Media Curmudgeon

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August 31, 2005

CNN Blew It

I assume everyone read the stories in the press about Bob Costas declining to substitute for Larry King on CNN on a program about the missing teenager, Natalee Holloway, in Aruba. In the New York Times, Bill Carter, in his story about the incident, wrote on August 24, “When he could not get the show's topic changed, Mr. Costas said he respectfully decided not to participate.” Carter quoted Costas as saying, "I don't believe there was a single American who was sitting around saying 'I'd really like to see Bob Costas's take on this.’” His decision not to do the story says a lot about Costas. It also says a lot about CNN and Time Warner.

Carter, in his NY Times article also wrote, “Many critics have questioned why the story of the disappearance deserves blanket coverage. Some have deplored the emphasis on white women who go missing, while missing women of other ethnic groups are ignored. One critic, Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, told The Associated Press that the Holloway coverage amounted to ‘emotional pornography.’”

CNN is trying to catch up to Fox News in the ratings, especially in the 18-49 demo. That’s why Bob Costas was hired to substitute from time to time for the ancient Larry King, whose demos are even older than he is. Costas is a highly-respected sportscaster and interviewer with younger-demo appeal, and hiring him was a good move by CNN in an attempt to improve the image and demos of Larry King, the king of cream puff, sycophantic interviewers.

Bob Costas obviously made a good decision not to pander to the tabloid tastes of the audience or be involved in “emotional pornography,” but CNN management made a terrible decision to go ahead with the story in spite of the fact the Costa demurred. Bob Costas has a better reputation among upscale, intelligent viewers than CNN does, a reputation that was not helped by keeping the scum-bag, Robert Novak, on the air as long as it did. CNN missed a great positioning opportunity by not announcing that it was canceling the topic. CNN arrogantly and stupidly saw Costa’s refusal as a problem, not an opportunity.

CNN got bad press coverage for making the decision to go ahead with the Natalee Holloway missing-person story. Think of the coverage it would have received if CNN had announced that it agreed with Bob Costas, decided to cut back on the tabloid story, and devote the Larry King time period to a serious news topic. Instead, CNN was blasted for copy-cat, sensational coverage, the opposite of what I’ll bet Time Warner upper management would like to see.

By making the wrong choice on covering the Holloway story, CNN gave the press another opportunity to highlight that CNN is being stomped in the ratings by Fox News. Bill Carter in his NY Times story pointed out, “Fox's margin in viewers over CNN has grown 57 percent since Mr. Klein took over last December.” “Mr. Klein” is Jonathan Klein, head of CNN. This kind of publicity, pointing out how badly CNN is losing, is not helping Time Warner’s stock price.

The problem is not one of news coverage, it’s one of positioning and framing. Roger Ailes is a genius at positioning, framing, and marketing. Fox News’s “fair and balanced” and “we report, you decide” positioning and framing is among the greatest in marketing history. What CNN needs to do is to re-position and re-frame against Fox, not copy Fox or try to do better news coverage. Bob Costas might have given them a small opportunity to begin to do that, but CNN blew it.

If Time Warner allows Klein and CNN to continue on its current course, what will it say about Time Warner's (owner of Time, Inc., a respected news gathering organization) commitment to news coverage and, moreso, its ability to manage its cable network assets? I think Wall Street has valued the huge media conglomerate's stock properly (very low) because Time Warner continually demonstrates that it is too big to manage all of its media assets well, as the latest CNN blunder demonstrates.

Posted by Charles Warner at 08:19 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

August 29, 2005

What's Wrong With Radio

I got an e-mail from an old friend from my radio days, Steve McGrory of Radio/Active. The original message he sent out to a number of radio managers was: “I am working on an article about the most compelling challenges that radio managers are facing today. Can you help, anonymously of course? What are your top 3?”

