Copyright 2006 by Rules |
So, Jay Leno is back to #1 in his old time slot, and NBC-U is $200 million poorer--that's a minimum estimate--for its disastrous Conan O'Brien detour. Leno, a genuinely nice guy, probably won't hold a grudge. But O'Brien, of course, will be mad, forever, and no doubt his Team Coco Coolaid drinkers will be mad, too. They will vent most of their venom on Leno, but some will spill over onto the NBC suits, the suitiest of which is Jeff Zucker, who has to be bidding now for the title of Worst Television Executive Evah. No doubt outgoing NBC-U prexy--he is on his way out, even if Comcast hasn't told him yet--will have some PowerPoint slides put together, explaining how things are going swell at NBC, but nobody is listening. Everybody knows the score, Jeff. You effed up, big time, and it's only Jay--the man you trashed, six years ago--who is saving NBC-U's bacon.Posted byCable Gamerat7:23 AM0commentsLinks to this post
When The Cable Gamer read this item in The Wrap about big changes coming for CNN's morning day part, she was puzzled: She had thought that CNN had grown too big for mere television. But as Dylan Stableford writes, CNN is, in fact, tinkering--more than tinkering: CNN s developing a new morning show pilot, with a format closer to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and “Fox & Friends” than anything it has ever done, TheWrap has learned. . . . According to one source familiar with the network’s development process, CNN is testing a concept that would include personalities with dueling political ideologies and opinions. That would be a bit of a departure for CNN, which considers itself to be a bipartisan, journalistically-driven network unlike its rivals at Fox News and MSNBC. The story in The Wrap was obviously a planned leak to a hot insider publication, and so as a result, Stableford didn't put any spin or context on the story--that would be an insult to his source. So he just reports his scoop, and leaves it at that. Which means, of course, that the rest of us, scoopless as we are, must provide the proper framing for The Wrap's story. And the real frame is the failure of CNN to get anything going in the morning, for decades now. That's a failure that precedes, even, CNN prexy Jon Klein. And now CNN wants to fix that by cloning "Fox & Friends." Or trying to. Yet again, all this rejiggering of CNN's morning lineup is interesting, of course, because lately the Alfred E. Neuman-esque* Klein has been saying that there's no need to worry about CNN's tumbling ratings, because CNN has now gone digital--its big competition is from social networks, such as Facebook. (You knew that, didn't you? If you didn't, see yesterday's TCG post, below.) So does this spell doom for the current co-hosts of "American Morning," John Roberts and Kiran Chetry? TCG has always liked Roberts, but Chetry is a more interesting story. She is the more dominant of the two on the air, and it's her picture appearing in The Wrap's story. Interestingly, her contract is likely up for renewal right about now, since she joined CNN three years ago, in February 2007, after she was terminated by Fox, because her agent, John Ferreter, was, well, ferreting around. Indeed, Chetry's fate sort of reminds TCG of the fate of Paula Zahn who was fired by FNC in 2001, and has been crashing and burning ever since, albeit she hasn't missed any meals. So is this another morning show failure for CNN? CNN is known for many programming changes–specifically in the morning. Klein replaced the perky Soledad O’Brien and the solid Miles O’Brien back a few year ago with Chetry and Roberts, and yet the ratings for "American Morning" have continued downward. Indeed, HLN's "Morning Express with Robin Meade" is not only beating "American Morning" in the all important 25-54 demo but it’s also showing growth while AM is declining by double digits. Here's a look at the ratings, Year-to-date ’10 vs, Year-to-date ’09: FNC’s "Fox & Friends": 1,108,000 in total viewers (up 8%) – 383,000 in 25-54 (up 15%)CNN’s "American Morning": 364,000 in total viewers (down 30%) – 137,000 in 25-54 (down 30%)MSNBC’s "Morning Joe": 346,000 in total viewers (down 22%) – 103,000 in 25-54 (down 39%)HLN’s "Morning Express with Robin Meade": 319,000 (up 21%) – 181,000 in 25-54 (up 29%)But again, why is CNN bothering with all this, since everybody knows that CNN's competition is Facebook? *Neuman, as in Alfred E. Neuman, the original "What, Me Worry?" guy.Posted byCable Gamerat10:34 AM1 commentsLinks to this post
