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Righting the Ship at NBC
Andrew Lack was a producer at 60 Minutes at CBS in 1992 when his opposition at NBC blew up. Literally.
Dateline NBC had produced a story about Thomas and Elaine Moseley whose 17-year-old son, Shannon, died when his Chevy truck exploded after being T-Boned by a drunk driver. When NBC couldn’t replicate the crash, they rigged it to get the footage they wanted.
At first, NBC News president Michael Gartner called it an accurate representation. GM sued and, within weeks, Dateline‘s producers were fired, Gartner would resign, and Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips were forced to read an on-air apology.
Unfortunately for NBC, it was not an isolated incident. Later that year, a ranger in Idaho’s Clearwater Forest claimed that overharvesting lumber was fouling the streams and killing fish. NBC aired footage provided by an advocacy group that the network then misrepresented: it was actually of a fish kill from Washington State. And an area that was represented as being clearcut was really only being salvage cleared after a forest fire. Another on-air apology had to be read, this time by Tom Brokaw on Nightly News.
Andy Lack was brought in to clean up NBC and restore its reputation.
Under it’s new president, Nightly News slowly rose to the top of the ratings and Lack oversaw the launch of MSNBC as a straight news network, a place where he would groom Brian Williams to eventually succeed Brokaw in the anchor chair.
He would also move to shake up Today, where he replaced the combative Bryant Gumble with Matt Lauer and returned veterans like John Palmer to prominence after he had been dumped for the likes of Deborah Norville.
Lack’s success would eventually let him lead the entire network, but then he got greedy and aimed for the job of his boss, Bob Wright. He left NBC and landed at Sony under his former CBS boss, Howard Stringer, did a stint as the head of Bloomberg Media, and more recently was the CEO at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the government corporation that oversees The Voice of America.
In the wake of the network’s recent struggles, NBC has called on Lack to right the ship again. It started yesterday, when the network and Chief Medical Editor Nancy Snyderman “mutually agreed” to part ways. Snyderman became infamous last October when she violated quarantine after covering the Ebola outbreak in Africa.
Now, Lack must deal with Williams and his problem of self-aggrandizement, plus the ratings slide of Today and Meet the Press. He also has to deal with the distrust the division has of current president Deborah Turness and the spiraling, flaming mess that is MSNBC. Furthermore he may find that Comcast is a different animal than his old bosses at General Electric.
Published in Entertainment, General
EJ, the delivery path has changed a little bit.
Last spring I didn’t even have the TV on when I got a tornado warning through my phone. Five minutes later, the Civil Defense sirens sounded.
Percival – Just so. There are many scenarios where the broadcaster is the go-to choice. There’s only so much emergency information that can be texted.
Even cable systems that are EBS compliant will instruct you to tune in to a local station.
Imagine everyone trying to stream a video feed in a national emergency… Buffering….buffering….buffering….
Low quality audio takes almost no bandwidth.
We have seen that ISPs have the power (which they use surreptitiously) to hijack where your browser goes. They could force the first page you load to play an mp3 before allowing to proceed, if they wanted to.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2029569/isps-plan-to-hijack-browsers-and-limit-internet-access-to-combat-copyright-piracy.html
http://hackercodex.com/guide/how-to-stop-isp-dns-server-hijacking/
Yes, an exaggerated demise. Journalists (especially those on the tech beat) and emerging media investment analysts tend to underestimate the staying power and adaptive options of “legacy” media companies.
ABC can program its broadcast network to young females, capture males over at ESPN, and kids on their Disney cable networks. As for VOD, well, they also have a good relationship with Apple.
Fox is well-diversified in cable and still benefits from the leadership of a global visionary. Their combination of prime time animation, the NFL, post-season baseball and Fox News pretty much locks in males for life.
CBS missed the basic cable gold rush, but they’ve now got an excellent rerun library. They and Warner could eventually combine with each other &/or Verizon &/or a Netflix.
Mergers and acquisitions may well fill up those pipelines for content-hungry internet home video channels. While Amazon weighs bidding up Seinfeld SVOD reruns above the $500,000 per episode level of Friends, other tech titans (Google? Verizon?) could be weighing the value of the entire Warner and Sony libraries.
Still, despite all the traditionalist media choices (from Fox News to CBS’ Blue Bloods to Turner Classic Movies) I often jump over-the-top to the Roku box. Last night it was the final Foyle’s War, then a Miranda and a QI all on AcornTV, a commercial-free channel for Anglophiles of a certain age.
The Big Media outlets mostly laser in on young viewers, while narrative content suppliers overwhelmingly advance coastal priorities over heartland sensibilities. These choices leave gaps — older viewers, conservatives — which means opportunities for investors and competitors.
When NBC blew it in the mid-1990’s by sharing its America’s Talking cable clearances with Microsoft for the youth-targeted MSNBC, they took the channel space away from Roger Ailes. The rest is history. So long as Big Media entities refuse to match under-served audience with suitable content, they will continue to lose millions of viewers to more alert and visionary competitors.