your wedding, so there was also a family element. Since then, we’ve remained strong friends. We don’t talk every week, but every time we do talk it’s like picking up a conversation in progress.

Emily Barr: In all these years, I’ve never lost faith in the value of this relationship. But I will admit that once when we were colleagues in D.C., you invited me over for dinner with your family. You insisted that I learn how to change my own oil and spark plugs, which we did in your driveway. The car coughed and sputtered, and it wound up costing me a pretty penny to get it fixed, so I guess you could say I doubted your Mr. Fix-it capabilities! I would also add that when we later found ourselves as rival general managers in Chicago (you at WBBM and me at WLS), I knew we had to limit our friendship for the sake of our respective roles. Needless to say, we remained cordial but distant in that period.

Hank Price: Yes, there was a time when we didn’t feel it would be appropriate to talk because we were running rival stations in Chicago, but the relationship was always there.

Emily Barr: Over the years, our mentor/mentee relationship has paid off so many times, but there’s one specific when I arrived in Baltimore [WMAR] to take on the role of broadcast operations and programming, I recall you calling me and instructing me to grab a piece of paper and a pen. You told me you were going to tell me everything I needed to know about syndication and programming because understood so little then. I wrote it all down and consulted that paper regularly for about six months when I realized I finally understood it. That was an incredibly gracious gesture that truly helped me adjust to a big new role.

Hank Price: As far as paying off, this may sound corny, but it has been very satisfying to watch from the sidelines as you developed you full leadership potential, influencing many others for good along the way. One of you great strengths is that in some ways you are that same person I met in an edit booth 40 years ago.

Emily Barr: Thinking over all that time and the best advice you’ve given me, I’ve admired that you are a very ethical individual and always told the truth, even if it was hard for the other person to hear. While we have rarely agreed on politics, you have always advised me to be the very best version of myself and to not worry about what others might think.

I deeply respect your values and perspective and have always tried to follow your example. You taught me to credit others and allow the credit to come back to me rather than seeking it out — that took time to sink in but was by far the best advice you could impart.

Hank Price: Emily, I’d have to say your own best advice to me was to apply for the job at WJLA. I took that advice, and it changed my career course.

Emily Barr: As will happen, our roles have sometimes reversed over the years. I recall having dinner with you when I was a GM in Chicago and you had left for Hearst. You were back in town teaching at Northwestern, and I remember you asking me for advice and thinking it was so weird but lovely that we had reached that point. I also believe I bought dinner that night, which definitely made me feel like a grown-up!

Hank Price: At some point long ago, our relationship, at least in my mind, moved from mentor/mentee to colleague and friend. It was clear to me from the beginning that you were destined for great things, though I had no idea what.

When you headed Graham, you collected experiences I hadn’t, so that was a role reversal. You have been a great resource to me on policy, network relations and other industry issues, all of which we both have strong opinions on.

Emily Barr: You know Hank, when younger people in this industry are looking for a mentor today, I think they need to look around their workplace or within the industry and see whose work and style they admire. If you are able to connect, I’d ask them how they were able to succeed and see if you can get a conversation going that could well lead to an ongoing relationship. Both individuals need to see value in the relationship for it to blossom.

Hank Price: I’d add they need to meet as many people as possible who are successful in the kind of job they aspire to. Call them up and ask for a short meeting to seek their professional advice. Do this until you find someone who seems genuinely interested in your career.

Once you find a potential mentor, build the relationship slowly. Send a note of thanks recapping what you learned from the meeting. Ask if you can call on the person for advice from time to time. After an appropriate interval, ask for another meeting to report how you have used the person’s advice, and you are off and running.

Never forget that you are building a professional relationship, so don’t be overbearing. Don’t ask for too much time and never ask for a job.

Emily Barr: Hank, reflecting on our relationship there are times when I wish our actual time working together in Minneapolis and D.C. lasted longer, but I cherish the time we did have together and know it had a profound influence on me personally and professionally. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Hank Price: I’d love to say you and I planned all this, but God puts people in your life for a reason. I’m sure there are things I could have done differently along the way, but the fact is I cherish our relationship.

Emily Barr is the former president and CEO of Graham Media Group.

Hank Price is a media consultant. In a 30-year general management career, he led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Emily Barr And Hank Price: How Mentoring Made Us appeared first on TV News Check.

Affiliates are also looking beyond a potential hour of news at 10 toward creating their own programming or buying syndicated fare. That kind of content only makes economic sense with a national footprint, thus the desire for all three networks to reduce their prime schedules.

Sensing the start of an affiliate tsunami, CBS’s George Cheeks felt compelled to issue a statement saying CBS is still committed to the 10 p.m. hour.

So far ABC has held its cards tightly, but not joining Cheeks in a public repudiation of the idea is also a message.

Why would CBS not welcome the same expense savings as NBC and perhaps ABC? Having the only network programming at 10 might create a ratings advantage for both CBS and their affiliates, but there may also be a bigger reason.

Reducing primetime to two hours could be the first step in resetting the entire network-affiliate relationship in a way that would shift power to the affiliates.

Currently, affiliates collect vast amounts of cash from cable and satellite retransmission fees, but most of that money ends up at the networks in the form of program payments. The networks are in a strong negotiating position because of the value of primetime programming and the high-profile sporting events they supply. Any change in that dynamic could affect the future distribution of those payments.

Controlling the 10 p.m. time period could also lead to stations eventually programming the entire three hours of primetime as a syndicated/local block. Instead of just station breaks, affiliates would own the majority of inventory. That would relieve the networks from the burden of producing primetime programming, but also loosen the chokehold they have on affiliate program payments.

Unlike the glut of news inventory, quality prime is highly sought by ad agencies and local clients. In this case, more is better, especially if there is a corresponding reduction in network prime inventory.

Under this scenario the network-station relationship would not go away. Networks would still provide sports, news and other special programming. They would also still receive programming payments, but not at the levels they do today.

Before you scoff that affiliate control of prime would lead to nothing but game shows and reality, consider that the traditional networks are already sending a clear message to Wall Street that their highest quality programming will now go on their streaming platforms, not their linear networks. Affiliates, who still believe in the value of linear broadcasting, might find their best bet for preserving primetime quality is to control it themselves.

One thing we’ve learned from the streaming world is that any organization can now compete for premier programming. Large affiliate groups have the same opportunity as networks and streamers to structure production deals. In case you doubt that, consider the following:

• Sinclair Broadcast Group has a new creative partnership with CSI creator Anthony Zuiker to produce new content for the group and likely syndication.
• Gray Television’s huge Assembly Atlanta project will bring Hollywood facilities to Georgia, allowing the company to do far more than fulfill their NBCUniversal commitment.
• Nexstar’s acquisition of the CW Network puts it squarely in the programming arena.
• Hearst Media Production group has greatly expanded its development efforts in both Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C., under veteran innovator Frank Biancuzzo.
• Byron Allen’s roots are in program production and syndication.

Should affiliates eventually control the entire primetime block, Amazon, Apple, Netflix or even Google could easily expand into the program distribution business. Amazon is already experimenting with the NFL, so major sports leagues and conferences could also come into play, further eroding the networks negotiating power.

Perhaps the best thing about affiliates gaining control of the 10 p.m. hour is the opportunity to slowly change the entire network-affiliate relationship without upsetting the current system.

No one wants to destroy the relationship between networks and their affiliates; quite the opposite. In a perfect world the current system would continue, but the reality of streaming means the networks are no longer willing to play by the old rules. That leaves stations with the untenable position of paying a fortune for what is going to become second-class programming.

If the network-station relationship is to be recalculated, stations must gain enough leverage to negotiate fairer financial agreements along with some control of prime.

For the moment, CBS is trying the put its finger in the 10 p.m. dike, but affiliates are sensing the opportunity to start leveling the playing field and thus will not be easily dissuaded.

Whatever the eventual network-affiliate relationship looks like, it is clear station groups want more control over the future than they have now. Giving affiliates an initial hour of primetime could be the start of that new relationship.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Axing Primetime At 10 Could Reset Network-Station Relationships appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

It seems almost certain now that sometime in 2023 NBC will cut primetime programming from three hours to two as part of an overall reallocation of resources from the broadcast network to Peacock.

With NBC serving as pathfinder, ABC and CBS are no doubt looking at their own options, though no one can predict at this point what decisions either might make.

Restructuring NBC likely has been on the table for some time, but urgency was added by Nielsen’s August announcement that streaming viewership had passed cable and blown by broadcast. That report was not unexpected, but a shocking announcement at the recent 2022 Code Conference came out of the blue.

Ruminating on the future, conference speaker and former Disney chief Bob Iger said “linear and satellite TV is marching toward a great precipice, and it will be pushed off… I can’t tell you when, but it goes away.” Like a Trojan horse, Iger had opened the city gates to a hoard of analyst predictions, none of them good, some outrageous.

As if on cue, last week Wells Fargo downgraded Paramount, citing concerns about the company’s linear businesses being able to support the long-term growth of streaming. Wells Fargo was unkind in its predictions, cutting Paramount’s price target from $40 to $19.

Comcast’s problem is not price target, but actual stock value, which has dropped 45% over the past 12 months. This is in large part due to the company’s cable business, but Peacock’s slow start has not been helpful.

Why talk so much about stock? If you want to know where our industry is heading, keep your eye on one metric: stock valuations. The major media companies are fixated on Wall Street and right now it cares about one thing: streaming. Never mind the billions being generated by linear television, Wall Street always looks to the future.

How does one evaluate streaming companies? Revenue and profit of course matter, but the big factor, more than anything else, is paid subscribers. With that in mind, let’s look at the relative subscriber strength of four major companies:

• Netflix: 220 million
• Disney+: 152 million
• Paramount+: 43 million
• Peacock: 15 million

If the standard among the three owners of traditional networks is Disney’s 152 million subscribers, 43 million is bad. Fifteen million is a disaster.

It was in this atmosphere that NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell sat down last week with a reporter from his own CNBC network to talk about the future of his company, especially his hoped-for growth of Peacock. This was not a casual interview, but a planned message to Wall Street using a tame employee to ask questions about calculated areas of discussion.

Shell came across as a friendly and reasonable executive whose primary concern was investor value (read stock price). He wanted everyone to know off the top that Peacock had grown from 12 to 15 million subscribers and that up to 30 million sometimes watched the free version.

It was fascinating to hear Shell list “linear” as an asset, along with sports, film and original product. He said linear is still “an incredibly important business … a part of the overall ecosystem … it’s not over.” I’m sure those were reassuring words to employees of Comcast’s linear business at 30 Rockefeller Center, also known as NBC.

When asked about cutting back prime to 10 p.m., Shell said: “If we’re being prudent operators … if you are allocating a bunch of resources to one part of the business, you have to take a look at resources allocated to another.”

Acknowledging that NBC has some “great shows and money at 10 .p.m. … we have to make decisions … as our investors would want us to.” Shell said he was not “ready to make a decision” but would do that based on “whatever the numbers show.”

Translation: NBC is planning to restructure its network business. The elimination of 10 p.m. programming will be part of that restructuring, but there could also be cuts in other areas. Nothing was said about protecting news, so expect NBC News to bear part of the burden.

Shell was not asked about the $1 billion dollars he recently ordered cut from NBC to support programming on Peacock, but that elephant was clearly in the room and part of the equation.

We don’t know the timing of NBC’s upcoming announcement, but the CNBC interview, along with a recently leaked story to the Wall Street Journal, seem designed to prepare both the market and affiliates for major changes.

As I’ve written before, when NBC does announce a cut in prime from three hours to two, there will be pressure on CBS and ABC to do the same thing. It is too early to know what decisions either network might make, but keep in mind all owners feel pressure from Wall Street to advance their streaming investments.

Whatever actual announcement NBC makes, the entire affiliate body and O&O group will find their businesses changed.

If television stations are going to bear the burden of losing one third of their prime-time inventory, they will certainly want a full hour of news inventory at 10, while retaining their current newscasts at 11, something many Fox stations already do. The network will likely want to move its own latenight programming up to 11, so a negotiation will be in order.

One must also raise the question of the huge affiliate-to-network program payments that are based on retransmission revenue. It seems reasonable that a change in prime would allow stations to ask for some relief, though any reduction is unlikely to happen.

NBC will not make an announcement until all elements are in place and negotiations finalized, but if I was running a network affiliate, I would begin to think about plans for an extended late newscast.

As I wrote in a recent column, the mass addition of local news inventory is a mixed blessing, especially for weaker stations unable to command a premium. Could this finally lead to a thinning of the news herd? Reducing network prime is a step in that direction.

Whatever NBC’s final announcement, it will fundamentally alter the industry, a process that began when the networks launched their own streamers.

There are many wild cards in this equation, CBS and ABC among them, so consequences and outcomes are unpredictable. The one thing we can be sure of is to expect more change to come.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss

The post With NBC Near Certain To Cut Primetime, Prepare For A 10 P.M. News appeared first on TV News Check.

You might have watched the coverage live, you might have set your DVR, you might have even chosen an app, but however you watched, the original source was likely one of the traditional networks.

Television’s ability to cover major news events, be they celebration or disaster, is a baseline competency so strongly developed we take it for granted. Like running water, we assume it will always be there when needed. This is especially true for local television.

Serving as an informer, a beacon, and a positive force, not only during big events but also in daily newscasts, is one of over-the-air television’s most critical roles. No other medium has the power to impact society in such a profound way.

