On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television IS IT GOOD FOR NEWS? BY REUVEN FRANK UNTIL THE dizzying Week of the Billion Dollar Mergers, this summer's principal broadcasting phenomenon was the earliest departure ever of...
...the treatments have none...
...Nevertheless, they do provide more news than any format that might come into vogue...
...Perhaps older people will watch anything, or everything...
...That is what the ratings say anyway, and it is what the advertising community believes...
...All three networks are now doing more live interviews and less news than ever before...
...radio did well...
...Even cable sold an estimated $1.5 billion up front...
...CBS—coming off a disastrous year when its biggest audiences were supplied by the two favorite examples of over-50 programming, 60 Minutes (Sundays, 7:00-8:00 p.m...
...First, several network programs drew much larger than expected young audiences last season...
...They also know senior citizens are a steadily increasing proportion of the American population and watch the most television...
...In 1995-96 there will be fewer than normally because of the national political conventions and the Summer Olympics...
...It is 25 years since a network parted company with a programming chief who had brought it to first place in the Nielsen ratings, but did so by running shows whose viewers were too old...
...The president of NBC News has given interviews about remaking the nightly news program...
...Even Senator Dole's attacks on the morality of the media, and the subsequent bipartisan elbowing of politicians for position in the V-chip parade, elicited a less vigorous response than precedent foretold...
...How does this square with the advertisers'optimism that older people will watch shows aimed at the young...
...The Discovery Channel tempts them with biographies of aircraft carriers...
...EST) and Murder She Wrote (Sundays, 8:00-9:00 p.m...
...Today the process is complete, and it is not confined to networks...
...Missing were the usual crop of snide newspaper columns proclaiming that the more things change, the more they stay the same...
...The hour of news was replaced by one of those syndicated talk shows that retail sex, personal hostility and family dysfunction...
...The network news magazines, on the other hand, are intended to appeal to younger people...
...It was a silly metaphor for bigness, but it showed the awe that greeted the broadcast sales explosion...
...Never mind that focusing on a single segment of the population undermines the theory behind the use of our airwaves...
...Nor has CNN displaced them...
...Young people like them all...
...Thus, rising demand has been met by shrinking supply...
...In fact, unfortunately only older people watch news...
...once they are sold, there are no more...
...For the record, here are some of the new programs designed to entice the young...
...An advertising columnist, straining to describe what happened, started by pointing to the bloated price of the 1995 Super Bowl commercials, $1 million for 30 seconds...
...EST), about the "dating experiences of Manhat-tanites...
...Determined to avoid a repetition, they bid heavily up front for 1995-96...
...Well, the marketers may still be right...
...EST) has the star as a single guy with married friends...
...In the case of some prime time programs, the most favored advertisers were not allowed to buy as many spots as they wanted...
...It doesn't sound different from what we have seen before, but there is youthful appeal in the casting of the roles, not to mention the testing of the boundaries of taste in plot and dialogue...
...EST), "a comedy starring Tony Danza as a chauvinistic detective romantically involved with a liberal crime reporter...
...Or solemn discussions with network executives about the social benefit they were about to spread among the plebs (there was no one around to discuss with...
...Third, the number of commercials in any network's day, week or year is finite...
...So far...
...With the age issue settled to the advertisers' complete satisfaction, the money is pouring in...
...They are reaping the rewards of following the leader, Murdoch's Fox Network, which used to be alone in targeting the youth market and was generally derided for doing so...
...EST), about the last bachelor in his group...
...OLDER PEOPLE, meanwhile, are signing up for cable, which is experiencing a resurgence after several years of stagnation...
...He talks about including local news inserts from the affiliated stations and turning it into an evening version of the early morning Today show...
...The network news audiences, while graying daily, remain respectably large, and cable will never be able to afford the worldwide news-gathering organizations required to sustain major news undertakings...
...They don't like the nightly news shows...
...Never was the coming season so little remarked upon either...
...We had old people...
...Certainly they watch news...
...The network's Drew Carey Show (Wednesdays, 8:30-9:00 p.m...
...Asa station executive explained, however, "They had young people...
...The trade weekly speculated hopefully that "other media" would pick up the leftovers, like gleaners following the harvest...
...This adds up to a lot of money looking for a place to be spent...
...Granted, it is not ordained in some grand scheme of things that there must always be nightly network newscasts of the kind the older generation has grown used to...
...Manufacturers know these groups buy products and do compete for their custom...
...Its bet is that programs will do better than anticipated and, once established, will command premium rates...
...This perhaps temporary benign condition derived from the network executives, programmers and salesmen finishing their work in record time...
...Advertisers place bets, in effect, when they buy time in the programs they think will attract the audience they want...
