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A Befuddling Game Show Slides, Despite ‘Synergies’

September 15, 2013 by

But it turns out that something was out of tune. When the “Quiz” had its premiere last Monday, NBC scored a 1.7 Nielsen rating with viewers between the ages of 18 to 49, the demographic valued most by the network’s advertisers. Instead of growing from episode to episode, as NBC encouraged the show to do by scheduling it for 10 nearly consecutive nights, the show caved in; a 1.5 rating on Tuesday shrank to a 1.3 on Wednesday, a 1.1 on Thursday, a 0.8 on Friday, and a 0.7 on Saturday.

Total viewership fell to 3 million on Saturday from 6.5 million for Monday’s debut. NBC wanted a national event; what it got instead was a national shrug.

Were the ratings a repudiation of Comcast’s much-promoted “symphony” approach to creating new entertainment franchises? Untold numbers of people throughout the broadcaster’s parent company, NBCUniversal, which is wholly owned by Comcast, had spread the word about the game show through special segments on “Today” and other newscasts, elaborate graphics on the bottom of the screen of other shows, Twitter messages and other tactics. NBC and other media companies have been trying these sorts of synergies for decades, but since Stephen B. Burke became the chief executive of NBCUniversal in 2011, he has made it a special priority, calling it “Project Symphony.”

Questions about what went wrong with “Quiz” simmered as the prime-time show took a previously scheduled one-day break for football on Sunday, but the view among some observers was that the game play, not the promotional efforts that accompanied it, had missed the mark.

“It all comes down to content,” said Brad Adgate, who studies ratings patterns for Horizon Media.

Similarly, when asked if NBC’s synergies had failed, John Tinker, who tracks Comcast and other media conglomerates for the Maxim Group, said he’d suggest “a more traditional problem: it’s not a great show.”

“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” this was not, despite NBC’s dreams that it would be. The show took a beating from television critics as soon as it started, mainly for having an overly complex format. Entertainment Weekly called the premise “a little horrifying.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “confusing and boring.”

In short, contestants were supposed to answer questions correctly so they could keep answering questions, beat other contestants and win more money — but asterisks and exceptions abounded, testing even the most patient viewers. Several people called it “the most confusing game show ever” in exasperated Twitter messages to Ryan Seacrest, the show’s host. Some critics pounced on Mr. Seacrest, whose omnipresence can easily be exploited for jokes. From NBC’s point of view, though, Mr. Seacrest was one of the show’s saviors.

For his part, Mr. Telegdy, the network’s president of alternative and late-night programming, said on Sunday, “We would absolutely do it all over again, in terms of the scale, ambition and the risk it represented.”

While he displayed disappointment about the ratings slump, he noted that “Quiz” had lifted NBC above its normal ratings levels for early September, which can only be a good thing for a beleaguered network that is about to introduce several new dramas and comedies for the fall.

The three million viewers on Saturday, on what is usually a dormant night for network television, represented NBC’s best performance in the time slot since a rerun of “It’s a Wonderful Life” last December. Still, given the high expectations, the New York magazine ratings buff Joe Adalian was moved in a Twitter post to rename the show “Million Dollar Mistake” after several consecutive days of declines.

NBC would not say just how costly “Quiz” really is, but consider this: More than 500 people have been employed by the production in New York City. Barring a stunning turnaround — the show will resume in prime time on Monday and wrap up on Thursday — the network is unlikely to start citing it as a successful application of synergy. But it’s unlikely to back away from the “symphony” idea either.

“When we get all parts of the company working together, we’ve been astounded by how successful we can be,” Mr. Burke said at a Merrill Lynch conference. He didn’t mention the “Quiz,” but he said the NBC singing competition “The Voice” and the company’s wide-reaching coverage of the Summer Olympics had both benefited from cross-promotional efforts.

“Million Second Quiz” received a boost, too, if NBC’s research into awareness about the show is any indication. Awareness levels were abnormally high beforehand but, like an anticipated Hollywood blockbuster that goes bust, most of the people who heard about the show did not actually tune in. Many who did were not compelled to stay. And the show suffered an irritating setback on Night 1: so many viewers followed Mr. Seacrest’s instructions to play the game online that NBC’s servers were overwhelmed.