In Steve’s e-mail he listed the top 10 problems from responses from radio managers to date:
1. Recruitment, finding good sales talent
2. AE's embracing NTR - working it 3-6 months out
3. Cost cutting measures/unrealistic corporate expectations
4. Declining transactional (ad agency) demand for radio
5. Price cutting by competitors
6. Commoditization of radio advertising by clients
7. Inflexible Sales Management regarding AE work schedules
8. Competition on the street from Cable TV
9. Satellite Radio - what if they decide to reduce the monthly fee or go entirely free
10. Clients demanding more for less

The above list doesn’t begin address the problems with the commercial radio industry today. Here is the Media Curmudgeon’s list:

1. The product sucks. Corporate, cookie-cutter radio has made plan vanilla out of radio music programming and over-commercialization has driven listeners to NPR, iPods, and downloading music. News/talk/sports radio has grown somewhat, but over-commercialization, and screaming, in-your-face, insulting, politically polarized, self-absorbed talk personalities are driving people to a more gentile, thoughtful approach on NPR, on some satellite radio channels, on the Web, and on many podcasts. When great, credible radio personalities such as John Gambling (WOR), Wally Phillips WGN), Eddie Gallaher (WTOP), or Jack Carney (KMOX) used to endorse products, people rushed to buy them. But Rush Limbaugh, how credible is he—would you buy a used car from this man?

2. The music sucks. Corporate music labels are cutting development costs and slashing risk taking on new acts, which is driving music fans in a vicious cycle to iTunes and to download music free. New acts are being broken on the Web and by hot DJ’s, not by most radio stations. This trend been acerbated by major labels hiring independent promoters who pay stations to play records—a new form of payola—which means, in turn, that many music stations are playing for pay not because of popularity. Also, the good new music from an innovative artist such as Norah Jones gets overplayed and burned out quickly, driving people to control their own playlists on their iPods, MP3 players, or on their own music-mix Web sites.

3. Sales compensation sucks. The vast majority of radio stations pay salespeople based on some form of straight commission, a compensation system that has been shown in hundreds of academically sound studies and articles to be the worst, most ineffective way of paying salespeople. Like many radio sales management practices, straight commissions are remnants of the 1950s and 60s and have not been updated to the last half of the 20th century, let alone the 21st century. Just as bad, many stations pay based on salespeople reaching predetermined budgets or goals or targets. This, too, is a terrible system, easily gamed by smart salespeople and abused by greedy companies who set the budgets too high to meet unrealistic corporate goals. If you don’t believe me, read Jack Welsh’s latest book, titled Winning, in which he writes that budgets are an exercise in minimalization. Virtually every radio station has a combination of these two outmoded systems and instead of changing the systems to meet the needs of promising prospects in the current job market, they try to convince rightfully suspicious recruits that straight commissions are motivating, when in fact they are the opposite. Some people are dumb enough to drink the Kool Aid, but the smart ones know better.

It’s no wonder that radio sales managers have a difficult time recruiting salespeople: a) There is no security in a straight-commission system. b) Paying based on meeting unrealistic, ever-increasing budgets that salespeople have no control over is discouraging. c) The radio industry has an image as a declining business with a dull reputation. Ask young people to pick an industry they’d like to work in among the following: software, Internet, television, cable TV, movies, magazines, publishing, audio production, or radio. No contest—almost any industry but radio. d) The radio industry has a reputation for not training its salespeople. e) The vast majority of radio sales managers, the very ones who are complaining about recruiting, treat their salespeople in an autocratic, blame-filled, rule-oriented environment allowing for little autonomy or expression of creativity or individualism. Believing some young person just out of college would want to join the declining radio industry, is like believing that people would volunteer to sign up for a trip to America on the Amistad.

4. Selling for share. Radio learned several bad habits from television, and selling for share is one of them. Selling for share always leads to lower rates, so sales managers who complain other stations are cutting rates have to look into mirror and ask, “Did I ever tell a salesperson to lower rates to get a higher share or tell a salesperson to do what ever it takes to get the business—just don’t lose the order?”

5. We have met the enemy and it’s us. Blaming competitors for cutting rates is the oldest excuse in the world by poor managers. It is well known that when Clear Channel cut the commercial loads on many of its music stations, they raised prices; therefore, everyone can’t be cutting rates. Also, lower rates are in order because radio listening overall is declining (but are corporate budgets declining?). Blaming agencies for demanding added value or more for less is equally disingenuous. How did agencies get the idea that they could get free trips to Paris for buying schedules in January? Desperate stations bribed them with trips. How did agencies get the idea that they could get a free promotion for buying a schedule? Greedy stations gave the store away. Even the newest prostitute on the street knows it’s bad for business and sets a terrible precedent if you give anything, even a touch, away. The give-away chickens are finally coming home to roost.