This ability to bring people together around common interests is also a window into the future of local stations.

Earlier this year, a prominent industry leader told me that he expects most entertainment programming will eventually move to the on-demand world of streaming. As that happens, he also expects over-the-air television to become more oriented toward information, big events and live programming. He is already being proven right.

Because the streaming world is unhampered by licenses or other government regulations, there is no appetite to invest in news, public affairs or anything else that does not fit smoothly into the on-demand model. That means all investment can be directed toward entertainment product.

The first sign of this new world came in February when Viacom changed its name to Paramount. In its official announcement, the new company detailed a broad range of programming with one notable exception: CBS News was not mentioned.

There have been many signs since then, the latest being Comcast’s decision to cut $1 billion out of NBC to fund greater program development for Peacock. We are not told what this will mean to NBC News.

Meanwhile, the syndication market is becoming an afterthought. With Hollywood desperate to fill the demand for new streaming series, it seems unlikely syndication will be a priority anytime soon.

As a result, when Ellen DeGeneres ended her long syndication run earlier this month there was no obvious new show to take her place. That lack of fresh programming is one reason so many stations launched 4 p.m. newscasts in Ellen’s former slot.

Those newscasts were not first to the time period. That happened back in 2011 when Oprah Winfrey exited. In fact, local news has been expanding in all time periods for the past two decades.

There are now so many hours of morning and afternoon news, one wonders how close we are to saturation. If the networks choose to cut back primetime, as NBC has suggested, even more local news will be added.

The best station owners understand that to make this work, they will have to broaden their offerings beyond countless hours of the same thing. Other companies will choose the easier and cheaper route of expanding hours by simply repeating their current product. The question then becomes “How much local news is too much?” I don’t know, but we are going to find out.

Once we reach over-saturation of news programming, weaker television stations will starve because oversupply always results in lower pricing. The only way to fix that problem is to decrease supply. Think about that for a minute: How do you decrease the supply of news inventory in a market? The only way I can think of is for some stations to exit the news business. If this happens, it will be because of economic necessity, not by choice.

No one has a crystal ball, but we are moving quickly into a new era of television that will be very different from what we all grew up with, and thanks to the explosion of streaming it is happening faster than anyone expected. Syndication will still play a part in the new era, but local programming and local events will expand to become even more important than they are now.

The good news is that leading companies will have the opportunity to literally reinvent local television. On the other hand, last place stations might want to start thinking about alternate business models.

As I’ve said before, the future will bring big winners and big losers. With consumer churn at an all-time high and advertising facing a flat year at best in 2023, we may see those winners and losers much sooner than anyone imagined.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Too Much Local News? appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

It was Saturday morning, just before Labor Day, and shoppers at the local Walmart in Tupelo, Miss., were filling their baskets. Suddenly, an announcement came over the PA asking everyone to evacuate. A stolen twin-engine aircraft was circling the area, threatening to crash into the store.

In this age of terrorism, once can only imagine what those people were thinking.

Thankfully, Allen Media’s WTVA Tupelo was on the air almost immediately. Over the following hours, as the pilot flew over community after community, often at dangerously low levels, anchor Craig Ford and chief meteorologist Matt Laubhan tracked his every move, sharing a wealth of details and the latest video. Many saw the coverage on their television screens, others on their phones, but all shared the experience of reliable information in real time.

I also watched WTVA’s live coverage and was impressed. This was the kind of incident that could have easily created panic, but in my opinion Ford and Laubhan’s professionalism and calm demeanor kept that from happening. It would have been easy to sensationalize the story, but neither Ford nor Laubhan did. They stuck to the facts, demonstrating why people still trust local television more than any other media.

Bringing in Laubhan as a primary face of the coverage was a smart move. As a meteorologist in a tornado-prone market, Laubhan knows the area well, so he was able to give exact locations as the plane wandered from place to place. Using live maps from Flight Aware, Laubhan reported the plane’s every twist and turn as it wandered across northeast Mississippi. The Flight Aware map looked like a child’s Crayola squiggles, making no sense other than to indicate the plane was in dangerous hands.

While the folk at WTVA were doing their job, the kind of public service only a local television station can perform, something else was also happening. Neighbors called neighbors to tell them about the threat and to say they should turn on ch. 9. As Laubhan updated the plane’s location, people poured out of their houses to take pictures and videos, many of which were sent to WTVA and aired.

WTVA also had reporters on the ground, doing their best to keep up with the airplane’s ever-changing position. When authorities were finally able to talk the pilot into landing in a rural field, a WTVA reporter was on the scene with compelling cellphone video almost immediately after state troopers secured the plane.

After the pilot was taken into custody, it turned out he was a ground crew member at a local airport, not a pilot, which perhaps accounted for his erratic and dangerous flight pattern. He seemed surprised that his threat to crash into a populated area had caused such disruption.

Watching all this, I couldn’t help thinking how different things could have been without a local station on the job. Lack of accurate information creates fear. Rumors without facts cause panic. A local television station kept those things from happening. No other form of media could have done as well.

WTVA has always been one of those stations that plays larger than its market size. Because the station is affiliated with NBC, ABC and Fox, it is also a testament to the positive case for in-market consolidation. Without revenue from multiple networks, one wonders if WTVA could afford to provide the same level of news service.

Looking back, perhaps the best thing about that day is a reminder that even as our business goes through radical change, even as the networks decide they have other priorities, even as people seem to think the whole world only cares about Tik Tok, we are reminded that the core mission of local television remains healthy and intact.

Throughout our nation, local TV stations are always on the alert, aways ready to make sure people are not only informed, but kept safe. WTVA did that admirably, but the same thing could have happened in almost any other community.

As it has done so many times in the past, local television rose to the challenge and served the public. We can be confident it will continue to do so in the future.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post How A Local News Station Prevented Panic appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

The affiliates personally liked Jay, everyone liked Jay, but television is a business that cuts no slack, so NBC quickly returned to traditional programming. Sensing a rare opportunity to change the paradigm, a number of stations lobbied NBC to shrink prime time, giving the 10:00 p.m. hour back to affiliates for late news.

I was running an NBC affiliate at the time and loved the idea. Fox competitors were the only stations with newscasts at 10:00 and they were making a fortune. Going to head-to-head in the time period would level the playing field. Most importantly, a one-hour newscast would double late news inventory, nothing to sneeze at.

NBC, of course, decided against the idea and that was that, but in our business no idea is ever dead, especially when there is money to be saved, which why NBC ran up a trial balloon in the Wall Street Journal last week, making sure to say affiliates had not been consulted and of course such a move would have no effect on their undying commitment to quality programming.

What NBC is not saying is that their first commitment is to Peacock, now starting at just $4.99 a month with a free set of dinnerware. OK, I made the dinnerware up. In any case, we can be sure that if this move happens Peacock will continue to program the 10:00 p.m. time period, competing directly with the network’s own affiliates.

Who knows? Maybe affiliates will still like the idea, but there are also reasons to give them pause before supporting such a radical change; the most important being there is much more news inventory in the market than back in 2009. Will adding even more still be seen as a bonanza? If so, then the decision will be made based on that factor alone.

If NBC does give back the 10:00 p.m. hour, don’t think affiliates will gladly allow Jimmy Fallon to start early. Many Fox stations program the entire 10:00 to 11:30 p.m. time period with local news, something NBC affiliates would want to match. That means Fallon would stay at his current starting time.

Perhaps the biggest question of all is about NBC’s strategy for the future. Do they have one, or are they so blinded by streaming that the 10:00 p.m. idea is another sign they no longer see local stations as long-term partners? That would be a very bad decision for both parties.

There is also the question of reaction from ABC and CBS. Would affiliates of those networks demand their own 10:00 p.m. start? One suspects both networks would gladly comply for the cost savings alone, not to mention their own commitments to streaming. If affiliates of all four networks start local news at 10:00 p.m. has anyone gained anything?

Whatever happens, we are clearly in a time of radical change. One can hardly wait to see the next shoe drop.

The post To Kill 10 O’Clock Primetime, What Is NBC Really Thinking? appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Today, WLBT is a model for race relations, but in the 1960s things were very different. The original owners had worked zealously against minority rights, using the station’s airways to actively promote segregation.

Things got so bad back then that in 1969 the Federal Communications Commission charged WLBT with what came down to blatant racism, revoking the station’s license. This was not a free speech issue. WLBT had encouraged viewers to defy the government, break the law and mistreat their fellow human beings. Among other things, the station had refused to carry any program that showed African Americans in a positive light. NBC’s Julia, for example, was preempted because it starred Diahann Carroll.

After the revocation, station owners held on for several years through legal challenges. They also tried to clean up their act, but eventually went down in history as the only owners ever to lose their license for racism. A community nonprofit ended up with the station, followed by other owners, all of whom worked hard to make WLBT a different place.

Today, WLBT is an example of how to do race relations right, reflecting the needs, interests and employee makeup of a largely African American community. The same is true for the other stations in town, now one of the most community-reflective markets in the country. No one sees this as unusual. It is the normal way of doing business in Jackson. That is also a legacy of WLBT’s past.

As positive as those things are, to Ted Fortenberry, a native Mississippian, WLBT had an obligation to do even more. That’s when he came up with the big idea.

The television industry is experiencing a shortage of qualified new employees, especially minority ones. What if WLBT did something about that shortage? Not just the usual internships, but a major program partnered with Mississippi’s five historically African American universities to feed fully trained, highly qualified minority graduates into Gray Television’s 113 markets.

Fortenberry’s first call was to his boss, Sandy Breland, a senior vice president with Gray. Breland loved the idea and the two began to bat ideas around. The big idea became even bigger.

By the time the proposal got to Gray President/Co-CEO Pat LaPlatney and EVP/Chief Operating Officer Bob Smith it was a major program with its own facility offering hands-on professional training. Doing it right would require a significant investment, something the Gray executives were happy to approve. The big idea was now becoming a reality.

The Gray Media Training Center will be a first of its kind, housed in a state-of-the-art million-dollar building connected to WLBT’s downtown studios. WLBT employee and Jackson State University graduate Michael White has been named director of operations.

At the groundbreaking and luncheon two weeks ago, LaPlatney pointed out the irony of the center’s location. “In launching the media training center at WLBT, a building that one time stood as a monument to ignorance, we’re using that facility to educate and help train young people. What they will learn will allow them to use fact and truth to help inform citizens of Mississippi and beyond at a time when facts and truth are needed more than ever.”

At the same event, Breland talked about Gray’s commitment to train minority students in all aspects of television, but she also asked that they be “All in … work hard, ask questions, be curious, find your passion. We want you to be ready when opportunity presents itself.”

As for Ted Fortenberry, he points to his own experience growing up in Mississippi and his struggle in college to get the kind of experience that would lead to a job in television saying “Somebody gave me a shot to get that hands-on training. That’s what this program is all about, giving these students an opportunity.”

At its best, television is a business of big ideas. For Ted Fortenberry, his big idea has now become a big reality.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post WLBT And Gray Television Do The Right Thing appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

If you follow The Gauge, Nielsen’s media tracking report, you know that last month streaming captured 31.9% of total viewers, compared to 24.4% for broadcast.

Seasonal viewing comes into play, but one cannot escape the fact that streaming continues to grow at the expense of both broadcast and cable. With network owners pouring money into their streaming products, the problem will continue to grow. For local television to thrive in the future, it must find new ways to expand audiences.

Expansion is a hard thing to do right now because another reality is that the FCC continues to stand in the way of modern business models that would revitalize local television, adding new products and generating new audiences.

Right now, most television markets have at least four stations producing what is essentially the same local news product, all competing for the same audience. Some stations do a great job, some do a poor one, but the very presence of so much similar product, filling so many hours of the day on so many different stations, cannot help being a factor in the decline in television viewership.

The logical answer to this problem is to narrow the number of stations producing local news.

A good friend and fine broadcaster who is committed to excellence in local news told me just last week that he hates the idea of losing any news voice. I understand his point, but the economic and coverage cases for local consolidation are overwhelming.

Almost every market has at least one player just sort of hanging on, committed to news only because it is the key to political ad billing. Without political, some of those newscasts would be gone already. Unless the Top Four rule is changed, many of those stations will eventually have to exit news the hard way, possibly during the next recession.

The economic case for consolidation is strong, but I think the case for democracy is even stronger. Right now, television news departments cover the same stories, often with the same leads, same live shots and pretty much the same body copy. That means resources that could be used to expand news coverage are tied up in duplicated effort. Stepping back, that does not make sense.

What if instead of four stations doing news, there were two? Before you clutch your heart, there is a case to be made that content would increase.

Let’s assume the two surviving stations were the currently leading ones with strong commitments to local news and to their communities. Sure, they might still have the same lead stories, but they would also have the resources to add much broader and richer individual content, especially on their digital platforms, something that must happen if the user base is to grow.

Yes, they would generate more money, but that means they would also have the resources to go deep, creating a breadth of local content newspapers can no longer provide. This would not be simply replacement of newspapers, but something far richer and more compelling: hyperlocal, multiplatform, video-rich, some of it user-generated. Each platform could play to its strengths, not simply repurpose television content.

Why do this? There is a vast and untouched local audience of all ages waiting to be served. Many members of that potential audience have a much broader idea of what constitutes news than those of us still locked in the straitjacket of traditionalism. They care about their local world and are eager to consume information about it, but they will not come to us. We must go to them with products and platforms that serve their needs.