“By the end of the week, we had found our footing,” said one of several executives who, when granted anonymity to speak self-critically, suggested that “Quiz” might have benefited from a test episode ahead of time (something known in the TV industry as a pilot). If there is a silver lining for NBC, it might be on viewers’ smartphones: the network says 1.3 million people have installed and played a total of 23 million rounds on its “Quiz” app.

Mr. Adgate of Horizon Media said he would be watching again this week, though he doubted that the low ratings were a setback for NBC as a whole. “Not everything Comcast puts on symphony is going to work,” he said. “There are going to be misses along the way, and one week in, this appears to be one of them.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/business/media/a-befuddling-game-show-slides-despite-synergies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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With a Solid Hit, CBS Breaks the Summer Ratings Mold

June 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Borrowing heavily from the cable playbook, CBS has set out to reverse the trend toward ever-dwindling network ratings — and intense attention directed toward cable dramas — in the summer. In its new series, “Under the Dome,” CBS may have done it.

The opening ratings for “Dome” last Monday qualified as spectacular: more than 13.5 million viewers for the premiere, the biggest audience for a summer drama in more than 20 years. The show added more than three million more viewers when three days of delayed viewing was counted, CBS announced Saturday.

Maintaining numbers like that could mean significant profits for CBS, which created a can’t-miss formula for financing the show that included a presale of the episodes for streaming on Amazon Prime, and now may expect a surge in spending from advertisers looking to reach summer consumers at the same time.

Even more important, CBS’s executives are so encouraged by the early ratings results that they foresee the potential “to create a whole new model for summer programming” said David F. Poltrack, the network’s chief research executive.

That model relies on some traditional network advantages. “One of the things the premiere’s ratings illustrated was the power of network television as a marketing medium,” Mr. Poltrack said. CBS began promoting “Dome” during the spring in its highly rated shows.

But the model is also new for CBS because, in this case, it includes such elements as a highly serialized plotline with science-fiction elements and characters who would not qualify as traditionally likable heroes on the networks.

Those have been among the drama conventions on cable for years, where such shows as “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” on AMC, “Burn Notice” on USA and “True Blood” on HBO have played in the summer. This summer, the cable networks have a full roster of prominent dramas, including “The Newsroom” on HBO, “Ray Donovan” on Showtime and “The Bridge” on FX.

But none of them are likely to come within 10 million viewers of “Under the Dome.” And this is only the first salvo in a network strategy to retake some summer territory. Already numerous projects are in the works at other networks, including shows called “limited series” on ABC, like “Resurrection,” (a town is shaken by the return of long-dead relatives) and “event series” on the Fox network, including the resumption of the action hit “24” and a “Twin Peaks”-style suspense series called “Wayward Pines.”

The last two are being prepared for summer 2014, part of an ambitious effort by Kevin Reilly, the chairman of entertainment for Fox, to shake up the scheduling paradigm that has dominated network television.

“The networks have to stop losing viewers,” said Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. “After the season they just had they can’t afford to lose any more.”

Mr. Reilly at Fox has been saying for several years that it makes no sense for network television to keep doing the same thing year after year even as its audiences shrivel. He announced this spring that Fox would invest heavily in short-run series with high production values and A-list casts. (“Wayward Pines” has already cast Matt Dillon and Melissa Leo.)

But CBS, the network that for years resisted the concept of the serial drama, planted its flag first. “Under the Dome,” an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, was conceived as a cable entry, developed by Showtime. When that network passed, CBS (which owns Showtime) picked up the project specifically intending to reinvigorate a deteriorating summer schedule.

Networks have tried to improvise in summer, spreading a few reality shows around a diet of repeats. But this summer, reality regulars like “America’s Got Talent” on NBC and “Big Brother” on CBS have experienced early ratings erosion. “Those shows are showing the same fatigue that affected ‘American Idol’ in the regular TV season,” Mr. Adgate said.

