March 29, 2024

NBC Announces a Face-Lift, and One New Face, for ‘Today’

Deborah Turness, the new president of NBC News, unveiled the changes to “Today” on Thursday and signaled that aside from the surprise addition of Carson Daly, no cast changes were planned.

Every other aspect of the once-invincible morning show has come under severe scrutiny since it was eclipsed in the ratings by ABC’s “Good Morning America,” which recently celebrated a full year at No. 1. The internal debate has brought up intriguing questions about what television viewers do, and do not, want to see in the mornings, especially as more and more of them reach for their smartphone before their remote control when they wake up.

Ms. Turness, who took over the news division a little more than a month ago, has made the revitalization of “Today” her top priority. She has concluded that the viewers who abandoned “Today” last year are recoverable, and in private conversations she has drawn analogies to the joy of reuniting with an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend.

But the show has to woo them back — and on Thursday, in her first public comments, she said she knows that a fresh orange coat of paint alone won’t do it. Her three buzzwords for “Today” are substance, uplift and connection.

“This is a content-led strategy,” Ms. Turness said. “And we have the right team and the best team to deliver that strategy.”

Her comments may tamp down continued speculation in the TV industry about the futures of Matt Lauer, whose reputation was spoiled when Ms. Curry tearfully signed off in June 2012, and Savannah Guthrie, the woman who was pressed into service as Ms. Curry’s replacement.

The female-centric “Today,” which was already slipping, lost about a quarter of its audience and became stuck in second place after Ms. Curry left; last week, “G.M.A.” had about 5.3 million viewers each day, about 750,000 more than “Today.” Among viewers ages 25 to 54, the ones coveted by advertisers, “G.M.A.” led by 118,000.

That stubborn gap has cost NBC’s parent, Comcast, tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue, much of which has shifted over to ABC’s parent company, the Walt Disney Company. It has also deeply damaged morale at “Today” and caused what one senior NBC News executive admitted have been “frantic” responses to the ratings crisis.

Ms. Turness and her boss, the NBCUniversal News Group chairwoman Pat Fili-Krushel, are said to have concluded that removing any anchor right now would cause a further decline in the ratings. Instead, they are adding talent: Mr. Daly, the former host of MTV’s “TRL” who now is at the helm of the hit reality show “The Voice” for NBC, will be a regular presence on “Today” starting next Monday, updating anchors on what viewers are saying on the Internet.

In a corner of the new set called the “Orange Room,” Mr. Daly will read messages from Twitter and Facebook and conduct online video chats with viewers. The producers of “Today” hope to have celebrities and newsmakers participate in the video chats after they appear on the television show.

The social media emphasis of the “Orange Room” is a tacit acknowledgment of new media trends as well as a way, maybe, to lure former viewers back to NBC. The multimillion-dollar renovations to the famous street-side studio, known as Studio 1A at Midtown Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, were sketched out before Ms. Turness arrived at the network, and on Thursday she portrayed it as merely one of several changes meant to make the show more welcoming. (The new set will debut on Monday, along with a new logo that resembles a sunrise.)

“Today,” Ms. Turness said, will seek, or rather re-seek, a middle ground in morning television — not as celebrity-centric as “G.M.A.,” not as sober as “CBS This Morning.” “It is our territory to reconquer,” she told reporters at a press event at the new studio.

Since arriving at NBC from Britain’s ITV, where she was the editor of ITV News, Ms. Turness has been in the “Today” control room virtually every morning. After the show, she frequently attends the 10 a.m. meeting with senior “Today” show staff members to discuss what segments were and were not on point.

She has told them she wants to return to the show’s traditional strengths, like human interest stories and more agenda-setting interviews (as the show had on Aug. 22, when NBC played host to the abducted teenager Hannah Anderson’s first interview and the announcement that Bradley Manning wanted to live as a woman). The show, she has said, should inspire viewers as well as inform. “Even in the darkness, we will seek the light. That’s our promise,” she said Thursday.