Why would stations make such a commitment? Because that is where the growth is; the economics make it compelling. It would only take one station. The other would then be forced to compete.

None of this will be easy. To build the future we must have a paradigm shift. That will happen only if we also have an economic shift that encourages investment. Sadly, that shift is being blocked by the FCC.

For longer than most people would imagine possible, the FCC has dithered about the Top Four rule as if it were a sacred scroll instead of a relic of the past. The rule was put in place during a time when television dominated media. The old saying was that stations had basement printing presses turning out cash. Today, those presses are full of rust and local television competes in a sea of many other providers, but the regulations remain stagnant.

Local television is the most important information force in America; one that represents the heart and soul of most communities. It is a force that not only informs and brings people together but is also the last bastion of citizen trust. If all that were not enough, time after time it has also saved lives.

If the critical role local television plays is to be preserved, we must have an orderly transition to the future. The FCC can — and should — ensure that future by removing the Top Four rule this year. If not, market forces will eventually reduce the number of stations producing news with unpredictable results. For the well-being of local communities across the nation, the FCC must act now.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post As The FCC Dithers On The Top 4 Rule, The Case For Consolidation Grows Stronger appeared first on TV News Check.

Exclusive research has revealed that readers do not want to be lectured or told what to think.

Thanks to this revelation, Gannett now believes that the time-honored newspaper tradition of taking editorial positions at odds with readers, printing national columnists that tell only one side of a story, and talking down to readers, could be causing some people to cancel their subscriptions.

Among other Earth-shaking revelations:

• Readers can’t always distinguish opinion pieces from straight news reports.
• Readers are tired of the same old partisan talking points.
• Syndicated columns are not widely read.

There is more, but you see where this is going: Fewer national opinion pieces, less preaching, remove opinion from news stories, emphasize local.

Not surprisingly, Gannett is facing a wave of protest from some old guard staffers, including charges that the company’s new attitude is being driven by cost cutting. In reply, Gannett says it is merely implementing “research-backed ideas for a smarter, sharper, more constructive discussion with our local news brands at the center.”

I share this information not only to make fun of Gannett, but because whoever did Gannett’s research is telling them why local television is now the nation’s most trusted form of media. But that does not mean stations can afford to rest on their laurels. Trust must be earned every day.

Today’s news consumers are smart. They know opinion, preaching and lectures when they see them, including on our own networks. If we want to retain their trust, we must never forget that viewers see forming an opinion as their prerogative, not ours. If one station has a reputation for presenting the full story and others do not, that station will usually be the most trusted.

We might discount what newspapers are trying to do as a last gasp, but what we cannot discount is the fact other media organizations are seeing the light and jumping on the trust bandwagon. If you haven’t seen NewsNation lately, it has become a sophisticated product with strong news balance. CNN is also moving back to the center with an emphasis on fairness and balance.

Other media entities want their brands to be trusted as much as ours; therefore, we must protect our brands by constantly emphasizing our hallmarks of fact-based, balanced local coverage.

Or we could simply steal Gannett’s research: fewer national opinion pieces, less preaching, remove opinion from news stories, emphasize local.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Television Lessons From A Newspaper Company appeared first on TV News Check.

Some in management will dismiss this reporter’s treatise as one person’s bad experience, but before you do that, know that I’ve heard versions of the same story from multiple others. And don’t mistake this for just another millennial problem. Most of those I’ve talked with are second-job professionals who have worked hard to earn their current positions. This discontent is not the case in every company or television station, but enough to matter.

Certainly, our entire industry is exhausted, something I’ve heard from all levels, but this problem runs deeper. Top tier television stations, no matter the market size, run on energy, competition and pride. Success always begins with leadership, but no leader can change station dynamics if key employees feel undervalued.

This is not a sudden or new problem. It has been coming for many years.

From the very beginning of local television, there were so many new college graduates seeking jobs that the law of supply and demand kept entry salaries down. Small markets offered a start and critically important experience in exchange for very low pay. Candidates knew that barely livable wages were the price of admission and accepted that reality. I did this myself and can confirm that even in my day struggling to make ends meet was a tough burden.

People accepted the system because those who stuck it out and learned their trade well could count on making it to medium markets where the rewards were better, and those who excelled could make even more money over time. Some of the best would even end up in major markets.

Over the past few years, things have been changing, especially in the medium markets. Many reporters and producers now feel their salaries no longer reflect their experience or job responsibilities, and the problem is not limited to those positions. Some news directors say the same thing about their own salaries. When enough staff members feel unappreciated, other problems always arise. The first casualty is usually momentum.

Then there is the other salary-related problem: The well of qualified new applicants no longer runs deep.

Many of today’s best college graduates in journalism and communications don’t think of television as their first career choice. Hearing of low pay and a hard future, they seek jobs in the alternate media they have grown up with, a route perceived as more exciting and lucrative.

It’s hard for those of us who love broadcasting to acknowledge that working in our business is no longer every student’s goal, but that is the new reality. One dean at a prominent journalism school recently told me that many students now have trouble learning to read a teleprompter because they are not used to watching television news.

As our anonymous columnist pointed out, why should someone take a low-paying, long-hours job, when they can try to become a social media influencer or TikTok star? If that fails, there are many other avenues to explore. And it’s not just new graduates, mid-level professionals are leaving for the same reasons.

Then there is the question of quality. Sure, it’s possible for an MMJ to shoot, write, edit and voice multiple stories in a day, not to mention do live live shots, but it is very difficult to do all those things while also producing a first-class product. Assuming a reporter wants to do great work, and most do, the burnout factor of what I’ve been calling assembly line journalism is high, especially when a person feels underpaid.

The pressure on producers can be just as great. Producers are one-person show planners, writers, story re-editors, font and graphic producers, assistant producers, talent hand holders and one of only two people in most control rooms. That makes them also assistant directors, live shot coordinators and any other job the director cannot handle. By my count, over the past two decades producers have taken on the jobs of at least five other people.

As I said earlier, these issues have been building for a long time, so why are they arising now? We seem to have reached a tipping point. I think the pandemic has something to do with it, but that is not the only reason. Some stations appear to have lost their sense of mission, their expectation of greatness and that important, but hugely underrated element called fun. When I speak with people, even some general managers, I often hear “the fun has gone out of it.”

Everyone gets the fact that technology has changed jobs and there is no going back. What they don’t get is why employees are not rewarded for their increased responsibilities and workload.

There are, of course, exceptions. One leading company, known for treating employees well, reviews every employee’s pay and adjusts when needed to make sure staff members are properly compensated. Another company has recently increased producer salaries in many stations. There is no question that this kind of proactive fairness results in major dividends. Employees who feel valued and appreciated return that loyalty many times over.

Now would be a great time for other station owners to listen thoughtfully to what their employees are really thinking. Do key workers feel they are paid fairly? Do stations have a top tier of professionals who set the pace for others? Do people believe they are working for a career company worth staying with?

Thanks to the interconnection of social media, employees already have these answers. Even new college graduates sometimes tell me which companies they hope to work for and which they would like to avoid.

Like so many other things, all of this comes down to a CEO issue. If anything is to change, it must start at the CEO level. If CEOs take this problem seriously, they will find out what is really happening in many of their newsrooms. I hope they do, because the future of our industry is at stake.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post An Anonymous Reporter Speaks For Many appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Back in the day when the network upfronts were about networks, you could always tell who was in first place and who was last by watching the presentations. The No. 1 network would be arrogant and dismissive of all competitors.  The other networks would make ugly jokes about whoever was in first place, predicting their own imminent move there. Every year was going to be “The year of (insert any network name here).”

If that truism remains in effect, then apparently Netflix, which does not have a linear product, does not currently sell advertising and had no presence at the upfronts, is now the No. 1 network. All it took was an announcement by Netflix to their employees that the service was considering an ad-supported tier for the lemmings at the organizations formerly known as NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox to rediscover the value of commercial inventory.

Like prospectors hearing there was gold in California, the networks pivoted on a dime from complete concentration on the quest for direct payment, to their former adoration of advertising, using the upfronts to profess undying love and loyalty to all things sponsored. “Subscribers? What subscribers? We just care about advertising” they cooed.

Of course, the upfronts are targeted to ad agencies, so we should expect the presentations to be tailored to that audience. But reading the various press reports, one cannot escape the impression that by lumping all ad venues together, any sense of unique value related to brand was lost.

Perhaps unique value doesn’t matter anymore. If it did, the networks would not have avoided the uncomfortable fact that most of those impressions they are selling are delivered through their traditional affiliate partners. These are partners that can still make or break a program’s success, not to mention that other forgotten fact that a spot running on a local affiliate can be more valuable than one on Bravo. Forgive me for digressing into reality.

Contrast all of this with local stations that have been in the multiplatform business for a long time, making quite a bit of money by selling the value of their local brands. Station digital products, especially mobile apps, offer stations unique selling propositions, driven by the power of their brands. Stations also do quite well selling third-party digital advertising that has increased value because the sellers have direct relationships with local merchants.

Local stations also have the unique value of over the air, a service that continues to see steady growth and does not have to wait for the promise of NextGen to have real value. OTA produces loyal audiences on multiple channels right now.

According to BIA, total local television/digital advertising is so important that it should top $20 billion this year, including political advertising, which is almost exclusively local. Perhaps next year stations should have their own upfronts. TVB could put it on the same week as everyone else. The theme might be “Advertising That We Know Works.”

With everyone from Disney+ to Sundance now selling spots, one must ask if there is enough ad revenue to go around? David Bloom has an insightful piece on the subject worth reading, but the short answer is probably not. Just as we are beginning to see consumers demonstrate limitations in the number of paid services households can afford, there is also a limit on the number of commercials any household is willing to absorb. We will see over time who succeeds and who fails.

Meanwhile, what does all this mean to the future of the networks? I’m not sure. Perhaps we should subscribe to Netflix’s in-house newsletter to find out.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Forget Subscribers. Now It’s All About Advertising appeared first on TV News Check.

So infatuated with streaming are the traditional networks that they seem to have forgotten what their affiliate partners bring to the table: A massive distribution system, powerful brand value and reportedly $2 billion dollars per year to each network in the form of program payments. Though it seems to have slipped their minds, the networks also know their success is directly tied to the brand strength of their affiliate bodies.

When Rupert Murdoch launched Fox back in 1986, the network struggled for survival. It wasn’t until Murdoch bought a prominent group of highly rated CBS affiliates that the network took off. These many years later, CBS in most of those markets continues to underperform because the network is now on lesser stations. More recently, powerhouse WRAL in Raleigh, N.C., switched from CBS to NBC, causing NBC for the first time in market history to contend for first place.

Why then are the networks risking their relationships with affiliates by pouring most of their attention and cash into streaming platforms while ignoring the needs of their long-time local partners? The answer is that Wall Street is obsessed with streaming. It is the latest bright, shiny object.

The problem for the traditional networks — and it is a big one — is that streamers such as Paramount+ and Peacock offer no unique brand value outside their programming. They are simply delivery systems dependent on turning out hit shows. By definition, if you are not in the brand business, you are in the commodity one.

Netflix, which had been Wall Street’s darling for years, recently made the mistake of believing it had brand value beyond its programming, thinking it could continue to raise prices even without a list of current hits. That’s one reason Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers last quarter and its stock dropped like a rock.

Disney+ is another example. Disney has a clear brand: Kids. So long as Disney+ catered to kids, it saw huge growth and was loved by Wall Street, but once that market was saturated, it stalled. “Make original programming,” chorused the stock analysts, which is another way of saying “Jump into the commodity wars.”

Then there is Prime Video. Amazon has stand-alone music and reading services, but video is bundled with free shipping. Amazon obviously believes its video streamer cannot stand on its own. Otherwise, Prime Video would have a separate monthly fee.

Clearly, streamers are only as successful as their latest releases. This need for a constant flow of actual hits, something no network or streamer can achieve, has created a desperate race to pour money into program development, because no matter how good the script, how prominent the actors, no one really knows what will grab the public’s attention. Seeing where this is leading, Discovery chief David Zaslav recently vowed to not overspend, saying his organization would be “careful and judicious,” but those words seem lost on the traditional networks. Driven by the fear of being left behind, they are in with both feet.

When you consider that the real goal is stock price, these moves are understandable. What does not make sense is why the networks seem to be going out of their way to alienate their affiliate partners. For instance, at least one network has chosen to not invite affiliates to this year’s up-front presentations, one of many signals that the networks have devalued their station relationships. It’s as if the networks are now playing a short-term stock price game rather than looking to the future.

The irony is that the networks did not have to choose between affiliates and streaming. The partnership that has worked so well for decades makes just as much sense in the streaming world because affiliates bring the one thing every streamer desperately needs: brand value, a reason to subscribe that goes beyond just the latest hit program.

The case for a partnership can be made on many levels. Station relationships run deep into their communities; their marketing engines are second to none and of course they also bring the power of local news. None of those things can be duplicated by a national service. Strong station brands also create sampling and, as we know from history, can accelerate the launch of hits.

It’s time for the networks to take the smarter course. Their affiliates are powerful potential allies. They would distinguish the network streaming services from all the other commodity offerings while adding the leverage of massive local marketing platforms. If the goal is to please Wall Street, then partnering with affiliates and their powerful local brands seems like an obvious move.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Networks Fray Rope Between Their Affiliates And Streamers appeared first on TV News Check.