You might think that CNN's major competition is other cable news networks--you know, such as Fox and MSNBC. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong, according to the latest spin from CNN prexy Jon Klein. Whatever made you think that CNN worried about television? CNN has other, bigger, fish to fry. Such as Facebook--look out, Facebook, CNN is coming atcha! As reported by George Szalai, in The Hollywood Reporter, Klein is now saying, "The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites," because they provide "an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us." So ignore the fact, Klein is saying, that CNN is Pnow third, fourth, or fifth in the cable news ratings. That's not a problem, Klein has been spinning for years now, because, well, you know, it's not a problem. Nobody except Time-Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes seems to buy Klein's spin, but if he, Bewkes, signs Klein's checks, Klein's focus-on-an-audience-of-one strategy must be given some grudging respect, albeit not by Time-Warner shareholders. "Viewers and ratings are just one metric that CNN looks at," Szalai writes of Klein's argument. Gee, I seem to recall the days when CNN bragged that it was Number One in cable news ratings, or when Ted Turner said that his goal was to "squash Rupert [Murdoch and Fox News] like a bug." But now that Fox is squashing CNN like a bug, the rules have changed. Now, CNN is looking past plain old cable news, toward the bright new world of digital. Yet interestingly, Klein's own words suggest that Klein doesn't buy his own spin. When called upon to defend CNN's performance, the CNN man still cites TV first, as we see in this quote: For example, Klein argued that CNN has "hands-down the best TV journalism," is the biggest news brand internationally and is "number one by a mile in digital," both online and in mobile. "We think of ourselves as No. 1," Klein summarized. "We think of ourselves as No, 1." Now there's some chutzpah! But we might further note that if Klein first cites CNN-as-TV when he is defending his "digital strategy"--as when he said, "hands-down the best TV journalism"--then that's evidence that Klein knows better than to pretend that TV doesn't matter. But The Cable Gamer has no doubt that Klein will perfect his spin soon enough. He will soon be saying, smoothly, with Alfred E. Neuman-ish nonchalance, "We never saw ourselves as a TV network. We were always a digital platform. What me worry about TV? What's TV? Don't you know anything about media?"Such spin will be as comical as Mad Magazine, of course. But if Bewkes keeps buying it, Klein will have made a career-extending sale.Posted byCable Gamerat3:16 PM0commentsLinks to this post
AllThingsDigital's Kara Swisher video interviews Michael Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, the new co-presidents of MySpace.As everyone knows, MySpace was the first social network to get really big, c. 2005-6. And then it lost its way; as Hirschhorn told Swisher, MyS "fell down on innovation." And that can be fatal in a fast-moving world, where Facebook, for example, took a huge lead.But MySpace has an interesting strategy: Service to musicians and artists. As Hirschhorn said, the duo's goal is "obsessively serving a creative class." Finishing the thought--the two share an office, share a desk, even--Jones added that the goal is to help "new bands, new things." Continuing, Jones said, the further goal is to deliver "a new experience that they've never seen." A tall order, to be sure. But Hirschhorn promised "a new kind of interface for the site." It will be intesting to see what Jones and Hirschhorn come up with. And yes, music is a killer app. But hey, fellas--don't forget politics. You know, showbiz for ugly people!!But in all seriousness--there are artists all over America, and plenty of them do political art, from writing to songwriting to photoshopping. All of them, too, have something to contribute, something to show off. Whichever site offers the best place to do that--for all human creativity, and all kinds of creativity--will be the site that the most people go to.Posted byCable Gamerat11:15 PM0commentsLinks to this post