But Ms. Turness’s plan assumes that there is still room in the middle — which runs contrary to the trend of niche morning shows on channels like VH1 and NFL Network, and new alternatives on the Web. The more sweeping overhaul that some staff members have hoped for, one that would involve talent changes as well as risk-taking content, does not appear to be coming.

The addition of Mr. Daly did restart an industry guessing game about who might succeed Mr. Lauer someday — something that viewers follow closely and speculate about constantly.

Mr. Lauer, who has co-hosted “Today” since 1997, has a contract that runs at least through the end of 2014. Speculation about him leaving before then has diminished, and discussions within NBC News about grooming Ryan Seacrest or Anderson Cooper for his co-host chair have not come to fruition. Willie Geist, who joined the cast a year ago, is thought to be the top in-house candidate, and on Thursday some wondered if Mr. Daly was his new competition.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/business/media/nbc-announces-a-face-lift-and-one-new-face-for-today.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder Blog: Robert Thomson to Be Chief of News Corporation’s New Publishing Company

2:53 p.m. | Updated

Robert Thomson, the top editor at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and a confidante of News Corporation’s chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, is expected to be named chief executive of the media conglomerate’s newly spun-off publishing company.

Mr. Thomson will run the separate, publicly traded company, which will include The Journal, The New York Post, HarperCollins and a suite of lucrative television assets in Australia. The announcement is expected as early as Monday, according to a person briefed on the company’s decision-making.

Mr. Thomson took over at The Journal in 2008, soon after News Corporation completed its $5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones. He serves as managing editor of The Journal and editor in chief of Dow Jones, which also publishes Barron’s and the Dow Jones Newswires.

Gerard Baker, a deputy managing editor at the Journal, will take over for Mr. Thomson at The Journal, said the person briefed on the decisions, who could not discuss private conversations publicly.

At The Journal, Mr. Baker has overseen Washington and political coverage, among other topics. He previously wrote a neoconservative column for The Times of London, also owned by News Corporation, and served as Washington bureau chief at The Financial Times, where Mr. Thomson was the top editor of the United States edition.

Mr. Thomson began his career at News Corporation in 1979 as a reporter at The Herald in Melbourne, Australia. He and Mr. Murdoch are both Australian, and have taken family vacations together. Mr. Murdoch is often seen in Mr. Thomson’s office in the Journal newsroom.

In his tenure at The Journal, Mr. Thomson increased circulation by broadening the newspaper’s focus beyond business to include more general-interest and lifestyle news. He oversaw an expansion of the newsroom budget, added photographs to go along with the paper’s signature dot drawings and introduced a local New York section.

Mr. Murdoch will serve as chairman of the publishing company and remain chief executive of the entertainment company, which will include News Corporation’s movie studio, Fox Broadcasting and cable channels like FX and Fox News.

News Corporation plans to complete its split, which was announced in June, in mid-2013. Additional announcements about the publishing company’s board and cash structure are expected before the end of the year.

A News Corporation spokeswoman declined to comment. Reuters was the first to report on the expected appointments.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/robert-thomson-to-be-chief-of-news-corporation%E2%80%99s-new-publishing-company/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economix: The Problem With the F.D.I.C.’s Powers

Today's Economist

Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”

Under the Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation (in Title II of that act), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is granted expanded powers to intervene and manage the closure of any failing bank or other financial institution. There are two strongly held views of this legal authority: that it substantially solves the problem of how to handle failing megabanks and therefore serves as an effective constraint on their future behavior, and that it is largely irrelevant.

Both views are expressed by well-informed people at the top of regulatory structures on both sides of the Atlantic, at least in private conversations. Which view is right?

In terms of legal process, the resolution authority could make a difference. But as a matter of practical politics and actual business practices, it means very little for our biggest financial institutions.

On the face of it, the case that this power to deal with failing banks — known as resolution authority — would help seems strong. Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has repeatedly argued that these new powers would have made a difference in the case of Lehman Brothers.

And a recent assessment by the F.D.I.C. provides a more detailed account of how exactly this could have worked.

