— ETP Staff
Clinton's Talks With Democrats May Signal Bid for President [NYT]
Breaking News: The New York Times Thinks You're Stupid [HuffPo]
USAtoday.com
Broadcasting & Cable brings word that daytime talk show ratings are falling, starting with Oprah and continuing on down the list. While the daytime queen still leads with a 7.1 Nielsen rating, her show saw a 14% average drop from last year, while runner-ups Dr. Phil and Regis & Kelly each fell 5%. The crop of newer shows haven't fared better, with the eponymous (and suddenly scandalous) Rachael Ray leading at a 2.1 rating, while Keith Ablow (1.1), Greg Behrendt and Megan Mullally (tied at 0.8) struggle to survive (Sorry Greg, looks like viewers just aren't that into you). Martha Stewart is still on the map with a 1.5, representing a 17% drop from last year (not a huge surprise considering she's reportedly resorting to planting spies in other audiences).
When asked by B&C about the drops, producers offered little in the way of explanations, suggesting that perhaps the market is too "diluted" or that personality-driven talk shows are just in a "down cycle" (though, for Mullally anyway, the fact that they offer spineless interviews filled with pointless drivel may be a more accurate explanation).
Meanwhile, other daytime talk shows are thriving. The Today Show, as The Washington Post reports, has maintained its viewership throughout the transition from Katie Couric to Meredith Viera, holding onto a 5.8 rating. And The View has held steady after its ratings spike in early September, when Duchess of Personality Rosie O'Donnell joined the cast. Based on ratings for the week of Nov. 20, the show ranked No. 3 for the week among women 18-49 - its best ranking ever in the advertiser-hungry demographic - with a 1.7 rating. Aided by YouTube, the show has been generating plenty of buzz with its increased willingness to enter contentious (and usually Rosie-fueled) discussions of issues from the morning-after pill to gun control (though, of course, scoring a drunk Danny Devito never hurts). The View's new format of political discussion mixed with heaping doses of opinion isn't all that different from the formula that's driven MSNBC to new ratings heights since Dan Abrams took over in June. Meaning The View may have hit on the same ratings secret that MSNBC did: More politics.
— Melissa Lafsky
undp.org and battellemedia.com
Current TV, the short-form segment startup cable network founded in part by Al Gore, is dropping heavy hints that it's pulling out of Yahoo. A Current spokesman told CNET last week that the company is "exploring better opportunities to distribute our content." (See above re: Heavy). Meanwhile, the joint Yahoo Current site is no longer accepting user submissions. Maybe Current got tired of seeing all the best talent go to Yahoo Video. In any case, the divorce buzz is growing.
It's a quick turnaround — Yahoo Current just launched this September. Last year, Current launched a show called Google Current, which summed up top Google searches and played every half hour on Current TV. Since this February, the show has also played online, but it hasn't generated much buzz.
So Current continues its quest for an online brand that can help the top-down, slicked-up news network feel relevant despite looking so Old Media next to YouTube stars and indie news commentators. Our guess for the next attempted partnership: Al Gore to do his best Jeeves with the brand-new "Ask Current." Thank you, Jeeves, that will be all.
— Nick Douglas
from YouTube
What is Keith Olbermann thinking? As the ratings of his show as well as those of his network are on the climb, and the middle of contract negotiations, he goes on the record with Radar dissing his boss, MSNBC General Manager Dan Abrams. See how Olbermann seems to bristle (and go pointedly off-topic) in response to questioning by Tyler Gray:
RADAR: Dan Abrams said recently that your program "could become a model for the newscast of the future." Are you a role model?OLBERMANN: I don't know what Dan has to do with it frankly. We've never had a conversation about the direction of the show.
RADAR: He's actually the--
OLBERMANN: The general manager [of MSNBC], right, but we rarely interact. As far as I know he works on dayside programming. Phil Griffin runs the network. He is the vice president of NBC [News] and my original producer in television.
RADAR: What the hell is Abrams doing giving quotes about you to everyone from the Washington Post to the LA Times, then?
OLBERMANN: You got me.
