Posted on 06/12/2008 1:24:17 PM PDT by abb
A flurry of big-name layoffs marks the reinvention of the local TV news business.
By Deborah Potter Deborah Potter (potter@newslab.org) is executive director of NewsLab, a broadcast training and research center, and a former network correspondent. Anyone who's been in the television news business for a decade or more has seen it before. A tough economy always means cutbacks, so it wasn't a surprise when the ax fell at stations across the country this spring. But the buyouts and layoffs this time around signal something more than a predictable reaction to a looming recession.
Prominence and longevity — and the high salaries they tend to guarantee — used to make some TV newspeople seem invulnerable. Not anymore. Some of the nation's best-known local news anchors and reporters were let go in a brutal week of layoffs at CBS-owned stations from Sacramento to New York.
WBZ in Boston dumped legendary sports anchor Bob Lobel, who had worked there since 1979. KPIX in San Francisco dismissed four reporters who had a combined 61 years of service at the station. WCCO in Minneapolis cut a 22-year veteran meteorologist and a weekend anchor. In Los Angeles, longtime KCBS coanchors Harold Greene and Ann Martin were told their contracts would not be renewed. At WBBM in Chicago, anchor Diann Burns was terminated six months before her seven-figure contract was to expire.
There were cuts behind the scenes, too. At the CBS station in Denver, video editor Shawn Montano was let go after winning his second editor of the year award from the National Press Photographers Association. A week before he was laid off, he says, the KCNC newsroom had a party to celebrate his achievement. Other stations also are cutting back, just not as publicly. NBC affiliate WSAZ in Huntington, West Virginia, owned by Gray Television, let eight production people go in March. The Fox station in Philadelphia laid off four news writers.
The layoff decisions weren't based solely on salaries, of course, but money was the driving force. Burns, for example, had been lured away from the market-leading ABC station in Chicago five years ago in an effort to pull WBBM's ratings out of the cellar. Higher ratings would have meant more advertising revenue. But the strategy didn't work, and she became expendable. "There's this perception that [television news anchors] are all Teflon superhuman celebrities," longtime WCCO anchor Don Shelby told MinnPost.com. "We're not." So maybe it doesn't matter as much who makes the widgets if it doesn't make a difference to the customers. And that means the local TV news formula of using star anchors to attract viewers may be headed for the ash heap. It's expensive and apparently not that efficient if you consider the recent downturn in both audience and advertising.
In 2007, for the second year in a row, ratings fell for local evening and late night newscasts, according to the annual survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism; morning news numbers barely held steady. Advertising that has moved online is not coming back to broadcast news, and most local online ad spending is on Internet "pure plays," not TV or radio Web sites, according to the research and consulting firm Borrell Associates. That suggests the local station shakeout is far from over.
"I would presume that everything has to be considered as the business moves forward, as television redefines itself and as the market redefines itself," said Shelby, a star anchor himself whose contract is up in 2010, to MinnPost.com.
He's exactly right, because the budget crunch hitting stations today is entirely different from past setbacks that could be weathered by temporary cost-cutting. "You're talking about a financial struggle that is not cyclical," says Jerry Gumbert, president and CEO of the broadcast consulting firm AR&D. "It's not going to turn around soon, and probably not at all."
Cost reduction can help stations keep going in the short term, but Gumbert says it's not a viable long-term strategy. So what is? "We tell them to re-engineer the newsroom to operate in a world with new revenue realities."
That means emphasizing nontraditional ways of delivering the news rather than relying on highly paid stars. The recent cutbacks suggest that stations are beginning to get the point.
Innovation can kill a business that refuses to adapt and change. Just ask Polaroid. The company that made its name and fortune on instant photography finally threw in the towel in February and announced it will stop making film — it had already stopped making instant cameras — and will focus instead on flat-screen TVs and digital cameras.
Local TV news could become another Polaroid, left in the dust by technology while continuing to produce a product fewer and fewer consumers want or need. Or it could take a page from a different camera company's playbook and turn itself around.
Remember how bleak things looked for Kodak five years ago? The company bet on disposable film cameras just as digital was taking off. In 2003, its stock price hit a 20-year low. Since then, Kodak has cut almost half its workforce and become a leading digital brand, not just by changing its products but by reinventing itself as a service company.