6. Over-reliance on non-traditional revenue (NTR) at the expense of not selling the medium. Events, coupons, co-op, sweepstakes, and Web-enabled promotions are all excellent marketing tools and have their place in radio sales, but they are sold at the peril of forgetting that most of them have nothing to do with the radio medium. Every moment spent selling a promotion takes time away from selling the radio medium. NTR selling should be a secondary focus.

A friend of one of my sons sells for a radio station in a mid-sized market. He has been there over a year and he told me that he will make $35,000 this coming year if he continues to make his goals, as he has done each quarter. However, he is thinking of leaving the radio business because his girlfriend just started in sales at a pharmaceutical company and is making $50,000. He wants to make more than $35,000 and sees the opportunity in myriad other businesses but not at the station he is with because he realizes that on the commission system used by the station the only way he can make more is to have one or two of the big-spending accounts (car dealers) which are locked in with the top salesperson, who will never leave.

He asked me recently how he could develop more new accounts—sell the medium, in other words. I asked him if he had seen the recent RAB study that showed that radio had an ROI advantage over other broadcast and all print media. He said he hadn’t because the station wan't a member of the RAB.

The RAB is a good trade organization and provides some excellent tools for selling the medium, but too few stations use them.

7. Negative selling. Finally, because the radio industry is so competitive, there is too much destructive, internecine, negative selling. Radio salespeople are not taught to sell their medium first and their station second, but are taught (modeled) to sell negatively against their nearest competitors. The typical radio sales pitch to an agency buyer or local client begins with, “Don’t buy WXXX, their ratings are down and their personalities talk too dirty,” or whatever is the negative brew of the day. Too many radio salespeople have not learned that you cannot sell what the other stations do not have.

I have little hope for the growth of the radio business because I don’t believe that radio sales management or incentive systems will change any time soon. Radio managers should read Freakoncomics, and learn that people are, indeed, motivated by incentives but that some incentives have unintended consequences. But Freakonomics was written in the 21st century, so it will take the radio industry another 50 years to read it.

Posted by Charles Warner at 04:55 PM | Comments (2) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at August 30, 2005 12:42 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at August 30, 2005 12:40 PM writes:

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August 22, 2005

GM and Chrysler Are Cheating

I recently put in the registration feature for comments in my blog (I turned on "Accept Comments From Registered Vistors" in Movable Type, my blogging platform) because I was getting 25, sometimes 40 comments a day from bots, mostly online poker, Viagra, and other drugs. The only way to stop this unwanted inundation was by asking people to register. I also turned off getting returns by TrackBack pings (I unchecked the "'Allow TrackBack Pings' On By Default" box) because I got three or four TrackBack spams from Chrysler for a 300 sedan and from GM for a Buick LaSabre. It’s fascinating that Chrysler and GM have found a way to manipulate blogging functionality to try to sell cars. I’m pissed, but I guess they are desperate.

In Business Week’s July 22nd Special Report, "The Best Global Brands," (I'd link to it, but it's no longer available unless you're a www.businessweek.com subscriber), of the worldwide car manufacturers, Toyota was #9, Mercedes-Benz #11, BMW #16, Honda #19, Ford #22, Volkswagen #56, Porsche # 76, Audi, #79, Hyundai #84, and Nissan #85. No GM or any of its brands and no Chrysler or any of its brands were in the top 100. The only American car company on the list was Ford.

GM and Chrysler aren't going to get on the top 100 global brands list by sending spam via Trackbacks to bloggers, a desperate, unethical tactic. Bloggers of the world unite and tell GM and Chrysler and any other company that sends spam via comments or TrackBacks to stop it.

Posted by Charles Warner at 05:55 PM | Comments (4) | Print |

Niall Kennedy at August 24, 2005 02:41 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at August 24, 2005 01:51 PM writes:

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Niall Kennedy at August 24, 2005 01:07 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at August 23, 2005 08:54 PM writes:

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August 18, 2005

Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, TX

My friend Jesse Kornbluth writes a blog called Swami Uptown on the Web site Beliefnet.com. His latest entry is titled "The Madwoman of Crawford: An American Idol." I urge you to click on the link and read it.