The other definition of brand is determined by consumers, not businesses. A simple explanation would be to say “brand” is the sum of every interaction between the product/service and the consumer, including advertising. From these interactions, the consumer determines the brand and once defined, it becomes incredibly difficult to change because the “brand” reflects the reality of the consumer’s experience.

Brand matters because it is the only way consumers can navigate an increasingly complex, information overloaded world. Brand is a shorthand we all use every day. It is the reason we can see multiple commercials for a product, yet never even register the name.

When CNN launched in 1980 it had a unique and specific brand: 24-hour news on cable. That sounds good in 2022, but not so much at the time. Many television stations still signed off overnight in those days, so 24-hours sounded weird. Another negative was that cable was seen as a second-class service offering old movies and reruns, not the news. CNN was simply before its time.

Thus, CNN launched with much fanfare, but hardly any viewers, then struggled for an audience for its first 10 years.

Ted Turner’s brilliance was not just launching CNN but understanding its brand and then sticking with it through difficult times. That’s why unknown anchors and reporters were encouraged not to inject personality, but to keep news at the forefront. Turner’s gamble finally paid off when the Gulf War started in 1990.

The Gulf War made CNN a relevant, household name. This was the war in which the U.S. military redeemed its reputation from Vietnam, and CNN was there, live, 24-hours a day. Viewers couldn’t get enough. Who could forget CNN’s images of precision targeting or the calm voices of Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett in Baghdad talking over gunfire and bombs; an eerie echo of Edward R. Murrow in 1940.

CNN’s huge success after the Gulf War was due to one thing, the fulfillment of its original brand promise.

Of course, success always invites competitors. Had Fox News attempted to copy CNN’s brand when it launched in 1996, the effort would have failed. Fortunately for Fox, Roger Ailes was a brand genius. Ailes targeted a mindset, the idea by many consumers that traditional news no longer served them. It was classic market segmentation, but he also differentiated the network in other ways. Fox was flashy and a little sexy with an attitude that embraced personality.

MSNBC was also founded in 1996, but unlike CNN and Fox, it had no guiding innovator, so it had no clear brand. It is one of the great examples of brand failure. Without the deep pockets of NBC, MSNBC would not have survived. MSNBC gave consumers no unique reason to watch. It was irrelevant and therefore most barely knew it existed.

After a decade of merely surviving, NBC was finally smart enough to follow Fox News’s lead and stake out ownership of a market segment. The decision was an obvious one: own the left. MSNBC implemented brand’s most important lesson: the only way to change brand is to change product, radically and obviously in a way that a target group finds valuable, even if no one else does.

Fast forward to today and you know how things ended up. Fox continued to fulfill its brand promise, never wavering, until it achieved a dominant position that continues today. Fox offers a classic lesson to television stations. To gain relevancy, decide to own a market segment because you cannot be all things to all people.

MSNBC does very well in time of political turmoil or big news, but not so much during times of calm. That’s when MSNBC relies on a core group of personalities to feed the left.

As for CNN, competition has taken a heavy toll, causing the network to fall into the same trap as many television stations. CNN leadership began to throw things at the wall — personalities, long-form programming, anything that might work. Slowly, CNN pushed its core brand to the back burner, but the death knell came when the network decided to copy someone else.

Because philosophically CNN could not go right, it seemed natural to go left, but MSNBC owned the left and CNN’s new direction gave MSNBC viewers no real reason to change. Ironically, CNN.com remained true to the original brand and therefore continues to be relevant.

Today’s consumer probably sees CNN as not important to their lives, which is why no one should be surprised by the failure of CNN+. Who pays money for something that has no meaning? My guess is most consumers did not even know CNN+ existed. This is a problem that could not be solved by an advertising campaign.

The obvious thing now is for CNN to return to its roots, but a modern-day version of the core brand, not what made sense in 1980. That means in a polarized society, specifically targeting the center. Sure, it’s a small segment these days, but it is ownable and it fits CNN’s original brand. Remember, no one expected Fox to succeed, nor was MSNBC successful until it staked out a target group.

There is a great hunger among consumers for news they can trust, which is why local television, with its emphasis on straightforward local news, is now seen as their most trusted source. When it comes to national news, consumers purposely turn to media that reflects their personal biases because they do not trust the other side. Therefore, the answer for CNN is to become an obviously unbiased news source that is equally trusted by the right and the left.

Owning the center does not mean shying away from the controversial. It means telling the entire picture objectively. To do that, decision-making power must include a broad diversity of thought and philosophies. That does not mean dull, but neither does it mean talking heads shouting over each other.

I’m not suggesting owning the center would be easy. Success would require a strong philosophy and an equally strong guiding hand. Above all, CNN must deliver the goods and do so over a long period of time as it did in its first decade.

Will CNN take what seems like an obvious route to eventual success? Time will tell, but whatever it does, CNN must resurrect its original brand promise.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Why CNN+ Failed appeared first on TV News Check.

Back in 1992 when Congress created a statute enabling television stations to finally put in place a second revenue stream (other than advertising) by negotiating fees from cable and satellite companies, no one could have predicted the advent of the internet and its subsequent threat to all traditional media. Thirty years later, television advertising has been so devastated by Big Tech that it can no longer fully fund stations’ ability to produce local news, emergency coverage and local programming.

Television stations now potentially face the same fate as local newspapers, which are shadows of their former selves.

Why has television advertising taken such a hit? The local ad marketplace has been massively disrupted by the growth of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn and the many other internet content providers, and things are getting worse every day.

Zenith Media predicts that of the $320 billion spent on the entire media universe this year, $200 billion will go to digital media. In other words, almost two-thirds of every advertising dollar spent in the U.S. in 2022 will go to digital advertising. It’s no wonder that local media find it tough to compete.

Adding insult to injury, much of the local information that appears on Facebook, YouTube and any number of other sites was created by television stations that receive only token compensation for their work.

All of this means that cable and satellite fees now fund the ability of television stations to produce quality local news and emergency services. Without retransmission payments, it would be impossible to maintain today’s high level of services.

Now a new and urgent threat from Big Tech is hurting even the lifeblood of those fees. Unregulated, lowball providers are competing with cable and satellite companies for customers, hurting those businesses and reducing payments to stations.

The threat is called Virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (vMVPD) which is a big name for virtual cable providers that use the internet to distribute their signals. I’ve written about them in other contexts. You know their names:  YouTube TV, Hulu +Live TV, Sling TV and others.

Because they operate in the loophole of the internet, vMVPDs have no obligation to local communities, no obligation to carry tornado or hurricane warnings, no obligation to caption programming, no obligation toward diverse workplaces. Because they do not have to honor network exclusivity agreements, they can negotiate directly with ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, cutting local affiliates off at the knees. If stations want to be carried, they must accept a pittance of their regular fees as a handout from the networks.

Using teaser starter rates, these services get consumers to drop their cable or satellite providers, only to raise prices later.

Because they have no obligations to consumers, vMVPDs are dangerous in other ways. Back in December, viewers of ABC affiliates on YouTube TV were suddenly deprived of all local service, including news and emergency warnings, for two days due to a conflict between YouTube TV and Disney/ABC. Affiliates were not given a choice, or even a heads up.

Today it is estimated that 15%-20% of live television viewers subscribe to a vMVPD. Some analysts say up to one-third of all current cable/satellite users could move to virtual services. Competition from vMVPDs is one reason DirecTV has shed record numbers of customers the past few years. It is now trying to move users to its own unregulated product called DirecTV Stream.

When Congress created the 1992 legislation requiring cable and satellite systems to negotiate with local television stations for carriage, the vote was bipartisan and overwhelming, making clear Congress’s intent to protect local television. The FCC was tasked with enforcing that intent which is now being clearly violated by virtual cable systems that negotiate directly with the networks, cutting stations out.

Let me also point out that according to at least one major negotiator, networks are now asking for 70% of station retransmission dollars. Add to that gut-wrenching figure the pittance stations gain from virtual system agreements, and you have a recipe for disaster. Without reform, we face the very real possibility that a great number of stations will be forced into lower-quality news and other services.

If the FCC chooses to, it can correct this massive wrong simply by requiring internet cable providers to follow the same rules as regular cable and satellite systems. That would level the playing field for everyone.

The ball is now in the hands of FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. It is imperative Chairwoman Rosenworcel put the regulation of vMVPDs on the commission’s agenda for its next meeting. This is a bipartisan issue, so there is no need to wait for confirmation of an additional commissioner.

The FCC first looked at the vMVPD problem back in 2014, so reform is long overdue. There is simply no reason to wait any longer. If Chairwoman Rosenworcel truly cares about the safety and well-being of the American public, she will act this year because the problem grows graver every day.

Survey after survey show that local television is now the most trusted source for unbiased news in our nation. If you value local television news, if you depend on television for continuous coverage during tornado or hurricane warnings, if local programming is important to you, then this is your issue.

Now is the FCC’s opportunity to do the right thing for local television, and even more importantly, the American public. It is crucial that Chairwoman Rosenworcel act now.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Unless The FCC Acts, Some Stations Face Reduced Local News appeared first on TV News Check.

Leading a television station seems simple from the outside, but it’s a complex job that requires balancing many competing interests to reach a few common goals. No matter what you hear about ratings, awards and innovation, it really does come down to consistently achieving the bottom line. GMs who make their profit goals keep their jobs. Those who do not don’t last long. This is the first and most important rule of running a station.

That does not mean the bottom line is achieved by squeezing expenses and emphasizing sales over everything else. Many have tried that approach and their stations have suffered from it. An outstanding news operation, high morale, great community relations and the willingness to sometimes put coverage and public safety before sales, are essential to long-term profit, so just saving every penny does not work. The trick is to know where to invest and where to save.

The best general managers have a vision for their station’s future and work daily to get buy-in from their staff. Success or failure of the leader’s vision shows up in every function of the station, including the bottom line. The best-in-class managers also grow new leaders, allowing department heads to do their jobs without micromanagement.

I could go on, but you get the idea. General managers are the big thinkers who lead their stations. I’ve written a book on the subject if you want to dig deeper.

So, why do group owners usually promote general sales managers to the top job? Part of the reason is that owners assume sales managers will at least understand how to maintain revenue, which is never an easy task. Another reason is that GSMs are already responsible for producing the sales half of the operating budget. That should make learning the expense side of the ledger somewhat easier.

Sales managers also spend a lot of time interacting with their general managers, as well as time with group heads, so that keeps them visible, which is a huge advantage. They travel to see clients, which broadens their outlook. And don’t forget that most group heads came out of sales themselves, so they have a natural comfort with other salespeople. Smart sales managers use all these opportunities to build their personal brands.

So, is sales experience a prerequisite? Absolutely not. I didn’t come out of sales, nor did many other GMs, not to mention more than one group head, so don’t think that is the only route. News directors, creative services directors, business managers and even chief engineers have successfully made the leap, so if you want the job badly enough you can, too.

One way to get started is to tell your GM about your ambition and ask for his or her help. No one is more important to your future career than your current GM. Understand that the better you perform the job you have now, the more likely your GM will help advance your career. Ask for advice and follow it, then ask for a short, regular meeting each week to get the GM’s thoughts on various aspects of running a station. The more the GM talks, the more you will learn.

Next, dig into sales. Find an ambitious sales manager and ask for help, offering to return the favor in your area. Make this person your best friend because you want all the nitty-gritty detail. This will also be of value in your current job, especially if you are a news director or CSD.

Don’t stop with the general manager and sales manager. You must understand something about accounting, engineering and every other function in your station, in some cases even more than your GM knows. GMs who say technology is a mystery are copping out, so understand that area, too, because it’s getting more important every day.

A note of caution: Don’t announce your ambition to the other department heads because they might see you as arrogant. Much better to say you can do your job better if you understand theirs, which is absolutely true as well as a good way to advance working relationships.

By the way, sales managers who hope to become general managers are well advised to take these same steps. Demonstrating an understanding of how a station works always makes a candidate look good.

After you’ve done all this, it’s time to distinguish yourself. You need to create something that moves forward the mission of the station. It could be a fresh idea or a change in practice. Once you’ve figured that out and successfully done it, write a report to your GM. The GM will submit the report to corporate, which will make both of you look good.

At some point, based on your GM’s guidance, you need to let the corporate decision-makers know how you have prepared yourself and why. Hopefully, your GM will have already filled in the appropriate people, but one thing is for sure. You won’t get a general management job unless you ask for it.

These ideas are just a start and not the only ways to get the top job, but I’ve seen them work for many people over the years. However you decide to go about it, create a plan and give yourself a hard timetable. Otherwise, the press of daily functions will cause life to march on.

Finally, only pursue a GM’s position if you really want to take on that level of responsibility. I was on call 24 hours a day for 30 years. Do you want to deal with that? How about corporate pressure when things are not going well? Handling tough HR issues including terminating people? Sometimes putting your career on the line for things you believe in and many more difficult situations?

The job is not for everyone, so make sure you do gut checks along the way because to achieve success you must love coming to work every day. Without that, not much else matters.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post How To Become A General Manager appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

When 26-year-old William S. Paley bought a small group of radio stations from Columbia Records in 1927, he decided to keep the Columbia name, since it was already well known. Over the following decades, the Columbia Broadcasting System, later shortened to CBS, became synonymous with style, quality and cutting-edge attitude.

In 1980, when Paley was 79 years old, the man who had bet his entire company on television 35 years earlier proposed to the CBS board that the network create a 24-hour news channel. The board thought the idea preposterous, saying it would anger affiliates. That left the way open for a billboard operator in Atlanta (Ted Turner) to do the same thing (CNN).