The lesson for TV news seems obvious. Cutting jobs won't solve the problem. It's reinvention time. Anyone listening?
"Network evening newscasts will go dark after the '08 elections and their news divisions disbanded."
ping
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/hbc-90003064
David Broder’s Moonlighting: Post columnist benefits from corporate speaking deals
By Ken Silverstein
Back in the mid-1990s, the fact that some big-name Washington reporters were receiving huge speaking fees created a scandal within the journalism world. No one was tougher in criticizing the practice than David Broder of the Washington Post, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and professor at the University of Maryland who is commonly referred to as the “dean” of the national press corps. As Broder said in a 1996 “Frontline” show called “Why America Hates the Press”:
It’s clear that some journalists now are in a market category where the amount of money that they can make on extracurricular activities raises, in my mind, exactly, and, clearly, in the public’s mind, exactly the same kind of conflict-of-interest questions that we are constantly raising with people in public life….
People think that we are part of the establishment and therefore part of the problem. I mean, what bothers me is the notion that journalists believe, or some journalists believe, that they can have their cake and eat it too, that you can have all of the special privileges, access and extraordinary freedom that you have because you are a journalist operating in a society which protects journalism to a greater degree than any other country in the world, and at the same time you can be a policy advocate. You can be a public performer on the lecture circuit or television. I think that’s greedy.
Howard Kurtz, the high priest of journalism ethics (who now simultaneously writes a Post column and hosts a show on CNN, where he recently promoted a book that his wife “had been paid to serve as a publicist for”), was equally outraged. “The pot of gold in the talk show world is not just for the half hour you spend on the program,” he said. “Maybe you get a few hundred dollars, at most. But it opens up this world of the lecture circuit, which has become a real scandal, I think, in the world of journalism. The reason so many journalists want to get on these shows and become these identifiable personalities is they can then go out and speak to corporations and lobbying groups for sometimes tens of thousands of dollars for a single speech, more than some Americans make in a year.”
snip
http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/post-gannett-pension-plan-comments-here.html
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Post your Gannett pension plan comments here
I’m working off my iPhone right now, so can’t write much. Frankly, I’m amazed this big whack at the pension plan didn’t happen sooner. Still, I want to know more about what specific impact this freeze has on management’s own retirement benefits. Post your comments below. I’ll write more tomorrow.
snip
http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13400
Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 6/12/2008 2:06:01 PM
Title: Publisher : P-I contract talks won’t be easy
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
Memo to Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers
From: Oglesby, Roger
Sent: Mon 6/9/2008 2:45 PM
To: PiStaff
Subject: FYI
Today we sent a letter to the Guild terminating the current collective bargaining agreement as of July 25. The current agreement is outmoded in a number of respects, not the least of which is that it does not address new media, and it needs to be replaced.
We will work with the Guild to reach a new agreement before July 25, but to be candid bargaining has progressed far more slowly than we had hoped. Negotiations began with an afternoon bargaining session May 28 and a session scheduled for May 30 was canceled. The next session is scheduled for June 24.
We had hoped for months that we would be able to begin early negotiations and move discussions along quickly to secure a new agreement without the distractions and hard feelings that sometimes accompany protracted bargaining. So far, no such luck.
No one is saying this is going to be easy.
The challenges facing newspapers today, financial and otherwise, are no secret to any of us, and these negotiations are not likely to be easy in any respect.
But the success of these negotiations is critically important to saving as many jobs as we can in this economic climate. I hope everyone shares the same sense of urgency about this that I have. Let’s hope we’ll be able to report some significant progress in negotiations in the near future.
Once the accountants have taken over a business, it’s time to find a new job.
The local news directors always blew off any complaints about the network new operation's bias.
They ignored the fact that if I won't tune in the network news, I won't tune in the local while I'm waiting for the news you dumb clucks.
Philly is all )&) stations and they should have known they are even more closely tied to the effects of network news bias, but NNNNOOOOOoooooooo!!! they wouldn't listen.
Have a nice wait in the unemployment line.
Dog gone HTML...
ping
Doctor Raoul, do you realize how blessed we are to be witnessing the implosion of the Drive-By Media in our lifetimes? I expect the next ten years to be even more exciting than the last ten.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4555
From AJR, June/July 2008 issue
Sam Zell’s Bad Medicine
Online Exclusive>>His prescription for saving Tribune’s papers is a ticket to oblivion.