Wow. "As far as I know he works on dayside programming?" Olbermann must not read the papers, since they all detailed Abrams' sweeping prime-time shakeup back in July, which included shelving Rita Cosby: Live & Direct, moving Tucker Carlson to the 4 and 6 pm slot, and rocking the doc-bloc in the 10 - midnight slot. This left Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough in place in the prime time, building on the ratings success of Matthews and Olbermann (which Abrams made a point of noting with praise at the time)(and which Scarborough's ratings are reflecting). Meanwhile, it's working: Under Abrams, MSNBC's ratings are climbing steadily, not only for Olbermann but across the board. This is not to say that Phil Griffin doesn't share in responsibility for MSNBC's progress; as the NBC Senior VP overseeing the network, his role is to collaborate with Abrams on the network's progress. But Griffin is big-picture, and Abrams is the day-to-day manager of almost 600 employees — including Olbermann, whether he likes it or not. He's the guy sending memos and getting quoted, particularly saying nice things in articles about Keith Olbermann. It is churlish — not to mention highly unprofessional — that Olbermann isn't doing the same.
Related:
Hot Heir: Anderson who? How an also-ran anchor became the caustic king of cable news [Radar]
Keith Olbermann, Talkin' Tough During Contract Negotiations With MSNBC [ETP]
from StopIggy.com
Academic, journalist, New York Times Magazine cover mainstay Michael Ignatieff lost his bid to win the leadership of Canada's Liberal Party on Saturday, losing out to French Canadian candidate Stephane Dion on the fourth ballot. Ignatieff, who declared his candidacy a year ago after the fall of the scandal-ridden Liberal government headed by then-Prime Minister Paul Martin, returned to his original homeland to run after living abroad for virtually all of his adult professional life, with seeming expectations of an easy victory (as per his former editor at NYT Mag, Gerald Marzorati, who told the Observer matter-of-factly that Ignatieff "expected" to win).
Back in Canada, however, Ignatieff faced competition from a broad field of candidates, including former Montreal Candiens star-lawyer-goalie Ken Dryden and former Ontario premier and perennial public servant Bob Rae, an old friend of Ignatieff from days at the University of Toronto who, like Ignatieff, had excelled in academia beyond Canada (Rae as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford at Ignatieff at Harvard). The leadership was widely seen as a two-person race, with Ignatieff having to overcome his controversial stances (e.g. arguments in favor of torture, as articulated in the NYT mag) and the perception that he thought he could waltz back in and claim the leadership (using terms like "we" and "us" while living in the States suggested more of an identification with Americans), and Rae saddled with the baggage of his term as the first NDP (social democrat) leader in Ontario in a recession, where he clashed with unions and instituted the unpopular "Rae Days" (unpaid days off for public employees to save on costs), which cast a long, long shadow and echoed in this race over a decade later.
Meanwhile, dark horse candidate Dion managed to shimmy up the middle, thanks to an eleventh-hour pact with fellow dark horse candidate Gerard Kennedy (see, Canada has Kennedys, too!) where the two decided to throw their support to each other in event of elimination. Kennedy threw his support to Dion, unseating Rae; Rae declined to throw his support to either candidate and released his delegates to vote their conscience, which swung decisively to Dion by almost 500 votes. That result was seen as a decisive rejection of Ignatieff, the perceived frontrunner for most the election and the anointed leader of numerous Liberal powerbrokers.
Following the election, Ignatieff declined to speak to journalists (something of an irony, that), but his brother, Andrew, indicated that Ignatieff was "committed" to staying in Canada. (For a more detailed history of Ignatieff's relationship with his brother Andrew, see this exhaustive 7,000-word profile by The Globe & Mail's Michael Valpy — those looking for gossip and juicy details will not be disappointed.) According to reports, Ignatieff, Rae and Dryden will all seek election and remain as part of the Liberal party.