According to the authors of the F.D.I.C. report, if its current powers had been in effect in early 2008, the agency could have become involved much earlier in finding alternative ways –- that is, unrelated to the bankruptcy process –- to “solve” the problems that Lehman Brothers had: very little capital relative to likely losses and even less liquidity relative to what it needed as markets became turbulent.

The F.D.I.C. report describes a series of steps that the agency could have taken, particularly around brokering a deal that would have involved selling some assets to other financial companies, such as Barclays, while also committing some money to remove downside risk –- both from buyers of assets and from those who continued to own and lend money to the operation that remained.

If needed, the F.D.I.C. asserts, it could have handled any ultimate liquidation in a way that would have been less costly to the system and better for creditors, who will end up getting very little through the actual court-run process.

But there are two major problems with this analysis: it assumes away the political constraint, and it ignores the most basic reality of how this kind of business operates.

At the political level, if you wish to engage in alternative or hypothetical history, you cannot ignore the presence of Henry M. Paulson Jr., then secretary of the Treasury.

Mr. Paulson steadfastly refused, even in the aftermath of the near-collapse of Bear Stearns, to take any active or pre-emptive role with regard to strengthening the financial system –- let alone intervening to break up or otherwise deal firmly with a potentially vulnerable large firm.

For example, in spring 2008, the International Monetary Fund — where I was chief economist at the time — suggested ways to take advantage of the lull after the collapse of Bear Stearns to reduce downside risks for the financial system.

Compared with the hypothetical variants discussed by the F.D.I.C., our proposals were modest and did not involve winding down particular firms. Perhaps in retrospect we should have been bolder, but in any case our ideas were dismissed out of hand by the Treasury.

Senior Treasury officials took the view that there was no serious systemic issue and that they knew what to do if another Bear Stearns-type situation developed –- it would be rescued by another ad-hoc deal, presumably involving some sort of merger. (Bear Stearns, you may recall, was taken over by JPMorgan Chase at the 11th hour, with considerable downside protection provided by the Federal Reserve.)

Mr. Paulson was very influential, given the way the previous system operates, and his memoir, “On The Brink,” is candid about why: he had a direct channel to the president, he was the most senior financial sector “expert” in the administration, and he was chairman of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.

Under the Dodd-Frank Act, however, he would have been even more powerful — as head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council and as the person who decides whether to appoint the F.D.I.C. as receiver.

It is inconceivable that the F.D.I.C. could have taken any intrusive action in early 2008 without his concurrence. Yet it is equally inconceivable that he would have agreed.

In this respect Mr. Paulson was not an outlier relative to Mr. Geithner or other people who are likely to become Treasury secretary. The operating philosophy of the United States government with regard to the financial sector remains: hands off and in favor of intervention only when absolutely necessary.

In addition, as a senior European regulator pointed out to me recently, the idea that any agency from any one country can handle a resolution of a global megabank in an orderly fashion is an illusion. Even if we had agreement among countries on how to handle resolution when cross-border assets and liabilities are involved — which we don’t — it would be a major mistake to assume that such a resolution would have no systemic consequences, that same person said.

These financial services companies are very large — more than 250,000 employees work for Citigroup, which operates in 171 countries and with more than 200 million clients, according to its Web site. The organizational structures involved are complex; it is not uncommon to have several thousand legal entities with various kinds of interlocking relationships.

Sheila Bair, the head of the F.D.I.C., has pointed out that “living wills” for such complicated operations are very unlikely to be helpful. Perhaps if the financial megafirms could be simplified, resolution would become more realistic (and the F.D.I.C. report, mentioned above, alludes to this possibility in its conclusions).

But any attempt at simplification from the government would need to go through the Financial Stability Oversight Council, where the Treasury’s influence is decisive.

And the market has no interest in pushing for simplification — anything that makes it harder to rescue a big bank, for example, will increase the probability that, in the downside situation, it will receive a too-big-to-fail subsidy of some form.

Many equity investors like this kind of protective “put” option.

F.D.I.C.-type resolution works well for small and medium-sized banks, and expanding these powers could help with some situations in the future. But it would be an illusion to think that this solves the problems posed by the impending collapse of one or more global megabanks.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9e81bd0ddbfac9dc700508d73af30738