...I'm not saying advertisers absolutely discount people over 49 or under 18, although ABC failed to renew a top-20 program because its audience was too young...
...If May's up-front sales had all been made for the January Super Bowl, he went on to reckon, the game would have had to run five years...
...But advertisers believe they will watch shows designed to attract theirjuniors while the reverse is not true...
...EST), is about a bachelor who must act as a parent to three younger siblings...
...The boundaries distinguishing the syndicated talk shows, the syndicated tabloid magazines and the network news magazines are shadowy, if not imperceptible...
...EST)?is favoring us this fall with Dweebs (Fridays, 8:00-8:30 p.m...
...People who earn their living judging such matters say a combination of causes brought about these results...
...This year they offered a revolutionary 85 per cent, and it was gobbled up in the blink of an eye...
...NBC is presenting a program actually called The Single Guv (Thursdays, 8:30-9:00 p.m...
...One agency executive told Advertising Age: "Older viewers will watch younger shows, but there's no amount of convincing that will get a 21 -year-old to watch Murder, She Wrote...
...The gamble, although high, is not total...
...Some of the topics have social merit...
...Upfront sales are those contracted for before a new season starts...
...Similarly, there was almost no follow-up on the Connie Chung affair—nothing new in the tabloids, no syndicated TV scandal-mongers wringing new angles out of thin hints and false rumors, no wondering how her contract with CBS was settled...
...Content like that is very successful in attracting young television watchers...
...Broadcast sales—for television and radio networks and local stations, syndicated programs, and cable—come in two categories, "up front" and "scatter...
...even Fox hasn't...
...When advertisers tried at the halfway mark to buy scatter spots in them, they found prices had been ratcheted up enormously...
...In the past networks offered between one half and two thirds of available commercial time in the up-front market...
...Possibly because it is less straightforward and freighted with implication, only a few commentators cited a fourth reason...
...By mid-May, barely a week after the next season's schedules had been announced, they were sold out, something that in the best years usually took until mid-July...
...BY REUVEN FRANK UNTIL THE dizzying Week of the Billion Dollar Mergers, this summer's principal broadcasting phenomenon was the earliest departure ever of industry big shots for the beaches of Malibu, the Hamptons and the south of France...
...They may be missed...
...syndication did well...
...And they do, by featuring celebrity interviews, exposure of misfeasances, raucous picture editing, hidden cameras, disease, and corruption...
...His notion would conclude the evolution...
...In May a TV station in Richmond, Virginia, canceled its 5 p.m...
...Second, competition in the marketing of several categories of consumer goods —especially soft drinks, sneakers, computers, long distance phone services, fast food, and automobiles—is now intense and confrontational...
...The talk show chosen in Richmond had made news not long before when a guest, upset by another guest's appearance on the show, shot and killed him a few days after the taping...
...After the major players fled for the summer, Advertising Age found that ad buyers still had roughly a billion dollars they were not able to spend on the tube...
...From ABC we are getting Hudson Street (Tuesdays, 8:30-9:00 p.m...
...Almost $6 billion worth...
...At last count, NBC's sales for the Atlanta games had topped $600 million, more than a fifth higher than total sales for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona...
...From the products being peddled during network news shows?denture adhesives, antacids, adult diapers—you can easily tell what advertisers think of the viewers...
...Once the public face of the networks, these programs await extinction because they skew too old...
...Indeed, the present shifting of programs and audiences would matter less if it did not mean, ultimately, that the future of network television news is in question...
...Broadcasters and advertisers are finally in full agreement that the one will offer and the other will buy only programs produced to appeal to viewers aged 18 to 49...
...Otherwise scatter is the industry's gamble...
...Ditto the repeats of network shows that the seniors liked in their earlier days...
...If a program fares too poorly, the broadcaster will make it up to the sponsors with palliatives like free commercial spots from those held back for scatter selling...
...Stations did well...
...daily newscast, which had the same Nielsen rating and audience share as its competitor...
...It is merely a guess, but a reasonable one, that without the emphasis on the rising generation the other factors would not have been enough to enable the broadcast bigwigs to hit the beaches in the spring...
...Old movies abound...
...EST), about people plugged into the Internet, and Can't Hurry Love (Mondays, 8:30-9:00 p.m...
...Given the way the industry is going, it seems inconceivable that the three nightly news broadcasts as we know them will be in place five years down the road...
...In addition, several planned or bruited new cable channels hope to capitalize on nostalgia in one form or another...
...The move declared dramatically that henceforth ratings would matter less and less, and "demographics" more and more...
...Another NBC series, Brotherly Love (Sundays, 7:00-7:30 p.m...
Vol. 78 • July 1995 • No. 6