Related:
Being Michael Ignatieff [Globe & Mail]
Ignatieff Was Seen As Outsider In The Liberal Family [Globe & Mail]
Superstar Ignatieff Leaves Harvard, Times To Save the Canadians [NY Observer]
Stop Iggy! [StopIggy.com]
— Rachel Sklar
lenslinger.com
The New York Times reports that Reuters and Yahoo are launching new efforts to incorporate photos and videos from citizen journalists. Beginning tomorrow, ordinary folks who snap camera phone shots of the latest winter storm or most recent undergraduate tasering may see their efforts distrubited throughout Reuters.com or Yahoo News. Editors at both news organizations will accept submissions daily and review them for distribution on their sites just as they would professional photography and video, providing surefire mechanisms for quality and content control. In addition, Reuters has announced plans to distribute collected clips to its print, broadcast and web media subscribers, and possibly even create a service solely for reader-submitted photos and video clips. Of course, questions of money can't be ignored; if amateur materials are selected for distribution to Reuters clients, the photographer or videographer behind the clip will receive payment. The news service refrained from quoting basic numbers (just noting they'll likely be "relatively small"), but did reveal that those offering exclusive rights to their images will receive higher payments.
This report follows on the heels of CNN's I-Reports, launched in August through CNN Exchange, a full site dedicated to displaying and categorizing reader-submitted photos and clips. In November, the BBC was the first to offer actual payment for amateur materials, with Britain's Channel Five following on its heels by announcing it would pay GBP 100 for any user content that it aired.
So far, efforts by the major networks to incorporate citizen journalism as part of their newscasts have been limited. ABC's Live News Now, the network's digital service, runs a daily news program made up entirely of content submitted by viewers, though that viewership is admittedly tiny; the channel is available on broadband only, as well as to 2 million cell phone users and Verison FiOS subscribers. Meanwhile, CBS News limits viewer interaction to features such as Assignment America, in which the public is invited to vote on a short list stories the network should pursue for a weekly segment. As Broadcasting & Cable noted recently, concern about quality control has been a sticking point for most networks. But with Reuters' introduction of procedures to put viewer submissions through the same broadcast standards checks as professional materials (and hopefully even beefing those up as well), other networks may soon decide that "amateur" and "unreliable" don't have to be considered one and the same.
UPDATE: Comedy Central has announced plans to air a political parody show produced by wireless carrier Amp'd Mobile, signifying the first time that a U.S. network will broadcast a show originally produced for cellphones. All hail the power of the phone!
— Melissa Lafsky
from nytimes.com
The Wall Street Journal has announced that it will shrink its width by 3 inches starting on January 2, 2007, to the 12-inch industry standard, reducing its news space by 10 percent. Journal execs say it will save millions and claim that the new design will actually offer more information, not less, according to the New York Times.
The move was foreshadowed by a similar initiative last year whereby the WSJ shrank its European and Asian editions to tabloid size, estimating at the time that it the change would save $17 million.
The change will eliminate the column of news on the left side as per the accompanying photo; for a comparison of the present and future journals, see after the jump.
As with the European and Asian switch, the U.S. shrinkage is being presented as an initiative to address how readers prefer to receive information, per WSJ publisher and parent Dow Jones SVP L. Gordon Crovitz: "Our ambition is to be the first newspaper rethought for how people consume news." That said, the WSJ expects to save $18 million annually on newsprint alone, plus attendant savings on outsourcing the printing costs now that the page size has been standardized. In July, the WSJ made headlines when it announced that it would begin running ads on its front page.
More details here; side-by-side comparison below.
— Rachel Sklar
http://ffmedia.ign.com
The votes are in: Stephen Colbert, the host of the eponymously-pronounced "The Colbert Report," is the 2006 I Want Media Person of the Year as voted in the media site's annual online poll. Readers of this site will know that we've agreed for months (twelve of them, actually); Colbert has been a can't miss commentator since day one — literally, because it was on Day One that he introduced his guiding concept of "truthiness," now an ingrained part of the vernacular. In April he struck a giant nerve at the White House Correspondent's dinner, skewering President Bush in a bitingly spot-on set before all of D.C.' s heavy hitters, and then, tellingly, everyone else via YouTube (but also giving the CSPAN site more hits than it could remember).*
As ETP has previously mentioned, Colbert is also a pioneer for his skillful use of the web via the havoc he played with Wikipedia, his takeover of a bridge in Hungary, and of course his "Stephen Colbert Greenscreen Challenge". At this point I think it's interesting — and fair — to note the symbiotic role Colbert and Jon Stewart, and Comedy Central, played in each other's exploding reach this year. YouTube extended Colbert and Stewart's audience by millions every day as new clips were religiously posted, giving millions of viewers a reason to go to YouTube that they might otherwise not have had (this is one of the reasons it was such big news that Comedy Central started pulling clips earlier this year).