Comcast-opus is raising its Internet rates. As reported by Katy Bachman of Mediaweek, the watchdog/activist group Free Press reacted quickly to the news: The irony of Comcast's rate hike wasn't lost on Free Press, which pounced on the FCC's failure to inject more competition in the broadband market. "Almost no one disagrees that the FCC's proposals to increase broadband adoption are very important. But they must be paired with a strong competition policy to drive down constantly increasing prices or else they will struggle to succeed," said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press.So The Cable Gamer asks: If Comcast is willing to do this now, before the FCC and the Justice Department approve Comcast's purchase of NBC-Universal, what will Comcast do after the deal is approved? Or to put it another way, will eight tentacles be enough for the Comcast-opus to grasp all our money?H/T Karl Bode of Broadband/DSL Reports.Posted byCable Gamerat10:29 PM1 commentsLinks to this post
How's this for candor. No tears, no nothing--just candor:"America, I'm gonna shoot straight with you," Glenn Beck said near the conclusion of his apparently frustrating chat with Rep. Eric Massa on Fox News. "I think I've wasted your time. I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time. I apologize for that."That's Kevin Allocca's report on Glenn Beck's hour with Eric Massa.Posted byCable Gamerat10:06 PM0commentsLinks to this post
People are getting wise to the Big G. Don't be evil--just be Darth Vader!G. is not a Cable Gamer, in any strict sense. It merely seeks to dominate the entire media ecosystem. Anybody got a problem with that?Posted byCable Gamerat9:06 AM0commentsLinks to this post
Gawker trumpets the story, and many other blogs are all over it.As always, it's worth asking what would have happened if Fox had done what Ross had done.Posted byCable Gamerat4:24 PM0commentsLinks to this post
Fox 26's Ned Hibberd has the story.Posted byCable Gamerat3:47 PM0commentsLinks to this post
Veteran Cable Gamer Stephen Battaglio scores an interview with CNN's Jon Klein. (Maybe "scores" is the wrong verb, since Klein can't be that busy.)In any case, fair-minded reporter that he is, Battaglio lets Klein prattle on about how CNN is actually winning, even though to any outside observer, not in bed with Anderson Cooper, CNN is clearly losing. That's the job of a reporter, I guess, to print what the source says. And if that reporter wants to keep the source as a source, the reporter can't burn the source too badly. So Battaglio plays it cool, headlining his story in TV Guide, "Can CNN Survive on News Alone?"Thus Battaglio lets Klein have his say: Klein says his network has not been hurt by FNC, which he believes is in a different business with its partisan personalities. “We cover the news,” he says. “They are about fomenting outrage. They do it very well. Their viewers stay longer. That’s about a state of mind.” That's all spin, of course, from Klein, who doesn't wish to acknowledge that he is leftwing hotheads--or simply loudmouthed oafs--on his air, in the form of Roland Martin and Rick Sanchez. But then Battaglio lets other make some telling points about CNN, as he gets Fox's response to Klein: A Fox News Channel spokesperson said: “We don’t respond to presidents of fifth-place news networks. The last time we looked, Jon was losing to the Weather Channel, so call us back when he and CNN regain relevancy.”And Battaglio adds: "Fox News points out that its regular news programs also top CNN by wide margins." Which, of course, is true; Fox is first, and CNN bumps around in third, fourth, or fifth place, depending on the time of the day or week. So I don't blame Battaglio for posing his headline as a question: "Can CNN Survive on News Alone?" But I like my headline better; “We don't respond to presidents of fifth-place news networks.”Posted byCable Gamerat3:34 PM0commentsLinks to this post
Fascinating profile of Rupert Murdoch in New York magazine this week. Written by Gabriel Sherman, the piece walks through a lot of familiar soap-opera-ish territory about concerning Murdoch and his sprawling family, and focuses a lot on Murdoch's effort to put The Wall Street Journal into direct competition with The New York Times. A few Cable-Gamey nuggets, though, are worth noting. First, reporter Sherman details how Gary Ginsberg got himself pushed out of the News Corporation last year. It seems that Ginsberg had been instrumental in persuading Murdoch to cooperate with Michael Wolff, the smart but slimy Vanity Fair writer, who published that nasty and inaccurate 2009 book, The Man