I've said that I'd sell what soul I have left to the devil to be able to write as well as Jesse. His blog about Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq and who is protesting in Crawford, TX to try to get George Bush to tell her why her son died, is one of the best pieces of writing I've read recently and reaffirms why I'd make the deal with Lucifer tomorrow if I could.

Do yourself a favor and read it and then please let Jesse know if his blog touched you too.

Posted by Charles Warner at 09:49 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

Let's Get Parasitical

I've been blogging for about a year and three quarters and I have had two requests--one about nine months ago from a friend who asked what I thought CBS should do with its Nighlty News and one several weeks ago from a reporter who writes about blogging for an important business publication. I respect this writer and was honored that my blog about Plamegate was read and that someone wanted to know what I thought about an article titled "Bad News" by Richard A. Posner in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section on July 31.

It's taken me two weeks to read and think about the piece in question. Maybe I'm a slow reader or maybe it was the length of the piece--10 print-out pages. Posner's "Bad News" essay covered myriad topics, from the decline in credibility of the mainstream media, to the split between liberals and conservatives in their criticisms of the media, to the effects of the rise of new media on old media, to a list of books promoting the media agendas of liberals and conservatives, to how the Fox News Channel beat CNN, and to blogging. So many topics, so many opinions, and so many assumptions that I would bore my readers even more than I normally do if I covered most of Posner's topics. So I'll restrict myself to some of his comments about blogging, a topic he knows something about because, of course, he has a blog like every other person who has more free time than good sense. (I claim to have some good sense because I blog rather infrequently, especially in the summer when the fishing and sailing is good.)

Even though I protest a little too much about the length of Posner's essay, I recommend it for summer reading to anyone interested in the media because he has a number of interesting perspectives, some of which are off base, such as his assertion that "The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left." Over-covering the runaway bride wasn't a shift to the left, for example, it was a shift to the sensational.

One of Posner's best lines was "The public's interest in factual accuracy is less an interest in truth than in a delight in the unmasking of the opposition's errors." A comment that is especially true about bloggers. Overall, "Bad News" is worth reading and forming your own opinions about.

Posner writes this about blogs: "The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the journalistic establishment is the blog. Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded -- it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media. A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways."

But bloggers, Posner claims, have no such worries. They are "not expected to be accurate. Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his punches." Be careful, Judge Posner, you forget that some of the top bloggers are women (Wonkette, e.g.) and that Kos of Daily Kos and the 13 Gawker Network sites that are making Nick Denton rich with advertising dollars would giggle at the statement that they have "no advertising." They'd prefer for people to think they're dirt poor.

Posner also writes: "How can the conventional news media hope to compete? Especially when the competition is not entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media. They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper. The legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the long run undermine the ability of the conventional media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers depend."

Oops. I guess I'm being parasitcal when I linked to Posner's essay in the NY Times. But I wonder if he's pissed. I am being parasitical--I do it all the time--by linking to articles, such as Posner's. Do you think he'd rather I didn't mention his article or link to it for others to read? I don't think so. Perhaps he's being hypocritical.

The notion of being parasitical assumes that the mainstream media are the only source of news, which is incorrect. Newspapers, terrestial and cable television, radio, and magazines these days are often the last to pick up news. A number of major stories in the last few years have been broken on the Web by bloggers, not in the NY Times, the Washington Post, or CBS News.

Posner's point that "bloggers are free riders who undermine the ability of conventional media to finance the reporting on which bloggers depend" is a like calling a glass half-empty (an analogy he uses). I suggest that blogging makes the news glass half-full in the sense that recently blogging has given the mainstream media a trend and techo-social phenomenon to write about--witness the recent cover story about blogging in BusinessWeek--and gives them breaking news they can expand on.

The mainstream media should stop whining about bloggers being parasites and embrace them like whales tolerate parasitical fish who keep them clean (cool analogy, eh?).