Contenders this year included — in order of votes — Rachael Ray, Chad Hurley, Dean Baquet, and Arianna Huffington. Also in the running were Katie Couric, Tom Freston, Rupert Murdoch, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and NBC hitmaker and NBC 2.0 architect Jeff Zucker. I repeat, Racheal Ray came in SECOND. The comments from prominent media voters are definitely worth a read (and it's interesting to note that none of the feeatured commenters voted for Eric Schmidt). Bonnie Fuller picked Chad Hurley; Keith Kelly picked Dean Baquet — " the poster boy for all the stupid moronic things some major media companies are doing"; Tina Brown chose "queen of the blogosphere" (and ETP bosslady) Arianna Huffington; AdAge's Scott Donaton pisses off Toyota. Both Kurt Andersen and Ken Auletta mentioned Lou Dobbs as representing the trend in opinionated on-air punditry (Andersen called Dobbs and Colbert "the twin avatars of Cable News 3.0...both lacking all doubt concerning their versions of the truth...both glowing with self-regard, one a parody and one not"). Write-ins included Keith Olbermann, the higher-rated not-Courics Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams, YouTube star Judson Laipply (per Bob Garfield: "He's a motivational speaker from Ohio, and you have seen him dance"), and Page Six's Richard Johnson, modestly nominated by Page Six's Richard Johnson.
Last year's winner was CNN's Anderson Cooper and prior to that Jon Stewart was the winner in 2004.
— Rachel Sklar
*Here's a sampler to remind you just how cutting and brilliant that speech was: "I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."
**This award, by the way, is rightly shared with Colbert's writing staff — between how The Word matches perfectly-timed delivery with zinger punchlines, the fresh and funny daily taglines and all the rapid-fire cutting-edge jokery in between, Colbert's writing staff deserves definite credit.
from theatlantic.com
At long last, exactly what you've been waiting for -- an issue of The Atlantic that manages to make you feel smarter than the writers. This month's edition features a 13-page package, complete with sidebars and old-timey photos, on "The 100 Most Influential Figures Americans of All Time."
What the hell were the editors thinking? This was their cover story? Will we never be done with Doris Kearns Goodwin? The questions abound.
Dear lord, just reading the first entry is enough to make you throw yourself into oncoming traffic. Abraham Lincoln, #1: "He saved the Union, freed the slaves, and presided over America's second founding." That's it. Is this The Atlantic or your third-grade history textbook? Hard to say. (And no, it doesn't get better. Susan B. Anthony, #38: "She was the country's most eloquent voice for women's equality under the law." Elvis Presley, #66: "The king of rock and roll. Enough said.") Even the opening line of the accompanying essay -- "It's a nebulous concept, influence: you know it when you see it, but definitions are hard to come by." -- is a cliche, an echo of an already overused line from Justice Potter Stewart, who wrote that he couldn't define pornography but that "I know it when I see it."
Magazine lists like these -- which tend to trade off depth for glibness and to make the obvious even more mind-numbing than usual -- are almost invariably bad ideas. The reason a lot of them come into existence is that, like the Time 100, they bring in ad dollars. The Atlantic stripped away much of the financial self-interest from its enterprise -- you'll find no Abe Lincoln ads in the current issue -- but still left us with the vapid, inexcusably lame remains. For the rare list that was well done, take a look at New York's Influentials issue, which manages to tell you a thing or two you didn't already know while bringing a distinct, non-hackish sensibility to the task.
A note to Atlantic editor James Bennet: If you can't do it well, don't do it at all.