Who Owns The News, which tried to argue that Murdoch disdains Roger Ailes and Fox News. It was no secret that Gary Ginsberg disdained Ailes and Fox, and so maybe that's why he brought in Wolff, to do a hit job on Ailes. But the effort--and the credibility of Wolff's book--blew up when Murdoch did everything he could to reassure and publicly embrace Ailes, including signing him to a new five-year contract. Moreover, Ginsberg was tight with Matthew Freud, Murdoch's rogue son-in-law, who freelanced a nasty quote about Ailes and Fox in the January 9 New York Times that Rupert immediately repudiated. So Ginsberg had to go, everyone at NWS agreed. And second, another little nugget, concerning Rupert, his eldest son Lachlan, and, yes, Roger Ailes: Earlier this month, Rupert took Lachlan on a sailing trip in the South Pacific along with Ailes. It was Ailes and Lachlan’s first reunion since they clashed five years ago—a surprising move that reignited speculation that Rupert is trying to repair relations and bring Lachlan back into the empire. It's interesting that Rupert is patching things up with Lachlan, but note the presence of Ailes in the far-away South Seas. Yet more repudiation of the Wolff/Ginsberg/Freud thesis about Rupert's alleged anti-Ailes-ness. Instead, it's perfectly obvious that Ailes, and Fox, are in tight with the News Corp., now and in the future.Posted byCable Gamerat8:30 AM0commentsLinks to this post
Kyle Smith posts a blog item on "Green Zone," the new Matt Damon movie. Actually, it's not that new; it was finished two years ago, and has been sitting in the can ever since--never a good sign.But here's Kyle's lede--I cut-and-paste, you decide:I can’t believe what I just saw, so I’ll think about it some more before I go into detail. But if I were the kind of excitable guy who believes in boycotts, I’d say “Boycott NBC-Universal” for its appalling new anti-American flick “Green Zone,” an absurdly awful would-be actioner that stars Matt Damon as a US warrant officer in 2003 Baghdad.I would never have accused director Paul Greengrass, who made the astonishingly powerful “United 93,” of being simplistic. But he has made a $100 million war film in which American troops are the bad guys. There are moments that we’re supposed to cheer because our soldiers are getting shot down- but it’s okay because they’re evildoers at worst or stooges at best who are trying to kill the one guy in the country who can prevent an insurgency from taking root. The movie isn't getting much attention, of course, and it probably won't do very well. But it'll be interesting to see how Comcast handles this political challenge, as it is trying to grease the regulatory and legislative wheels for its proposed acquisition of NBC-U.Posted byCable Gamerat8:22 AM0commentsLinks to this post
Laura McGann, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, starts to unravel an interesting tale, about The Huffington Post's "Impact" section--a section which The Cable Gamer had noticed on the Huffpo site, but not thought much about till now. Here's the way McGann describes it: In October, The Huffington Post launched a new section with an unusual goal: turning an audience of passive readers into activists for good causes. The section’s underlying business model is novel, too: All of its content is outsourced to an outside company, a for-profit firm that has nonprofits for clients.In exchange for that content, HuffPo shares the advertising and sponsorship revenue the section generates with the outside company, Causecast. And Causecast gets a platform to promote its services and the nonprofits it chooses to highlight, some of which are its partner organizations.The arrangement emerges at the same time news organizations are struggling to make display advertising alone a viable business model. The HuffPo-Causecast arrangement, in conjunction with ads, could be an example of the kind of hybrid solution publishers are struggling to find. However, by blurring the line between advertising and content, it also raises questions about conflicts of interest and editorial responsibility.Interesting questions, all, about Huffpo operates in conjunction with Causecast. Lots of unanswered questions. For example, the section on the Causecast site shows a variety of bold-faced celebrities associated with the group, including Russell Simmons, Jenny McCarthy, and Natasha Bedingfield. But nobody thinks that any of them are actually