Although he lived for 10 more years, that was the end of the Paley era. CBS then went through a series of owners, each of whom lessened the luster of the once-great Tiffany Network.

Fast forward to 2022. Viacom, a company founded in 1972 by, you guessed it, William S. Paley, has announced a name change from ViacomCBS to Paramount. If you have not read the official press release, it is fascinating. The four-page document details every program and franchise the company owns, even Beavis and Butt-Head, but with one notable exception. Other than one line of fine print at the bottom, there is no mention of CBS. CBS News is not mentioned at all.

In fact, the only reference to “news” in the entire release, which makes clear that Paramount will be a global entertainment company, comes as one word in a long string of product offerings on the Paramount streaming service. Even then, there is no CBS.

Reading the press release forces one to ask the obvious question: Is CBS for sale? We get that the new company will be all about streaming, but why no mention of the company’s single most valuable asset?

Logic would say Paramount would not be willing to lose the massive revenue from affiliate payments, as well as retransmission consent money from their O&O group. Nor would Paramount want to lose an important, though now secondary, distribution platform for its product. Those are strong arguments against a sale.

It seems to me that the more likely move would be to keep the network but sell the CBS News assets. I say assets because the brand really doesn’t have sterling value these days. You could shut down operations but keep the name and a small group of people to lessen any shock.  Both CBS’s morning and evening newscasts are low rated and lose money, so both could be canceled. Although you will never hear it said out loud, many affiliates would welcome cancellation of The CBS Evening News. This would return a valuable half hour of local news inventory to the stations.

When you think about it, CBS News’ only major asset is 60 Minutes, a self-contained unit with no need of a news department.

Why would a company that bills itself as a global entertainment entity want to support a money-losing news enterprise that could be jobbed out? Affiliates would simply fill the time with local news, or — think about this — syndicated programming from Paramount.

Taking the argument one step further: Why continue to program daytime? Fox does better without it. Speaking of Fox, how about reducing primetime programming from three hours to two, something the Fox affiliates love and NBC once flirted with? All of this could easily be accomplished over time.

So here is my prediction: Paramount will not sell CBS, but it will get out of the news business. Thankfully, the CBS name will continue — for two hours every night.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Is CBS For Sale? appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

When the move to multimedia journalism first became popular, a good friend, whose company was going all in, told me how excited he was about the new system.

“Instead of seven reporters and seven photographers in a medium-market newsroom, we will have 14 journalists who report and shoot,” he enthused. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. The newsroom he used as an example more likely terminated all their photographers, leaving seven reporters to do their original jobs while also shooting and editing.

With much of the industry now making multimedia journalism a standard practice, this might be a good time to talk about the real reason so many companies shrank their news crews to one person, the blunt reality no one talks about: Converting to MMJs was a purely financial decision and journalism was never a consideration. When it became possible to replace live trucks with LTE cards, many stations also eliminated truck operators, giving yet another responsibility to reporters.

Most very small markets have always had single reporter/photographers as an economic necessity, and even large stations occasionally have talented people who want to shoot their own footage, but in top stations those continue to be the exceptions, not the norm.

The situation today, where many major companies field one-person crews as their normal way of doing business, has its roots in the economic recession of 2009 that literally threatened to put some stations out of business. Retransmission consent saved the day, but once a new system is baked into the profit margin there is no going back.

Here’s another reality: Because advertising is now a second revenue stream, fewer companies are still willing to make the deep investments required to compete at the highest levels.

Since we are being frank, let’s ask ourselves another hard question: How much does the change really matter? When I was at WJLA Washington in the early 1980s, photographers and technicians were up in arms because management had reduced field crews from reporter, photographer and sound recorder to just two people, reporter and photographer. Many said it would be the end of quality in TV news. They were, of course, wrong because the change had been driven by technology, not just expense savings. Video recording simply required fewer people than film.

Other than the development of smaller field cameras, the move to MMJ had no other driver than profit. One can’t help but be reminded of the old saying that “a great photographer can sometimes make a mediocre reporter look really good while a poor photographer can make a great reporter look bad.” Stations can certainly achieve good work using MMJs, but greatness? I think not.

Now to the question of safety. It’s surprising that in the second decade of putting lone reporters on the street, industry discussion of safety has not risen to the forefront as a major issue.

The recent near-tragedy at WSAZ Charleston, W. Va., in which reporter Tori Yorgey was sideswiped by a car, is anything but an outlier. Since the beginning of the business, covering the news has been dangerous, both from hazards and from people of bad intentions, but how a reporter standing near a highway trying to communicate with a producer, set up a live shot, stay in frame and think about what she is saying while still having a heightened awareness of her surroundings is beyond me. Sadly, the one-person live shot is also now a regular part of our business.

The WSAZ incident has been widely reported in the mainstream press, with some reaction among journalists, as well as an interesting town hall among reporters, but I’m unaware of any public comment from upper management or ownership. Was anything learned at the highest levels?

I’d love to see television station owners have a new awareness of safety and respond by adding staff, at least for live shots. But we are in a contracting industry, not an expanding one, so we must look seriously at what stations are able do with current resources. The people with chief responsibility for seeing that happen are news directors.

The best local news directors have always been keenly aware of reporter safety, always understanding that no story is worth risking an employee’s life. In the past, hazardous situations have been handled by sending enough people or by simply finding another way to report the story. With today’s far smaller staffs, in some cases the first option is simply not available.

That means news directors must make hard decisions while driving home safety every day. I’ve known plenty of reporters who were fearless, others who seemed to feel some kind of obligation to put themselves into harm’s way. And don’t forget, all great reporters are highly competitive, so safety cannot simply be left to people in the field. News directors, or their designated managers, must be actively involved.

One news director, Jerry Goodman at WALB Albany, Ga., recently posted a safety policy giving clear guidance to reporters in the field. It’s a thoughtful response and offers a good example of engagement with the issue because it lays out boundaries for a very young staff while also offering them a philosophical foundation.

It’s a good start, and I salute him for it. Other news directors may not agree with all of Goodman’s particular rules, but the point is that he’s actively addressing the issue.

Because circumstances change with every story, it will never be possible to create an inherently safe environment, but there are baseline things that can be done. Every news director should have honest discussions with their staffs, followed by a written policy. News directors must then stay engaged because safety will only be paramount if strong enforcement is also a part of the policy.

We cannot make reporting immune to risk, but that does not lessen our responsibility to employees which is to do our best to protect their safety. Now is the time for company leaders to honestly engage the elephant that has long been in many newsrooms. To do less would be negligent management.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post News Directors Must Own The MMJ Safety Problem appeared first on TV News Check.

Nielsen, which has lost its Media Rating Council accreditation for both national and local television ratings, continues to claim the undercounts had “minimal impact” on ratings.

Whatever the facts, the real issue is bigger than whether panel meters have been properly maintained. It’s bigger than either Nielsen or the VAB.

The real issue is that the very currency of television is in crisis.

To be properly monetized, advertising needs a common medium of exchange whose credibility is recognized by both buyers and sellers.  For the past 70 years that currency for television has been Nielsen ratings. As multiplatform selling moves to the forefront and impressions become the new currency, Nielsen’s competency still matters because same system measures impressions. Questions about Nielsen’s accuracy do more than raise red flags, they put the value of television advertising at risk.

That risk is not a future worry, it is front and center right now.

After a very public solicitation for proposals from dozens of companies, NBC announced just two weeks ago it has partnered with a company called iSpot.tv to measure television and streaming audiences for the upcoming Olympics and the Super Bowl. Ad buying conglomerate Publicis Media is participating with several of its clients.

If NBC is this far along in the process, many other companies must be equally down the road to alternative systems, just less publicly.

Not only is the industry facing a potential wild west of measurement systems, but we must also consider a bigger transition about to take place that is even more complex than just accuracy in the number of people watching. That issue is attribution.

Simply measuring how many times a potential customer views an advertisement is no longer enough. Clients want to know customer reaction, engagement and — most importantly — action taken. By its nature, attribution is more difficult to measure, but it is also far more valuable. This is one of the reasons the addressability and two-way communication features of NextGen TV will be a game changer, greatly multiplying the potential value of commercial messages.

Since attribution is by nature a more complex sell, you might be asking why would a universal measurement system still matter? The answer goes back to common currency. Without a common currency there is no common value. To negotiate rates, buyers must be able to compare all proposals using the same standard, no matter how complex that standard may be. This is obviously equally true for sellers.

Looking at all of this from a practical point of view, the one company that should be creating future advertising currency is Nielsen, not just because of its television history, but because of its vast database in consumer goods and credit card purchases.

Could an assumption by Nielsen that the company will always be needed “no matter what” account for its public arrogance? If so, here is some breaking news: The industry is moving on.

Nielsen’s problem, of course, is its culture, which more insular than the Ming Dynasty. I know some very fine people who have worked at Nielsen, but glasnost is not a term I would use to describe their openness to criticism.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe Nielsen has privately opened its systems and operations to work transparently with clients. Perhaps Nielsen is now listening with a willingness to make substantive change. Perhaps there really is a Santa Claus.

Here is what I do know: There are still plenty of broadcast companies that would open their arms to Nielsen if the company genuinely sought to put all its cards on the table and create true client partnerships, but one suspects that list grows shorter every day.

Although it will be very different from what we know now, the local media industry, led by leading multiplatform television stations, has a very bright future. Let’s hope Nielsen decides to be a part of it. If so, it had better start soon.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post Wake Up, Nielsen. TV Is Moving On With Or Without You appeared first on TV News Check.

Since record keeping began, SEC teams have won 43 national championships in football. That means on any given fall Saturday the conference fields potential playoff teams across the schedule. In 2025 Texas and Oklahoma, both of which have also won multiple national championships, will join the conference. No wonder in the deep south there is a common saying that “The SEC Championship actually is the national championship.”

Unless you’ve lived in a Southeastern Conference city, it’s difficult to understand the full power of SEC football. It’s not just that games produce massive ratings, some beating Super Bowl numbers, but related programming such as post-game shows, coaches shows and even some commentators all draw large audiences. SEC Network personality Paul Finebaum is a megastar in SEC country, second only to Elvis.

To its fans, SEC football is not merely a sport. It is a year-round consuming force that affects every aspect of society.

Take the LSU/Ole Miss rivalry. I once attended a series of meetings in Oxford the week before LSU came to town. Every meeting, every conversation, every interaction between people ended with someone giving the benediction “Go to Hell LSU!”  This was not said in a perfunctory manner. It was bawled out with emotion and force. I wasn’t there on Sunday, so I don’t know what they said in church.

Two weeks ago, during the Birmingham Bowl, hundreds of Alabama fans bought up $100 tickets so that they could root for Houston to beat Auburn.

Speaking of Alabama, during a Dish Network blackout a lady once told me: “I’d like to get rid of Dish, but we have the last three seasons and all the championship games on our DVR. I can’t bear the thought of losing them. We watch one every weekend.”

SEC fans also hold grudges. In 2010 when Lane Kiffin suddenly exited Tennessee to become the head coach at USC, local politicians running for office bought airtime to accuse each other of being “no better than Lane Kiffin.”  When Kiffin later returned to Tennessee as Alabama’s offensive coordinator, state troopers served as bodyguards. Now the head coach at Ole Miss, Kiffin recently remarked that going to Tennessee is still “very dangerous.”

In the SEC East, Georgia fans have an intense and long-term hate for Florida, proudly calling themselves Gator Haters. Their annual matchup, always at a neutral site, also showcases another side of the SEC. It is known as “the world’s largest cocktail party.”

Of course there is also The Egg Bowl, The Iron Bowl and a slew of other games that create the incredible intensity that makes SEC football unique.

There is one exception. No one hates Vanderbilt. That game is considered a week off.

Lastly, I must admit that my own wife is one of those crazed fans. If Alabama is behind in the score, she rushes from the room in agony, sometimes carrying her Nick Saban autographed football.

Consider now what will happen when SEC football moves from CBS to ABC in the fall of 2024. CBS affiliates across the conference will lose the single most advertiser-friendly venue in their arsenals. Millions of dollars will move en masse to ABC affiliates, turning station budgets and revenue audits upside down. The halo CBS affiliates have enjoyed will move right along with those dollars.

Every market is different, so the stronger CBS affiliates will absorb the body blow and live to fight another day. But what of the weak CBS affiliates, those in third or fourth place? Forget the old fashiond answers: changing anchors and a new news set. Save your money because those things no longer work.

What can work is a bold, carefully thought-out vision, one that creates an actual product-based strategy that is highly calculated, platform agnostic, easy to communicate, and reasonably risky, because there is no reward without risk.

General managers of those CBS affiliates have big decisions to make, and they must be made soon because two years is a very short window to prepare for an earth quaking change.

I could go on, but right now my wife wants to talk about tonight’s game. She is terribly afraid Georgia might win. I’ve reminded her this is a rebuilding year for Alabama, but that does not matter to someone who thinks the CFP trophy should be permanently housed in Tuscaloosa. I hate to think what might happen if Alabama loses, but there is really nothing I can do. This is not about me, it’s not even about logic. This is the SEC.

Hank Price is a media consultant. His second book, Leading Local Television, has become a standard text for television general managers. In a 30-year general management career, Price led TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago, KARE Minneapolis, WVTM Birmingham, Ala., and both WXII and WFMY in Greensboro/Winston Salem, N.C. Earlier, he was a consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also spent 15 years as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. He is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss.

