The ambitious NBC newsmagazine was scheduled to be shown for the final time on Friday night. Within NBC News, employees expressed a sense of disappointment — not so much in the quality of the program, but that it was not rated highly enough to remain on the network schedule. To those who invested much in producing the show, its demise raises doubts about whether any new newsmagazine can succeed on network television these days.
To that point, Rome Hartman, the founding producer of “Rock Center,” said in an interview: “I hope that’s not true. I sure hope that somebody figures it out.”
“Rock Center” was the first new prime-time newsmagazine to be introduced by any network since CBS added “60 Minutes II” in 1998. Mr. Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” had been eager to try something in prime time, and when Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in 2011, he got his chance. For Comcast, giving the go-ahead to “Rock Center” was, among other things, a way to provide clear support to the network news division it had just acquired.
The newsmagazine had its premiere on Halloween. Unlike CBS’s “48 Hours” and NBC’s “Dateline,” which are mainly about crimes and court cases, “Rock Center” presented a wide array of stories each week and was closer to the “60 Minutes” model than anything else on television. But the comparisons to “60 Minutes” were rarely complimentary; “It’s a very hard standard to match,” Mr. Hartman said.
More important, “60 Minutes” was able to find its footing four decades ago, before the days of cable and Internet competition. It has a protected Sunday night time slot that often gets a big ratings lift from sporting events that are shown beforehand.
“60 Minutes II,” on the other hand, was canceled in 2005. And “Rock Center” was canceled in May, shortly before NBC announced its schedule for the television season that starts in September. With an audience that sometimes slipped below three million people, the network could not justify another season of “Rock Center.”
At a time when audiences have far more choices than ever before, online as well as on TV, the people involved with “Rock Center” may have simply overestimated the public’s appetite for taped news stories in prime time. Said one former NBC executive: “You can’t launch a serious newsmagazine anymore. Those potential viewers, if they’re around, they’re watching cable news.”
There is no shortage of niche news and information programming on cable. CNN, for instance, will show a new documentary series from Morgan Spurlock this Sunday. HBO recently granted a second season to a youthful newsmagazine, “Vice,” and OWN has “Our America,” hosted by Lisa Ling. These programs, though, do not have the sweep of a network newsmagazine.
If the decision to cancel “Rock Center” was not surprising, it was still dismaying to Mr. Williams and to others on the staff, some of whom will lose their jobs after Friday’s final broadcast. (Many others will be absorbed by other NBC News programs.) One staff member said Mr. Williams felt insulted by the network’s decision; another said what pained Mr. Williams most were the layoffs. Staff members were told not to talk to the news media, so those who did speak did so on condition of anonymity.
An NBC spokeswoman said on Thursday that Mr. Williams was not available for an interview about the program’s accomplishments. Patricia Fili-Krushel, the chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the end of “Rock Center.”
Staff members expressed pride in the program, asserting that it was a rare outlet for interviews and investigations that lasted longer than a few minutes. (Typically the program had three to five stories an hour. Once in a while the hour was devoted to a single subject, like one show titled “Mormon in America.”)
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/business/media/demise-of-rock-center-shows-difficulty-of-creating-a-newsmagazine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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