“Viewing habits have changed,” said Jeff Gaspin, the former head of NBC Entertainment who also oversaw cable networks like USA. “Broadcasters started programming summer years ago because of cable inroads. They mostly tried weak scripted content and ultimately settled on nonscripted.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/business/media/with-a-solid-hit-cbs-breaks-the-summer-ratings-mold.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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News Blackouts, for Security or Serenity

December 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Responding to a video posted by the real estate mogul Donald J. Trump challenging the president to release his college records and passport applications in exchange for a $5 million charitable donation, Mr. Grove, an editor at The Daily Beast and a former New York Daily News columnist, pulled a rarely used card from the journalist’s deck: the media blackout.

“Effective immediately,” he wrote in The Daily Beast, “in light of your latest foolish attempt at seeming important, we will ignore you and your hot air for the foreseeable future — or, at the very least, until after the Nov. 6 election.”

Members of the media may declare blackouts for many reasons. Some are out of caution: in 2008, when David Rohde, then a reporter for The New York Times, was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan, more than 40 major news outlets refrained from reporting the story for seven months, until he and a local reporter escaped.

This month, NBC News asked other media outlets to hold off reporting that its chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, and his production team were missing in Syria where, it turned out, they were being held by a pro-government group. Most obliged, although last Monday, a day before most of the crew was released, Gawker, the media news and gossip Web site, posted an article that stated he was missing.

But more often, the blackout is more akin to a boycott that, when made public, can be a tool for media outlets or commentators to raise the level of discourse, to focus the public’s attention elsewhere or to glean some attention from those they are barring.

For eight days in 2007, The Associated Press quietly experimented with a Paris Hilton ban. “It wasn’t based on a view of what the public should be focusing on,” explained an editorial after the moratorium. “No,” it continued, “editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn’t cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. ”

It ended when she was arrested for driving with a suspended license, a violation that led to a brief jail sentence.

“One might call it a gimmick,” said the A.P. reporter Jesse Washington who, at the time, was the editor of the outlet’s entertainment department. He said he does not recall where the idea came from, but he petitioned his boss to put it in action, insisting that if something “really newsworthy” happened, they would cover it.

For the previous decade, The A.P. had been adjusting to an increasing demand for entertainment-related news. There was frustration in the newsroom about reporting entertainment news, but widespread recognition that the industry was changing and that they had to reconsider what was newsworthy.

“The A.P. was feeling our way through this transition,” Mr. Washington said. “What do we cover? What do we not cover? Do we dip our toe or go in waist-deep?” He went on to point out that reporters make decisions about what is news and what is not news every day, and that as the industry evolves, the types of news that are covered change. “Everyone knew that J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe were sleeping together,” he said, “but no one reported it.”

Of course, the subjects a news outlet refuses to cover can vary greatly for any number of reasons, including the outlet’s particular audience and concerns of national security. And announcing a ban can be self-defeating, placing more eyes on the subject meant to be played down.

“In some ways, it’s commendable,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. “What they’re doing is making public the criteria they’re applying; they are inviting the public to consider whether the criteria they are applying are valid.”

On the other hand, he added, “To say, ‘I don’t care what he has to say, he’s a clown’ — you run the risk of giving insufficient consideration to potential newsmakers.”

Even blackouts for security or safety reasons are controversial. At the time of Mr. Rohde’s kidnapping, Bill Keller, then The Times’s executive editor, told The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that although he recognized the danger of making the situation public, “it makes us cringe to sit on a news story.”

When Gawker broke with the embargo over reporting about the missing NBC News crew, the writer John Cook said in the post that the story had been reported by Turkish news outlets and that it was spreading on Twitter. He also wrote, to widespread criticism, that he was not persuaded by the network’s rationale.

“No one at NBC made a case to me that reporting Engel’s situation might cause anything concrete to happen to him, because they didn’t know anything about his current circumstances,” he said.