running Causecast, or scoping out its relationship with Huffpo, or with donors.McGann does her best, but there are plenty of questions that need better answers--or maybe more honest answers. For example, consider this question posed by by McGann to the president of Causecast:When I asked Brian Sirgutz, Causecast’s president, if a Causecast client could pay for a link or a story on the Impact page, a spokeswoman for the organization responded in an email that they could not. I also asked if Causecast clients get any priority in the editorial process when determining what nonprofits to feature. I was told “no.”That seems straightforward enough--"no" can be assumed to mean "no." But then McGann adds:But that doesn’t mean Causecast isn’t writing about or linking to affiliated organizations. Here’s an example: On Jan. 31, Harris wrote a 76-word post titled, “Malaria Is The Cause of 2010, Declares Matthew Bishop and Malaria No More.” The quick post notes that the nonprofit group Malaria No More expects the World Cup in South Africa to draw attention to the disease. Underneath the post, a box features a link to donate money to Malaria No More, using Causecast’s donation tool. Harris doesn’t mention in the post that Malaria No More is a member organization of his employer, or that Causecast ran Malaria No More’s mobile fundraising campaign. Causecast lists the campaign as a case study for its text2give services.In other words, it sure seems as if Malaria No More is getting some special treatment, from Causecast, and thus from Huffpo.Now let's see. Malaria No More, obviously a key group to Causecast. Hmmm. Malaria No More. Where have we heard that name before? And who is the Chairman and Co-Founder of Malaria No More? Why, Peter Chernin, the former COO of the News Corp. until he was more or less pushed out last summer, sits at the top of Malaria No More. Small world! And so now he's tight with Causecast and Huffpost. Tell me more! For openers, we might ask: What sort of business relationships, if any, are laced up with philanthropy? And oh yes, what has Chernin had to say, if anything, to Arianna Huffington? The Cable Gamer has been paying more attention to Huffpo's founder since she went out of her way to attack Roger Ailes a few weeks ago on ABC News. I wonder who Chernin was rooting for during that exchange. One side note: As McGann observes, the future of media seems to include the sort of Huffpo/Causecast hybrid, perhaps with a few operators, such as Chernin, thrown in, just to make sure nobody goes broke. But interestingly enough, The Nieman Lab is a part of Harvard University, so it, too, is a non-profit with complicated connections all over the place. So plenty to unravel, on all sides. Maybe Huffpo can do a profile on Nieman.Posted byCable Gamerat6:02 PM0commentsLinks to this post
CNN's Rick Sanchez wants to go to MSNBC. That's the only explanation for Sanchez to trash the citizens of Texas, the second-largest state in the union. And the people of the South, and conservatives in general. That's a lot of antagonizin' Yesterday on CNN, Sanchez declared to his nationwide audience that "states' rights" is "a racist term." And of course, that means that Texas Governor Rick Perry is also a racist. That's the sort of talk that would have Rick fitting right in Keith Olbermann. Of course, he does have to get himself hired at MSNBC, and there's no evidence that MSNBC wants Rick, but he has to start somewhere, right? I mean, as he sees CNN sinking into fifth place, he certainly doesn't want to stay where he is. So a little Texas-bashing might get him some attention among trendy left types. You know, the kind of people who think that Anderson Cooper, who carried CNN from second to fifth, is the right guy to take over Katie Couric. Yes, I realize, such thinking doesn't make sense, unless, of course, you're Jon Klein, in which case, you think that getting invited to the right parties in Manhattan is more important than getting good ratings in the country as a whole. So wait--maybe Rick is simply gunning for a raise at CNN.Posted byCable Gamerat11:09 AM0commentsLinks to this post
| --BEGIN VALIDATION CODE-- X fSwEzNs G sYyUcHp G tAcI rXgAzEzM tDzI hAqUtYdY pB bCeGaAtMxApF fYpWeS iPo LpGbTjBpD iCgHbRaG aZmRoEkB vIuNvVw MtJ dNoP hVg KiU dKiZwT kRtPvFwNoNqK yYyX qGkXrGeAkU aZlXrMhUhUfYzPlJ mTyX bEhHbUsK kL mMeFxBeUlLqW cNhJ iQu ZcOvBjN hAeS fXmCkSlDfQ hIjHlH lWhS w hohositeX2006 --END VALIDATION CODE-- |
