CBC News – consulting the TV show repairman

via: The Tea Makers

CBC News has hired this firm to revamp, er CBC news. This is depressing.

Bleck.

You’d think I could come up with something intelligent and rational, but I can’t because I have a visceral response to these kinds of decisions.  
I hate this.
I hate this when people in offices worrying about branding and how news departments are going to make money, stay ‘relevant, capture market share’, yada, yada, make the decisions on how news is going to be delivered and how news people are going to look and how news is going to be presented (hard news experience is meaningless to bean counter-programmers)  I hate this.
These consulting firms are about bottom lines (revenue, numbers, direct marketing, audience survey) not news.

This is from The Virginian-Pilot 1995

Kent is at his best on A&E when he carries his audience to Frank Magid Associates in Iowa where Kent proves that anchors are not born but made. Most compelling is his profile of a thirtysomething anchorwoman in York, Pa., who is being groomed and shaped by the Magid people and her agents to crash a major TV market.

“This is Ken and Barbie journalism,” says “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt to Kent.

“It’s like Noah’s Ark. One man, one woman. Ken and Barbie journalism is happening everywhere in America. It’s time for television to raise its sights a little.”

Walter Cronkite also checks in to denounce “the so-called local Action News presentations that are total perversions created from outside by consultants.” Was he pointing a finger at Frank Magid Associates, which has advised stations in Hampton Roads on how to do local news?

Kent describes the Magid approach as the “Hollywoodization” of local TV news. “Out of market research, in which people are asked who they want to see on television, has arisen the whole phenomenon called Ken and Barbie journalism. It’s cosmetic actors reading the news without any weight of journalism behind them.”

Kent points out that local stations are not the only ones to use a pretty face to keep ratings up. Didn’t CBS pull a similar stunt two years ago with Connie Chung, now lost in limbo at the network?

“The lines between news and entertainment have become blurred as never before,” said Kent. “It is ironic to hear Walter Cronkite say he despises the star system in television news because he fathered that system. He became the first network anchor to be lionized.”

Kent took his cameras on down to Atlanta, to the offices of CNN founder Ted Turner, who didn’t mind saying that wars were good for business, seeing how they elevate CNN’s ratings.

If this consulting firm gets it’s way, CBC is going to look like Fox, CNN and every other dumbed down news cast out there. We’ll have crawlers and bells and whistles and breathless airheads breaking news about the latest Tom Cruise sighting. Whatever credibility CBC has left will be blended into a 500 channel universe nothingness.
At least with the CBC, we  viewers usually haven’t been treated like a coach potatoes with attention deficit disorder. (yes that is an oxymoron!)  If this firm gets it’s hooks in, we will be.
How infuriatingly and insulting to every tax payer in Canada.

Summarize this CBC. Time for this viewer see if Star Choice offers the BBC.

National Post  (requires subscription)

Recently, the CBC retained a U.S. media-advisory consultancy, Iowa-based Frank N. Magid Associates, to help revamp its local news coverage and build ratings.

“Sometimes we need someone from the outside to look in,” explains Julie Bristow, the network’s executive director of factual programming. She stressed that Mr. Shekter is only one of several consultants the CBC calls on for a little program surgery, a so-called “show doctor” kept on call in case of emergencies.

“Mark can help facilitate with a show’s direction,” Ms. Bristow says. “He’s the person who says, ‘Let’s crystallize it, synthesize it, and figure out how to execute it.’ ”

After 15 years of tweaking, developing and shaping such news programs as Marketplace, Venture and CBC Sunday, Mr. Shekter is winding down from his most eventful his most eventful television season yet with the CBC.

He has helped guide The Hour, the 11 p.m. news talk-show hosted by George Stromboulopoulos, to critical and commercial success. He was also instrumental in the launch of the Living series, a 13-week regional travelogue that was just renewed for 26 weeks. The network also dispatched him to rejig The Gill Deacon Show, a daytime launch it later cancelled after a high-profile, big-budget unveiling.

“I’ve started to hear about responsibility to bring up numbers, to be relevant, that I haven’t heard before,” says Mr. Shekter, a casually dressed man in his fifties with a slight Eugene Levy aura. “We haven’t developed a lot of personalities in the news area. It’s a different paradigm now.”

I like Stromboulopoulos, he’s quirky, engaging, sincere and has the potential as staying power since he is being marketed, but  I can’t stand The Hour.
To be perfectly frank I’ve watched about 20 minutes, and that was because Romeo Dallaire was on. (He’s learned to talk in solid soundbites and is who he is. Just put a camera on him, ask the question and listen, damn it)  I’ve watched one Stomboulopoulos interview online, with Chris Hedges. Stomboulopoulos sets up well,  over asks his questions, but he shows indications he knows his subject matter and in time he’ll simmer down, he tries to listen carefully. It was the rest of the show I couldn’t stomach, the camera angles, the audience, the set, lighting, loud music bridges, the attempt to appeal to a younger audience with: “Oh! yeah, almost forgot, this is going on too. Headline! Headline! Headline! See ya.”
Bleck.