Voluntary blackouts at least seem more fun. Mr. Grove imposed his Trump boycott after the developer and onetime Republican primary front-runner spent much of the 2012 campaign season hounding President Obama over his birth certificate. The $5 million offer, according to Mr. Grove, was the last straw. “I just thought that the guy was constantly screaming, ‘Look at me,’ ” he said in an interview.

Mr. Grove issued a similar edict about Ms. Hilton in 2004. “In both cases,” he said, “there was a sense of weariness in having to write about these people.”

Bemoaning the “media obsession” with the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Dana Milbank used one of his Washington Post columns to declare February 2011 a “Palin-free month,” and encouraged others — he named several commentators in various media — to join him. “I pledge to you: Sarah Palin’s name will not cross my lips — or my keyboard — for the entire month of February,” he wrote. “Who’s with me?”

“I knew nobody else would follow it,” he said in an interview. “The point was whether you could get through a month. I picked the shortest month.”

Ms. Palin — ever the apple of the critical eye of what she calls the “lamestream media” — appeared to be relieved. When she learned of the boycott eight days after Mr. Milbank’s column was published, she said she supported it.

“Sounds good,” she remarked, “because there’s a lot of chaos in Cairo, and I can’t wait to not get blamed for it — at least for a month.” Her supporters online, taking the ban as an insult, redoubled their fervor. One blog declared that “Sarah Palin owns February,” and another started a petition to declare February Reagan/Palin Appreciation Month.

Practitioners of media bans acknowledge their ineffectiveness. “Maybe if a news organization made that decision,” said Mr. Milbank, they might have a lasting impact, but “one columnist can’t alter the earth’s rotation.”

Mr. Grove acknowledged his announcements were self-serving, but said he would still point toward the results. “After all,” he said, “do you read much about Paris Hilton anymore?”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/business/media/news-blackouts-for-security-or-serenity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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In Pursuit of John McAfee, Media Are Part of Story

December 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Years earlier, Mr. McAfee had relocated to a Colonel Kurtz-like compound in the jungles of Belize, surrounding himself with armed guards and multiple young lovers. Then, with reports that he was a “person of interest” in the death of a neighbor, Mr. McAfee had gone on the lam. Last Monday, after several days of surreptitious travel, Mr. Castoro and Mr. King posted their first dispatch. It bore the smirking headline, “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers.”

The gloating was short-lived, however. Within minutes, a reader noticed that the photograph posted with the story still contained GPS location data embedded by the iPhone 4S that took it, and sent out a message via Twitter: “Check the metadata in the photo. Oooops …” Vice quickly replaced the image, but it was too late. “Oops! Did Vice Just Give Away John McAfee’s Location With Photo Metadata?” a Wired.com headline asked. The article included a Google Earth view of the exact spot the picture had been taken — poolside at the Hotel Marina Nana Juana in Izabal, Guatemala.

Soon, the Guatemalan police were with John McAfee. This weekend, he is in their custody and is expected to be extradited to Belize, where he faces questioning in connection with the murder of Gregory Faull, a 52-year-old American who was his neighbor. Mr. McAfee’s lawyers are appealing his extradition.

The Vice debacle was just one colorful twist in the relationship between the press, which is always willing to indulge a colorful subject, and Mr. McAfee, who was always eager to bend news coverage to his often inscrutable ends. I first wrote about Mr. McAfee five years before, when he was merely a colorful software pioneer — an apparently clean-living citizen who courted the press mainly to promote his favorite pastime, flying ultralight aircraft. Since then, his life had taken several darker turns. I had only just published a long piece about his purported connections with Belizean drug gangs on the Web site Gizmodo when I received a curt e-mail from a police official in Belize on Nov. 11, “It may interest you to know that there was a murder yesterday in San Pedro Town, Ambergris Caye and McAfee is the prime suspect.”

I passed the information along on Twitter and on Gizmodo and the news took on a life of its own. “It was on all kinds of Tumblr sites, people were talking about it on Twitter, and that fueled a lot of the professional media to say, ‘O.K., everyone’s talking about this, we should have a story on it, too,’ ” said Mat Honan, a senior writer at Wired who has written about the case.