By Rem Rieder
Rem Rieder (rrieder@ajr.umd.edu) is AJR’s editor and senior vice president.
It must have looked so easy from the outside:
These stodgy old publicly held corporations running newspapers just don’t know what they are doing. Clearly some sharp, nimble, entrepreneurial private operators could turn these ailing behemoths right around.
Back when he put together a group of local investors to purchase the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, Brian Tierney said there would be no more of the knee-jerk cost-cutting that characterized the final years of Knight Ridder ownership. Instead, Tierney & Co. would invest in the product. What a concept.
It wasn’t long before an advertising turndown reared its ugly head, and the brash new owners were slashing and burning. (When AJR business columnist John Morton and I pointed out the irony (see Full Court Press and The Newspaper Business February/March 2007), former CQ President Neil Skene wrote somewhat incredulously that we seemed to be waxing nostalgic for the days of Tony Ridder!)
When Sam Zell was taking over Tribune Co., he talked dismissively about the management skills of the old Tribune leadership. But it wasn’t long before he was downsizing his new properties.
Now Zell is talking about implementing a 50-50 split between news and advertising, which would mean 500 fewer pages in Tribune papers each week. And Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels says it’s time to “right-size” the operation, which means fewer and fewer staffers for papers like the Los Angeles Times, whose roster has already been trimmed repeatedly.
But not to worry. Lots of those ink-stained wretches aren’t bringing much to the party anyway. Reporters at Tribune’s smaller papers are much more productive than those at the overstuffed Times. “We can eliminate a fair amount of people, while eliminating not much copy,” Michaels told the company’s creditors, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Beautiful.
Nothing could showcase more vividly how little Zell and his peeps know about the newspaper business. It’s not the same as an assembly line. “Productivity” isn’t measured by byline counts (what a pernicious idea) and column inches. The contribution of staffers is measured by the quality of their work. Accountability reporting, so crucial to newspapers’ raison d’être, is labor intensive. It takes a lot of time—a lot more than knocking out four quick hitters a day.
There’s no doubt that these are troubling times for the mainstream media. The impact of the Internet is huge, and permanent. Media companies have to shed the shackles of the past, to think boldly and creatively, to adapt to the new and fast-evolving world.
But if all you’re bringing to the table is mindless ax-wielding, why bother? There’s no way drastically weakening your product in a bitterly competitive media landscape is a recipe for success.
In-depth, hard-hitting enterprise efforts are one of the key offerings that differentiate good newspapers and their Web sites from their numerous competitors. They are an important component of the brand.
I just finished Denis Johnson’s brilliant Vietnam novel, “Tree of Smoke,” so maybe that’s why the devastating comment from the tragic war in Southeast Asia comes to mind:
Sam Zell wants to destroy the village in order to save it.
“You’re talking about a financial struggle that is not cyclical,” says Jerry Gumbert, president and CEO of the broadcast consulting firm AR&D. “It’s not going to turn around soon, and probably not at all.”
Finally someone shines the light on what’s happening not the so called Bush depression that isn’t happening in many of these tv whackings.
http://www.poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13402
Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 6/12/2008 4:37:08 PM
Title: Tribune COO on his publisher’s departure
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
Memo from Tribune chief operating officer Randy Michaels
After 30 years with Tribune Company in a variety of roles, Scott Smith has decided to retire. Scott has had an extraordinary career, beginning in the finance department in 1977. He served as the company’s chief financial officer, headed up the corporate development department, and was publisher of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune — twice. In January 2005 he became president of our publishing group. And he’s enjoyed the admiration and respect of his colleagues everywhere he’s been.
Scott’s career has really come full circle. He was instrumental in helping Tribune go public in 1983, and in helping to guide it through the going-private transaction last year. More recently, he’s been helpful as we implement our plans for the future.
Scott will be staying on to help us with the transition to his successor, who we expect to name soon. Attached is Scott’s email to employees at the Chicago Tribune, announcing his plans. Please join me in thanking Scott for all of his efforts on behalf of the company.
Randy
Walk by Wolf Blitzer, drop a quarter in his styrofoam cup and say, “Told you so..”?
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