The post SEC Football Will Move Millions From CBS To ABC Affils appeared first on TV News Check.

Newscasts had become so regimented, so carefully choreographed, that first-place stations were fearful any major change would cause viewers to become uncomfortable and turn somewhere else. There was simply too much to lose. I began to call this the inverse relationship between profitability and risk. The higher the profitability, the less appetite for risk.

Even last place stations could make a lot of money in those days, so their appetite for change was also limited. They wanted to produce a “better” newscast than the leader. Thus bells, whistles and all the other things we do today were added, then countered, until all stations looked pretty much alike.

As time went on, most markets settled into the ratings patterns we see today, one where relative station positions have become fixed. That is a good thing if you are in first place, but a looming disaster if you are a poor fourth. Simply trying to do a better job than the leader is a model that stopped working long ago.

As we look to 2022, it’s amazing to think how little has changed. Sure, mobile, digital and many of the other things we do today look different, but the basic proposition is still the same.  Stations compete against other stations using conventional newscasts, even though the world around us has morphed into something very different.

From decisionmaking power moving to end users, to fresh competitors springing up every day, to the networks’ new love affair with streaming, we now live in a consumer-driven society where audiences are constantly fragmented, making last place no longer a safe haven. One way or another, it looks like we are close to a time when the local news herd is finally going to thin.

Ideally, this means stations would consolidate within their markets, but that rule change seems unlikely under the current administration. Could it be that some will exit the news business, or perhaps job their newscasts out to a competitor, possibly by allowing the competitor to sell advertising in both newscasts? There are other scenarios, but all involve fewer stations producing local news.

If you are a dominant No. 1 station, then your best route might be to hold the course and continue to improve your product, knowing your on-air newscasts are the key to everything else. Even with an aging audience, if you dominate conventionally then your digital products become a pathway to younger users as well as a ramp to NextGen TV. Don’t believe me? Try launching a local news or weather app without the resources and promotion of a major television station.

But if you are in last place, now might finally be the time to figure out the newscast of the future.

If I were creating a new kind of newscast, I would begin by recognizing that people who want to watch conventional newscasts are well satisfied, so more of the same gets you nothing. It’s hard to not be choked by tradition, but this is an opportunity to open our minds.

Next, I’d rid myself of the gatekeeper mentality that says only we get to decide what is and isn’t news. I would recognize that while consumers trust local television more than other media these days, they trust their friends even more. Those same consumers, especially the younger ones, are also capable of intense loyalty to brands they love.

Now that we’ve adjusted our thinking, it’s time to answer the big question: What must we do to create a different kind of video-based information brand that a major segment of consumers will love? There are no easy answers, but here is one idea.

What if you were to empower information consumers of all ages, especially the younger ones, to become part of the process? Not to just comment or send in videos, but to produce actual stories? Shoot the video, flip the camera on themselves and let a robot edit it. Imagine if you could get 100 consumers to do this? Or 1,000 or 10,000? What if you empowered every consumer who owns a smartphone?

Imagine if you could get local people to cover every school board meeting, every car wreck, every bit of news in their world? What if you could curate all of this in real time on a live app, creating a vast trove of on-demand information? You would have more local content than any newspaper ever dreamed of — all provided by people you didn’t have to pay.

What if you ended up with both a digital product and a constantly streaming flow of local information delivered by television, app or whatever new technology came along? Who needs a network if you have a large, intensely loyal, local audience? Sure, there would be mistakes, but they would be quickly corrected, which would enhance your credibility because news consumers still value a trustworthy independent arbiter. Part of your curation role would be to also insure such a revolutionary product did not become the wild west.

Creating such a product would be hard, but that’s the beauty of it. At the start, competitors would ridicule you, but once you succeeded, they would find it too hard to copy. Success would also require strong planning, realignment of resources and a long-term commitment, but think what would happen if you succeeded?

What if you owned it? What would it be worth?

You may have a better idea than mine. If so, I hope you try it and I hope it succeeds, because this might finally the time to reap the rewards of a much larger world of local news and information than the one we live in now.

Call me crazy, but it sounds like fun.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post Now’s The Time For The Newscast Of The Future appeared first on TV News Check.

Time to admit the truth. I never really worked for a living. During three decades of running stations, I rarely took it seriously. It was fun, a game we all played. Sure, the stakes were high and there were occasional moments of sheer terror, but that was all part of the game.

The fun was spending every waking moment trying to win. Win ratings, win pageviews or whatever the latest metric, win revenue, win profit. That meant big highs, big lows and sometimes betting your job on a big idea. Ask any successful general manager and they will tell you pretty much the same thing. They will also tell you that lately something has changed.

After 18 months of being battered and bruised, no one seems to be talking about winning. No one talks about fun. So much has happened in such a short time that it is hard for people not to be overwhelmed, not just on the station level but also in many corporate jobs.

You know the list. A pandemic that just won’t end. Social upheaval in the streets. Political chaos, not just in Washington but in many local communities. The new awareness of the need for equity and equality. Learning to work from home. Learning to work back at work. Getting used to people calling you at home – at all hours. The vaccine mandate and its repercussions, including some coworkers choosing to lose their jobs rather than comply.

All piled on top of a debate over salaries and retention while trying to understand a new generation of employees who see their jobs very differently from the way ours did.

Normally, any item on the list would be enough to create a crisis. Television people are very good at dealing with crisis. The problem is that these have all come together without time for reflection or even a deep breath. So much has happened so quickly that one can’t help wondering what will be next.

According to the Mayo Clinic, “job burnout is a special type of work-related stress — a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. Burnout is not a medical diagnosis, such as depression, but it can affect both physical and mental health.” Mayo lists “lack of control, unclear job expectations and dysfunctional workplace dynamics” as the three top causes of burnout. Any of that sound familiar?

The worst thing about burnout is that no one wants to admit they are suffering from it, which is perfectly understandable. Whatever your job, be it news producer, account executive or general manager, admitting to others that you are having a hard time coming to work is not going to happen. There is simply too much career risk. This is tragic because admission is the first step toward recovery.

All of this will eventually pass, but at what cost? The challenges to our industry are growing greater every day. What happens when an industry that runs on energy has a short circuit? Will this be the tipping point for weaker players?

It seems obvious to say that the companies quickest to restore high morale — and the drive and energy that come with it — will have a competitive advantage.

It also seems obvious that this is a CEO-level issue. Only the CEO can give company-wide recognition, offer perspective and provide appropriate confidential resources. If employees believe the CEO is a straight shooter who really does care about people, they will also believe the CEO’s vision of a brighter future, including company leadership in a changing industry.

Some CEOs may already be taking action. Let’s hope so because success is always built on energy, drive and fun. Right now, our industry needs all three.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post It’s Time To Address Local TV’s Burnout Problem appeared first on TV News Check.

What is true is that during Marconi’s era, when print publications reigned supreme, direct mail was already a leading form of local advertising. The internet of those days was the Post Office. The most popular browser was the Sears catalog, which also served as the Amazon of its day.

Because of its dependency on “snail mail,” we think of direct mail as ancient, sort of like the pyramids, never giving it a second thought. And yet, in BIA Advisory Service’s just released 2022 forecast, direct mail is listed as the second largest form of local advertising, behind mobile and ahead of desktop computers, television, and radio.

Those who follow these things realize BIA’s forecast is significant because for the first time in memory, direct mail is not in first place.

BIA estimates that direct mail will account for $33.4 billion in local advertising revenue next year. This compares to $21 billion for local television. Think about those numbers for a minute. The direct mail number is 50% larger than the television number. This is not a new phenomenon.

Since it is always harder to generate new advertising dollars than to move existing ones, you may be asking why television stations do not have a strategy for targeting direct mail? There have been. Multiple strategies have been tried over multiple decades, the best with only limited success.

The problem is the core difference between the two media. Television is a form of mass media, while direct mail is a highly targeted media. Past experiments by television stations have come down to taking a user role rather than an innovator one. They have failed because trying to beat a competitor at their own game rarely works.

By now you are probably thinking the same thing I am. What about NextGen TV, which is all about addressability? We’ve all seen presentations on ATSC 3.0’s potential, which reeks of opportunity. We are still in the early adopter phase, so it is too soon to fully understand NextGen TV’s revenue potential, but it is not too early to think ahead, as I am sure some groups are already doing.

With that in mind, here is a specific question that seems timely to ask: What is the plan for converting a significant portion of the more than $30 billion spent annually on direct mail to NextGen TV? How will it work? Why would advertisers want to use it? What must we do to prepare for it?

It seems to me that it would be beneficial to create an industry task force right now to take advantage of this specific opportunity. Industry synchronization will be essential since advertisers and their agencies will want to buy multiple stations. Rather than lumped in with local, this could be an entirely new revenue line to be launched by market rather than by individual groups.

Finally, think about this: direct mail is a flat, static medium delivered at a snail’s pace. Mobile has taken some dollars away, but the core business still exists only because no one has had a better idea. Perhaps now is the time for that idea. It will certainly worth the effort to find out.

Television has a long history of adapting to new opportunities. NextGen TV will offer a world of those opportunities beyond anything we have seen in the past. As I was saying to David Sarnoff back when he was inventing television: “Keep at it and there might be something to this TV business.”

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post TV Needs Direct Mail 2.0 And NextGen TV Will Help appeared first on TV News Check.

You may have noticed that the latest fad among journalism and academic sites has been to bemoan what many call “the end of local news.” Just Google “loss of local news” and you will find dozens of stories. The common theme is that local news is only legitimate if one searches through a wet shrub to find it. I wonder if news is even more legitimate if the paper has a plastic wrapper?

The self-destruction of metro newspapers over the past 15 years has been a sad thing to watch. Chained to an arrogant culture that refused to recognize the future, papers long ago declared not just supremacy, but actual ownership of local information. That is why the rise of competitors, beginning with television, was seen an intrusion into their divine rights.

Sadly, arrogance continues to be on full display. How else do you explain the industry’s adulation over a Kansas City paper’s recent decision to print a blank front page, thus showing those unappreciative readers what they were in danger of losing? I’m reminded of the time our eight-year-old threatened to leave home. We offered to pack a lunch and drop him off at the bus station.

Things have gotten so bad that many of the same publishers who seven years ago decried the failed FCC plan to send monitors into television newsrooms have now gone to Congress with hat in hand asking for government funding of their fading enterprises. Having failed in that, they are now asking for tax credits. As a believer in the First Amendment, I am too stunned to say more.

Of course, the loss of newspapers is more complex than just the rise of competitors. Consumers have taken control of the conversation, rejecting the gatekeeper mentality that news is only what authorities say it is. This broadening definition of what constitutes news, and traditional media’s failure to understand what that means to younger consumers, is a cultural barrier to newspaper survival. It is also a red flag to those of us in television.

So, is local news dying? Old mentalities are certainly dying, but only because new ones are being born. Consumer control through technological choice means we are transitioning to a videocentric, on-demand world. This gives television stations a natural advantage, which is why the better ones are producing record levels of local news, including investigative, enterprise and political coverage, available not just on television and the web, but instantly on every consumer’s personal phone.

All forms of citizen journalism, from local websites to Facebook pages, are growing faster than you can say “does anyone remember Want Ads?” Specialized and cohort news, which used to be exclusive to print magazines, are among the fastest growing forms of local journalism. Most importantly, immediate video is now available on almost anything and everything, and we haven’t even talked about the promise of NextGen TV and 5G.

There is, in fact, so much information now being created that consumers are well-aware of their need for a trusted source, some place they can count on to always tell the unbiased truth. In this need lies the future for many — but not all — television stations. Research indicates we already have a leg up, but to take advantage of this opportunity we must stop thinking of ourselves as gatekeepers. Facilitators who also curate and produce might be a better descriptor.

The arrogance that killed newspapers is still present in the many television newsrooms that continue to see themselves as exclusive producers and disseminators rather than trusted partners. I’ve written a book on that subject, so I won’t go into detail here. Just let me say the future is ours for the taking — including serving younger news consumers — providing we are willing to change our own culture.

Let us never forget the lessons of newspapers, lest we make the same mistakes and come to the same end.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post Amid Local News Death Narratives, There’s An Opportunity For TV appeared first on TV News Check.

To me, Nielsen’s response sounded like “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” I wrote a column here at the time urging Nielsen to take whatever steps necessary to restore confidence in their product.

Since the controversy started, Nielsen has worked hard to change the subject, spending a lot of time promoting its Nielsen One measuring system. If it is successful, Nielsen One will have much to offer, integrating everything from streaming to digital sites. Most importantly, the new system will boil it all down to impressions, something many multiplatform television sellers have been demanding. Sounds great, providing of course one can trust the data.

In May, trust took a hit when the Media Rating Council, the industry’s accreditation group, agreed that Nielsen did undercount some demos in February, saying changes in panel maintenance accounted for a 2% to 6% undercount of 18-49 viewers, though they felt the impact of the undercount was difficult to determine since all estimates have standard errors. Nielsen was quick to say it had been cooperating fully with the MRC, including supplying it the affected data. Nielsen also said it has since returned to full maintenance of all meters and, of course, it again pitched Nielsen One as the system of the future.

Whatever hope Nielsen had that the MRC announcement would calm their critics was quickly dashed the following month when the VAB’s Cunningham again unloaded on the ratings service, calling for the MRC to suspend Nielsen’s accreditation. He also demanded a full audit of Nielsen’s data. Keep in mind that the VAB represents almost 50 networks, including the traditional over-the-air ones. When the VAB speaks, we are listening to the voice of a great number of major industry players.