Philip Meyer, in his book, The Vanishing Newspaper, writes that the last newspaper will be recycled in April of 2049. But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post will be read on the Web by ten times the number of people who subscribe to the papers now, they will make even more money than they do now from advertising, and they will link, parasitically Posner would say, to numerous blogs within their online stories and editorials. For example, The Times would have links on an editorial page, like on a blog page, to a number of blogs who would have different opinions from the opinion in the editorial. The reading public and democracy would be well served by the resulting online discourse.

Posted by Charles Warner at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Print |

August 02, 2005

Lachlan, We Hardly Knew You

Lachlan Murdoch, oldest son of News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch quit this week to take his family back to Australia. Reports in the press indicate that Lachlan was pissed at his dad's imperious style and meddling in the way Lachlan, 33, was running the company's most profitable division, the 35 Fox television stations.

Too bad. Lachlan seems to have shown promise and he may have learned how to be an effective media executive in a few years, but he also learned to his dismay and disgust that politics runs thicker than blood. I don't know the specific politics of News Corp., but I do know that the politics in big media companies where money and power converge is brutal. The young Murdoch, even with his birthright and the intent of his father to have his children eventually run his empire, was no match for one of the greatest political infighters and strategists of all time--Roger Ailes.

In the August 10 story in the Wall Street Journal, Julia Angwin and Joe Flint wrote, "But issues over the station group's day-to-day management were a big source of conflict between Lachlan and his father, triggering the younger Murdoch's departure, say people familiar with the situation. Specifically, Lachlan often found himself out of the loop, in part because of the close relationship between the station group's CEO, Jack Abernethy, and Fox News chief, Roger Ailes, a close confidant of the elder Mr. Murdoch."

In the next two paragraphs, Angwin and Flint write: "The vacancy created by Lachlan Murdoch's departure could set the stage for a power struggle between Mr. Ailes and another high-profile News Corp. executive, Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin. As chief operating officer, overseeing the TV and film operations, Mr. Chernin would seem to be the natural candidate to take control of the station group. But Mr. Ailes' success at building the Fox News Channel into the leading 24-hour news channel has made him a favorite with Rupert Murdoch. A spokesman for News Corp. declined to comment.

The company's TV station group, one of the largest in the nation, has long been one of the company's biggest profit centers. The stations account for roughly 10% of revenue and 30% of operating income at News Corp. Just as important, the group is strategically crucial as the main outlet for the Fox broadcast network. The stations are also useful for other businesses, such as Fox's sister cable networks, that need on-air promotion."

You can see Alies's fingerprints all over this situation, just like you can see the equally Machiavellian politcal strategist Karl Rove's fingerprints all over the outing of Valerie Plame. I'll bet a month's wages (I'm on vacation this month, so I'm earning nothing) that Alies wasn't getting what he wanted from Lachlan in terms of caving in to Alies's demands for more Fox News channel promotion and intergration of the station's news product with the Fox News channel.

Plus, I'll bet next month's wages that Alies wanted new worlds to conquer now that he's thrashed CNN and MSNBC. And because he came out of political consulting and politics, you know he craves more power. Afterall, when it comes to power in politics and the media, you are either gaining power or losing it--there is no standing still in the power grid. Therefore, Alies lusts for more power and he'll get it from Murdoch who must be terrified that Ailes, his ideological soulmate, will go over to the competition and beat Fox's brains out.

I predict that Chernin will do Murdoch's bidding (which is why he is Rupert's #2 and short-term heir apparent) and give the Fox Television Station group to Alies. That move will give Alies more power and keep him in the News Corp. family where he belongs.

Will News Corp. and Fox be better off with Lachlan gone and Alies running the TV station group? Of course. Lachlan may have been fairly smart, but he's not nearly as smart or experienced in TV or corporate politics as Ailes is. So, Lachlan's blood ties lost to Alies's political ties and maneuvering, and the young Murdoch will probably be much happier away from his controlling father and the political infighting. He probably said to himself, wisely, "Who needs that crap when I'm going to be worth about $1 billion some day no matter where I work."

Rupert was quoted as saying he hopes Lachlan will come back to News Corp. some day. Fat chance. Would you go back if you were in Lachlan's position?

Posted by Charles Warner at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Print |