Mr. McAfee went into hiding with a 20-year-old girlfriend, but it was hiding of a uniquely visible kind. Within 36 hours, he began an aggressive campaign to court and spin coverage of his story. He started by calling Joshua Davis, a Wired writer who had spent the summer reporting on a profile for the magazine’s January issue, and fed him fresh details of life on the run every few hours. Mr. Davis passed along his minute-by-minute updates via Twitter and daily blog posts.

News media around the world were rapt: it wasn’t just that Mr. McAfee’s name was stubbornly familiar, a relic of the early days when computer users installed his software to keep viruses away. “A tech millionaire, an exotic Central American locale, murder, the possibility of drugs — the story just has everything,” says Nathalie Malinarich, world editor of the BBC News Web site.

Wired had a problem, though. The murder and Mr. McAfee’s flight had made Mr. Davis’s print article obsolete before it could even hit newsstands. Wired and Mr. Davis updated the material and repackaged it into an e-book that has sold more than 22,000 copies, at one point reaching No. 1 on the Nonfiction Kindle Singles list.

Mr. Davis’s exclusives did not last long. As the week went on, Mr. McAfee granted phone interviews to more reporters (though none to me, with whom he’s declined to communicate since my first Gizmodo piece). Then he set out to spread his message across new electronic platforms. He started a Twitter account and, with the help of a cartoonist he had befriended in Seattle, a blog. To keep the story fresh, Mr. McAfee kept upping his media exposure and the outrageousness of the tales he told. He arranged face-to-face interviews— a Financial Times journalist first, followed by CNN’s Martin Savidge. (Both were told to wait in public places and then were driven to meet Mr. McAfee in locations unknown to them.) Then, in the ultimate act of bravado, he invited Vice’s journalists to tag along.

For reporters, a McAfee exclusive guaranteed a rich share of readers and viewers and social-networking interest. But many found the favor an ambiguous blessing. Mr. McAfee seemed to understand the dynamics of journalism well enough to know which assertions reporters would pass along without double-checking or qualifying — like his claim that he had eluded the police by burying himself in sand and positioning a box over his head — even as his self-created narrative veered ever further into the surreal.

“As soon as reporters start to think, ‘Wait a minute, we’re sort of jeopardizing our objectivity and reputation for this guy,’ he’ll just burn them, and go to the next one,” says the Gizmodo writer Joel Johnson, who found himself cut off after publishing an article Mr. McAfee did not like. “That’s what he did to me, that’s what he’s done to a lot of journalists, and he’s going to do it to the Vice guys, if he hasn’t done it already.”

Vice seemed to remain in Mr. McAfee’s good graces even after the freedom-endangering gaffe. After the secret of his location spread across the Internet, Mr. McAfee quickly went online to claim that the data leak was in fact an intentional piece of misdirection. Mr. King, the Vice photographer, supported the claim on social media. This amounted to following up an “egregiously stupid action with a far worse one,” Mr. Honan wrote in a Wired post later last week, “King apparently lied on his Facebook page and Twitter in order to protect McAfee.”

In a statement, Vice said it would not comment about its reporting in the McAfee case.

“The flight we chronicled was from the start filled with misinformation, rumors, social-media-fed myths, outright lies and overall total weirdness,” the magazine said. “Despite many media outlets’ obvious glee in damning us immediately, Vice has decided to wait and talk to the people on our team who were actually on the ground and who could therefore tell us what actually went down and not just buy into the same rumors, myths and madness that this story has consisted of from the start.”

Indeed, while Mr. McAfee seems determined to drag out his drama as long as he can, some of the journalists who have covered him say they have had enough. “People try to behave ethically,” said Mr. Johnson, who wrote his final post on Mr. McAfee three weeks ago. “And he milks that out of them until they get to the point where they’re like, ‘You know what, you’re just nuts.’ ” He adds, “I know as a journalist I can’t say that, so I’ve got to get out of this story.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/business/media/in-pursuit-of-john-mcafee-media-are-part-of-story.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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