Cunningham’s demand for suspension was soon followed by a fiery speech from Discovery’s David Zaslav, who minced no words, calling Nielsen “antiquated” and “wrong.” He also called for a new industry measurement solution, saying of Nielsen, “They just can’t get it together. It’s a shame.”

In response to the critics, last week Nielsen took the unprecedented step of asking the MRC for a hiatus, saying a break would allow the company to concentrate on its panels while also focusing on Nielsen One. That sounded like an admission that Nielsen’s current numbers have a problem, though, as with all things Nielsen, conclusions are open to interpretation.

What to make of all this? In Police Squad, there is a scene where Leslie Nielsen (possibly no relation) stands in front of fires and explosions yelling at a small group of people through a megaphone. “Nothing to see here! Please disperse! Nothing to see!”

My personal experience with Nielsen has been that legitimate complaints were usually met with either “our system is working within the established parameters” or, when things got really hot, “our new methodology will solve your concerns.” I’ve never known Nielsen to admit a mistake, at least to me, though they have on very rare occasions reissued ratings books in some markets.

It’s time for Nielsen to genuinely listen to its customers and have an open conversation designed to solve problems, not defend decisions. Yes, Nielsen One is a great idea, but that only matters if the parent company has credibility, something now in doubt. Without credibility, Zaslav’s call for a new system could come true.

The world of media selling is moving toward full measurement, a place digital has always been. Some day in the not-too-distant future, our industry will look back on audience estimates as a quaint 20^th Century idea. If Nielsen is to be the company of the future, and not a paragraph in history books, it needs to rebuild its client credibility now. That will only happen if there is honest, straightforward and transparent discussion with the clients who fund its business. The time for simply saying “we know best” is never coming back.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post Emperor Nielsen Has No Clothes appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

Seeing the excitement of all three spectators at the Tokyo Olympics, with its canned cheers and recorded applause, one cannot help but think back to the last time Japan hosted the games. You remember those games, the ones never mentioned in polite Olympics company. Dare I say it here? Nagano.

The 1998 Nagano Olympics on CBS are remembered as the greatest ratings disaster in the modern game’s history. Of course, those games were in the winter, which was the first strike. They were also inaccessible, high in the central mountains; a beautiful area few outside of Japan had heard of.

The second strike was that the print press, still a factor in those days, kept emphasizing the unfortunate fact all events would be recorded. The 1996 Summer Olympics, live from Atlanta on NBC, had been an overwhelming success, setting huge viewing records, so expectations were artificially high.

The third strike was that CBS simply did not know how to do an Olympics. Roone Arledge may have created Olympics television coverage, but these days NBC is the recognized expert. I doubt any other organization could match NBC’s expertise on a one-off basis.

To give you a sense of just how great the Nagano disaster was, I was running the CBS O&O in Chicago at the time. We ended up owing American Airlines almost $1 million in credits. It took two years of being shut out from American buys before the bleeding stopped.

Of course, you can’t simply compare television ratings from past Olympics to today’s world of app-based multiple streams and replays. One sports columnist this past weekend, complaining that Sunday morning basketball was not on free TV, spoke for many when he asked: “What the heck is Peacock?” As NBC’s precarious gamble to build an OTT service at the expense of affiliates continues full steam, one can’t help wondering what the future mix of Olympic platforms will look like.

You are probably thinking by this time that I’m not a fan of Tokyo 2020. I am. Viewership is, of course, down, but everyone expected that. Football survived canned crowd noises and empty seats; the Olympics will, too.

My point is simply this: Olympics viewership, no matter the platform, has always depended on location and time zone. This year’s games will go down as an aberration due to bizarre factors no one could have predicted, including a 12-month delay. Whatever the final numbers turn out to be, remember one thing: For every Nagano, there is an Atlanta, a London and a Rio waiting down the road.

Like the Super Bowl, the Olympics continue to be the gold standard.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post Recalling The Ghost Of Nagano appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

FCC Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel’s recent announcement that she will be offering some changes to the current political advertising rules during the commission’s upcoming August meeting is a reminder of how cumbersome and unfair the current rules are. Since we don’t know what Rosenworcel’s plan is, I won’t speculate on contents, but the chance of simplification seems unlikely.

First, let me say that no one wants to do away with political regulations. Free speech, especially political speech, is one of our most sacred rights. It is the very foundation of our nation.

Reasonable regulations that ensure equal access, pricing and other details of purchasing advertising matter. The vast majority of broadcasters believe strongly in fairness and aboveboard treatment. They invest an enormous amount of time, effort and legal expense to make sure they get it right.

The problem is that the rules have become so cumbersome and fraught with traps that the most minor mistake can bring fines, embarrassment and other forms of punishment. And don’t think those mistakes go unnoticed. Special interest groups troll FCC public files in search of any error that might create a headline. No owner — no matter how diligent, no matter what safeguards have been put in place — can guarantee such a mistake will not happen.

The online files themselves, which were designed to provide greater transparency, instead have become a quick source of pricing information allowing all competing stations to see exactly what other stations in the same market are charging for airtime. I didn’t like that when I ran stations and I don’t like it now, but it is legal and therefore a common practice.

On the positive side, one bedrock rule gives political candidates the right to say virtually anything they like in a commercial. Though that right is often criticized, I believe it is important. Television stations should not be the arbiter of political speech, no matter what that speech may be.

The biggest station headaches, though, are with non-candidate “issue” advertising. Non-candidate commercials are subject to the same rules as any other advertiser. Stations routinely ask for claims to be documented and that documentation is kept on hand. Documentation matters because most every time an issue commercial makes a strong charge or negative statement, general managers are bombarded by lawyers from the other side demanding withdrawal of the offending message. Some complainants become so testy one imagines only capital punishment would be seen by them as a fair resolution. Though these complaints are usually without merit, no station can afford to ignore any charges. That means the finest FCC attorneys in the country, none of whom work cheap, get very little sleep during election season.

On occasion, I have rejected issue commercials because they were clearly false, but those cases were rare because, again, most managers believe television stations should not be the arbiter of free speech.

As I’m sure you know, political advertising is now the single most important advertising category on local television, so stations expect a high level of accountability to come with those profits. The problem is that the cumbersome nature of the current regulations leads to rabbit trails and side agendas that have nothing to do with ensuring a level playing field.

With the FCC currently split 2-2, it is unlikely Acting Chair Rosenworcel will propose any major change to political, or any other controversial rules, in the near term. That of course will soon change, since sitting presidents have the privilege of naming a party-line chair. When that happens, let’s hope the regulations do not become even more complex.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post The Insanity Of Political Advertising Rules appeared first on TV News Check.

The television business has a long history of disgruntled employees making accusations against the stations they worked for. Doing so is well within their rights, and there has never been a shortage of forums to make such charges, from social media to local newspapers to even rival television stations, but to use an employee’s own station’s airwaves is almost unheard of.

Regardless of the validity, or lack, of each complainant’s charges, making those claims on their employer’s air was an outrageous breach of trust. Each was justifiably terminated for cause.

Were these two cases outliers, or is this a coming trend? Are younger generations so different that they think nothing of arbitrarily breaking societal norms? Are we looking at the future?

Every general manager, news director, every other station department head has a story of head-scratching millennial behavior. Some are minor, others bizarre, but one thing is sure, younger employers are a different generation from their predecessors. If we are to effectively lead this new generation, we must take the time to understand them.

First, we must not tar every employee of a certain age with the same brush. Few would ever take extreme actions against their own companies. Most are normal staff members who want to do well and build their careers. We’ve always had the odd employee who makes unreasonable demands. That is not a generational issue.

With that in mind, what broad conclusions can we reach about millennials? Three things stand out:

• Younger employees want to be involved in decision making. In my generation, if the boss said to do something, we did it. Young people are interested in the whys. Why are we covering this issue? Why are you giving me this assignment? Why should we be doing this?
• Millennials like consensus and group decision making. Hearing from everyone seems to be very important to them. They want to have a discussion before deciding.
• Younger employees’ private lives matter to them as much as their jobs. They are more thoughtful than earlier generations when it comes to promotion, sometimes willing to turn down a logical career move if it interferes with the rest of their lives.

When you think about it, are those things so terrible? As long as they are not taken to an extreme, they could actually be healthy, leading to a more balanced person. I’m not making excuses for those who cross the line, but we need to keep this issue in perspective. We can do that by looking at the millennial and upcoming Gen Z generations from a leadership perspective.

Over the years, I’ve seen every level of leadership, from the best to the worst. I can tell you without question that the most important key to organizational success is always leadership. Great organizations usually have great leaders. Dysfunctional or failing organizations virtually always have poor leaders. Leadership is the great challenge of any organization. It is the difference between success and failure

Great leaders are not “bosses.” They explain the mission in personal terms, seek buy-in on strategy and show they care about staff members as human beings. Great leadership is the same no matter the generation because basic human nature does not change.

Skilled leaders have always taken the time for two-way communication, explaining, seeking feedback and pushing decision making to the lowest level. Leaders who do this build the credibility to sometimes say “I know you don’t understand this, but you are going to have to trust me that it must be done.”

None of this means the inmates are running the asylum. Leaders must also be decisive, willing to make hard decisions when staff members cross the line. Some behavior is simply not acceptable and therefore cannot be tolerated.

Leading today’s generation of younger employees can sometimes be a challenge, but we must remember that great leadership transcends generational differences. The key to leading a new generation is not to change the way we lead; it is to raise our own skill level.

Our industry is in the midst of radical change. If we are to marshal our forces to build the future, our most important tool is effective leadership.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post Price Point | Leading A Different Generation appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

If you have not seen John Oliver’s expose on the practice of using local newspeople to hawk paid products, then you owe it to yourself to watch. You will see 21 minutes of riveting television featuring news personalities from large market stations pushing all kinds of products, some of which are more than questionable. You will find yourself embarrassed for the talent, the stations and the group owners.

Most embarrassing of all is the pittance it costs to have a news talent expound on the wonderful results one will experience by using (fill in name here).

Sadly, this is not a new practice. During the last of my GM days, I competed against more than one station offering paid endorsements. I knew about it because I constantly had to explain to our salespeople why we were unwilling to do the same thing.

How does it work? The most common way is for a salesperson to offer an advertising client a spot on their “special program” to talk about their business. Technically, the program is not a newscast, which would be fine if news talent were not involved. The problem is that the same people who appear on regular newscasts also host the “special program.”

As Oliver points out, clients are then encouraged to post the “interviews” on their websites.

These arrangements are always connected to the purchase of advertising. Every interview comes with a spot schedule. There is also a direct payment option, which is the subject of Oliver’s piece.

Stations justify this practice by claiming they are not selling commercial endorsements in their “news programs.” This is done with a wink and a nod by the salesperson, since both the client and viewers at home think they are watching part of the news.

Tragically, this is not the worst of it. There are stations that will sell endorsements in their regular newscasts, usually their noon shows or later hours of morning news. No matter what the credits say, viewers have no practical way of knowing they are watching paid material.

Keep in mind that we are talking about medium- and large-market television stations. There have always been some small stations that didn’t hesitate to cross the line between journalism and advertising, but for most of my career it would have been shocking to see this happen at a larger station.

Why, you might ask, are these practices so common? The easy answer is corporate mandates. I have a number of GM friends who don’t like the practice, but the decision is not theirs to make.

If you think I am writing this because of some kind of moral crusade, think again. I believe companies have the right to run their stations however they see fit.

Here is what I do care about, and you should too. Local television is the last form of news media that consumers trust. Survey after survey shows consumers feel betrayed by national media. They don’t trust what they see on networks, on the internet or in print. In some cases, they are angry. Their last bastion of trust is local television news.

We live in a dangerous time for the station business. Networks see streaming as their future. Program suppliers are merging into mega companies offering app-based products. New competitors of every kind are popping up daily.

If local stations are to have a future, it will be based on their one unique strength: strong relationships with local consumers. Stations have those relationships because viewers watch and trust their newscasts.

To willfully damage a station’s only unique asset is a tragedy, because if their viewers ever lose faith, they will leave and never come back. When it comes to consumer loyalty, there are no second chances.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

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On paper, AT&T stockholders will own the majority of the new company, but don’t be fooled. While AT&T has bumbled through multiple media heads, confusing brand names and poor customer service, Zaslav has built Discovery into a genuine force. Known for his clear-eyed thinking, willingness to make hard decisions and lack of sentimentality, Zaslav appears to be the right person to make sense of a diverse group of video assets.

Coming on the heels of its DirecTV spinoff, this announcement is also an acknowledgement by AT&T that it knows how to string wires, but not what to do with them.

The bigger question, of course, is what does this all mean? The press release says it is a streaming play along with the obligatory claim that “the new company will be able to invest in more original content, enhance the programming options across its global linear pay TV and broadcast channels and offer more innovative video experiences and consumer choices.” Some of that may be true.

Hyperbole aside, let’s take all this to its logical conclusion.

It is possible for some brands to stand alone with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu being examples. However, consumers tend to see those brands as aggregators, offering a wide diversity of program choices. That is the play AT&T hoped to make with HBO Max.

The problem comes with the programming that consumers watch, but do not like enough to for which to pay a premium fee. I pay over $200 a year for Netflix, but I would never pay that much for the Discovery Channel alone. In order to be viable, Discovery must be bundled with other channels, which is the basic cable model.

Just last week, a rural friend of mine with a new high-speed internet connection asked for advice on dropping her Dish Network subscription in favor of apps. Rather than give her an opinion, I sent articles and links to the various app offerings, including the virtual cable-light providers.

A few days later, she sadly told me she had decided to keep Dish. She had hoped to cut her costs to just four channels:  DIY Network, the Hunting Channel, Fox News and weather on her local NBC affiliate. Trying to buy just those channels required buying a lot of other things. Together, they would have cost less than Dish, but not enough to make changing worth the trouble.

The challenge for David Zaslav in today’s streaming environment — and it is a big one — is to monetize his lesser channels at a price consumers are willing to pay. Zaslav even admitted this in his press release: “During my many conversations with John [Stankey, AT&T CEO], we always come back to the same simple and powerful strategic principle: these assets are better and more valuable together.”

How ironic it will be if the ultimate outcome of the wholesale rush to streaming will be an aggregation model similar to cable.

Mega-mergers are driven by hopes and dreams for the future, but never forget that the consumer only cares about one thing: the product. That is the challenge for the new world of mega-streaming. It is also the Achilles’ heel.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

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Having been on both sides of the argument (always depending on whether the station I was running was winning or losing), I can tell you it is rare for disagreements to go public. Both sides need each other because ratings, and the impressions derived from ratings, are still the currency of the realm. This is why the Video Advertising Bureau’s public shot across Nielsen’s bow last week is so significant.

If you’ve been keeping up, you know the VAB is accusing Nielsen of allowing meters to go into default during the current pandemic, resulting in “systematic undercounting” of television program viewership since last March. VAB’s Sean Cunningham cites a 20% drop in panel participants which he says correlates with a drop in reported total TV set usage. There is much more, but that is the crux of the issue.

In an unusually quick response, Nielsen issued a white paper this past Friday saying it is well aware of the issue and have been taking steps all along to make sure the numbers are accurate. It, of course, has its own statistics and arguments.

So, who is right? I have no inside knowledge, but I do have a long history with Nielsen, so here are some thoughts.

First and foremost, which side has the most logical argument? Nielsen concedes the drop in panelists is real. It is hard to believe that the loss of one out of every five households would have no effect. I’ve seen cases in local markets where a much smaller percentage of meter faults resulted in significant change.

Second, how accurate is the current demographic mix? The only way to make up for lost panelists is to impute numbers by oversampling other members of the panel. How well does that really work?

Finally, what is Nielsen’s history? Every time Nielsen has changed methodology – diaries, meters with diaries, people meters, nano meters — ratings have changed dramatically for the worse. Naturally, Nielsen always claims its latest system is its most accurate. Perhaps it is right, but controversy has not been unusual.

All of this matters because Nielsen is still the gold standard. Comscore has made inroads, but only Nielsen measures actual over-the-air viewing, something essential to networks, program suppliers and, of course, local stations.

Nielsen needs to do more than issue a white paper. It needs to take whatever steps necessary to ensure clients have full confidence in its product.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post The Price Point | Nielsen Must Restore Clients’ Confidence appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

As an alumnus of Chicago television, I can say with some certainty there is nothing the town likes better than inside baseball. In most cities, no one cares who runs the local stations, where news directors last worked or the minute details of anchor contracts, but not Chicago. Chicago is the king of media towns.

During my Chicago days, there were a half-dozen columnists writing about television. I had to check each one every morning to find out what I had done the day before. And I wasn’t alone. Every other GM was in the same boat. When news director Pat Costello and I decided to create a different kind of newscast with legendary anchor Carol Marin back in 2000, it was literally front page news.

All of this is to say the current angst at NewsNation is a story made for Chicago. It has everything the town loves: a media mogul trying to create something new, resignations by high-level employees, outside consultants (always distrusted, if not hated) and, of course, the ratings angle. Even The New York Times has weighed in with a hit piece throwing gasoline on the fire.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from past controversies, it is that no one knows the full story except those involved. Even then, different people have different perspectives. Rather than speculating, let’s talk about what we actually do know.

Upon acquiring WGN, Nexstar’s Perry Sook saw an opportunity to create a new national news voice that would eventually compete with the cable news networks. He has consistently said he wants that voice to be non-biased, right down the middle. Sook is known for frankness and straight talk, so we must take him at his word.

We also know that Jennifer Lyons, a respected news executive, resigned her VP/news position last week. This came after News Director Sandy Pudar resigned several days earlier. To their credit, neither Lyons nor Pudar have publicly commented, but executives do not leave their jobs without a good reason. That reason may be related to the hiring of former Trump executive Bill Shine as a consultant.

According to columnist/blogger Rob Feder, who usually gets his facts right, NewsNation has “plummeting morale amid dismal ratings.” Sounds logical to me.

So, what to make of all this? Let’s start with the ratings. Launching a new news product on a platform not known for news is a long-term proposition at best. No one should expect significant ratings anytime soon. Remember this Saturday Night Live running bit: “This just in: No one watches MSNBC.” Will NewsNation succeed? We will have some idea in a couple of years.

The bigger question, of course, is about NewsNation’s content. The polarization of American media has created an opening for a national news organization that is truly unbiased. If NewsNation is to become that organization, then there is work to be done.

First, remove anything and anyone who appears to be influencing content. Employing on-air talent and consultants representing both sides will not work. Viewers are sick of arguing. Put those people in news stories, not on the desk. Viewers want clarity and straightforwardness, not artificial drama.

Next, cover both sides of every story until it hurts, then do the same thing over and over and over again.

Third, do this with determination and single mindedness over a long period of time.

Brands are not built on marketing, sets, graphics or even talent. Those things matter, but they are not the keys to success. The key is unique content. In this case, the unique content would be a willingness to tell both sides of the story in depth with as little bias as possible. Any deviation from that promise courts disaster because if the promise is not real, the product will fail.

NewsNation is at a crossroads. What the press thinks or what I think does not matter. What viewers see over time will determine success or failure. Let’s hope NewsNation does what it takes to succeed.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post The Price Point | NewsNation Finds Itself At Early Crossroads appeared first on TV News Check.

The now-ancient VHS machine was the first technology to crack the idea of fixed TV schedules. One thousand dollars was a lot of money in the mid-1970s, but consumers were willing to pay that high price for the convenience of recording their favorite shows. It was the DVR, though, that changed the game. The simplicity of the DVR empowered consumers, giving them true control of their time. From the DVR came every other trend, from binge watching to acceptance of streaming video.

Seeing all of this, the networks seem to have concluded that the future is about on-demand streaming and nothing else. This idea was reinforced by Disney’s announcement, also last week, of record subscribers. Looking at the numbers, one analyst predicted that Disney+ might eventually pass Netflix in paid subscriptions.

After the Disney announcement, one could almost feel the panic in the other network boardrooms. CBS had already dropped every other priority to promote its Paramount streamer but will probably now double down. NBC, always happy to fire before aiming, will no doubt do the same for Peacock. Perhaps Peacock could hatch some eggs, but let me stop lest they get ideas.

As important as all this is, something else happened last week that was equally important. The majority of the nation was engulfed by deadly winter storms. Guess what consumers in those stormy areas overwhelmingly chose to watch? It wasn’t Disney+.

Consumers watched local news, and they watched it live. They watched local weather coverage and more local weather coverage and even more local weather coverage. They also watched the commercials, which were also live.

This week, many of those same consumers will continue to watch their favorite local newscasts live and on station apps. They will also watch streaming video, mobile video, DVR video, other app video and much more. They will do so on a wide range of screens and devices because today’s consumer devotes more time to content than at any other period in history. Theirs is a very broad world that even includes print.

Rather than putting all their eggs (sorry) in one basket, today’s networks need integrated strategies that take into account all of their distribution systems, including their legacy station partners who not only bring strong brands to the table, but contribute billions in cash program payments. Such a strategy seems logical and simple, but the latest bright shiny object is oh so appealing.

Let’s hope the networks realize streaming, though incredibly important, is not their only opportunity for the future. If not, stronger local stations may eventually have to look at alternate program sources, and that would be a shame for everyone.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

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When COVID-19 first hit, engineering and IT departments worked miracles, allowing the vast majority of employees to do their jobs remotely. Microsoft Teams, Zoom and even our old friend Skype became lifesavers.

The fact stations have been able to function so well with so few people actually in the buildings is a testament to the resilience of an industry that has always been known for its ability to mobilize during emergencies. But emergencies are one thing, multi-month efforts, soon to be a year, are another.

Television stations thrive on shared energy. This is true of every department — sales, news, creative services, even engineering. Everyone who has worked at a major station knows the feeling of electricity that can go through a building after a big win. It’s not like working at a life insurance company, where success comes down to a spreadsheet. Ours is truly a people business.

Talk to any general manager of most any group and they will tell you how proud they are of the way their people have responded. Talk with them long enough and you will begin to hear how tired they are, how much they miss being in the same room with their department heads and staff members. Talk to news directors and you will hear the same thing. Everyone wants this to be over.

Of course, it can’t be over until companies believe their people can return to a safe workplace, but the not knowing, the lack of a target date, makes things that much harder.

All of this is why I was excited to see NAB’s announcement that they plan to have an in-person convention later this year. This is exactly the kind of leadership our industry needs, and the timing could not be better. If it will be safe to go to the NAB convention, surely it will be safe to go to work.

The important thing about NAB’s announcement is that it commits to a specific time-frame — the month of October. If events should prevent the convention from happening, then so be it, but in the meantime an actual date offers a light at the end of the tunnel.

Let’s hope television station owners across the country follow NAB’s example and set target dates to return to full station staffing. The ability to work remotely is a valuable tool that will be part of the future, but television stations are very small organizations. They function best with everyone in the same building.

A commitment to normalcy, even if it is far off and tentative, will energize tired employees. They will be given hope, and hope is a precious commodity that is needed right now.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

The post The Price Point | A Return In Sight For Stations? appeared first on TV News Check.

Lew Klein was an innovator and master local programmer. It’s been almost six decades since he and 60 or so station program directors banded together in a New York hotel to form a professional organization. They called it the National Association of Television Program Executives, but in pronouncing the acronym, NATPE somehow became “Nap-tee.”

Syndication was not big business in those days; local programming was king of the great stations. Syndication consisted of old movies, a few originals like Ziv’s Highway Patrol and Sea Hunt, and of course the off-network staples led by I Love Lucy.

Syndicators were called “film peddlers,” a slightly pejorative term for what was then considered secondary programming sold by episodes and number of plays. In some cases, stations bought full libraries of programs, but the main distribution system was 16mm film moved from station to station via Greyhound Bus.

NATPE solved an industry problem because it put buyers and salespeople at the same venue, but the organization did not become really important until 1970. That’s when the FCC implemented the ill-advised Prime Time Access Rule, which prevented off-network programming from running during access in the top 50 markets. Take away The Honeymooners and stations were sure to create their own local prime programming, or so the regulators thought. Instead, they got Wheel of Fortune.

The Prime Time Access Rule created the modern syndication business, something NATPE was well prepared to handle.

Of course, the new world of syndication had to find its way. Through the 1970s, NATPE was hotel suite-based. Syndicators would move beds and furniture to set up their wares. Single rooms were used for private meetings. There was no glamor, just business. But the business was no longer five and dime. It was becoming much bigger with the promise of big money. It was much too big for just hotel room meetings. That’s when my generation of NATPE was born.

By the early 1980’s, when I first attended, NATPE was a massive event with virtually every star who had ever appeared on television — or wanted to. Disney boasted the first $1 million set among acres of equally luxurious venues. As program director of the Washington CBS affiliate, I was at constant risk of being tackled in the aisles by salespeople.

After spending a day on the exhibit floor in San Francisco, my wife once remarked: “The only thing missing from this place is carnival rides.” She also endeared herself to Roger King when she told him Divorce Court was a terrible show because it promoted immoral lifestyles. Years later at a NATPE in New Orleans, he remarked upon seeing her: “Oh yes. Divorce Court.”

Like the television industry itself, NATPE reflected the times. As the dollars grew, so did the syndication sales organizations, opening offices around the country. Stations with 50% profit margins could afford to pay the cost. Those were the glory days when half the celebrities in Hollywood seemed to have their own talk show pilots. To say they all failed is only a slight exaggeration.

But life is full of changes. The recession of 2009 brought a dash of cold water. Like talent contracts, stations suddenly wanted to negotiate the cost of programming down. Several days of partying in convention cities no longer seemed an appropriate use of resources.

The consolidation of station groups also changed the syndication business. There were simply fewer decision makers than in the past. During the 1960s, program directors had been powerful forces in TV stations.  Today, the job as we used to know it no longer exists.

Of course, syndicated programming still matters, which is why NATPE still matters. To its credit, the organization has morphed into a 21^st century global entity, far more than anything those 60 or so program directors could have envisioned all those years ago.

Whatever happens in the future, programming will remain the essential element, which means there will continue to be an important role for NATPE, though I doubt we will ever get those carnival rides.

Hank Price is a media consultant and leadership coach. He is the author of Leading Local Television, a guide to leadership for television general managers, as well as those who aspire to top leadership. Price spent 30 years managing TV stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett, including WBBM Chicago and KARE Minneapolis, as well as three other stations. Earlier, he was a consultant for Frank N. Magid Associates. Price also served as senior director of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and is currently director of leadership development for the School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. He is the author of two other books.

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