Category: National Media

Upon learning that conservative commentator George Will was moving to Fox News, my initial thought was”great, now he’ll be the next to sell out his usually composed and reasonable conservative mindset in exchange for a more radical approach to appease the far right Fox News audience.”

I should give him the benefit of the doubt though since I do think (or hope) he is better then that.

According to the linked Times article above, Will wanted to eliminate the travel between his Washington home and New York, where ABC’s “This Week” is based from (on weeks when hosted by George Stephanopoulos — usually three weeks out of the month). According to the Times article, Will has been a regular roundtable participant on “This Week” since 1981.

Like the other Sunday morning news shows, “This Week” was based in Washington up until Jan. 2012 when Stephanopoulos returned as host. The New York move was done to accommodate Stephanopoulos who continues to host the New York based “Good Morning America” during the week.

When ABC first announced this arrangement in Dec. 2011, I wondered how it might impact the show’s ability of booking guest to appear in studio, considering most of the mainstream political guests are based in Washington. These same guests often appear on multiple shows each Sunday morning, the rest of which are based in Washington.

It must not have posed too much of a problem or else Stephanopoulos would have either been flying to DC himself each weekend or the network would have replaced him with a DC based host by now.

Earlier this year, ABC News vacated their studio space at the Washington-based Newseum, where “This Week” had previously been hosted.

On Friday, the New York Times released a damning piece that revealed just how much of a grip the NFL has over ESPN, concerning the network’s participating in a documentary about players suffering from football related head injuries. The story has garnered a lot of attention within the sports media community, calling into question the journalistic integrity of ESPN as a result.

On a semi related note, you may recall an ESPN television show 10 years ago called “Playmakers,” which depicted a fiction pro football team overcoming day-to-day hurdles in a fiction pro football league. The NFL didn’t appreciate having such “hurdles” spotlighted — even if the show was fiction — and pressured ESPN into dropping the series.

On Saturday, the Times released another football related piece about ESPN, concerning the network’s influence in the creation of specific games, of which would also air on the ESPN networks. While not as damning as their now lack of involvement in investigating head injuries, this piece is still revealing, at least at the big picture level, as it concerns the relationship between media partnership.

The two type of above circumstances are not exclusive to ESPN or sports media. Concerning our news and political media, I’d argue that any agendas, whether it be the New York Times, NBC News or Fox News, are more often business/financially driven as opposed to being politically driven. Political talk radio should be the most obvious example (unfortunately, that is often missed by the hardcore fans of a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck).

Ball game or not, at the end of the day, news reporting is all business.

You can slam dunk that or bank on it. Whichever you prefer.

MSNBC announced yesterday that progressive talker Ed Schultz is moving back to weekdays, albeit, at the earlier time of 4 p.m. CT. Schultz was removed from the coveted 7 p.m. primetime slot earlier this year to make room for Chris Hayes, who has been a rising star in the progressive community.

Politico’s Dylan Byers explains how Hayes’ program “All In” has so far been unable to spark the ratings for primetime cable news. Moving Hayes to primetime was a very gutsy move, and one that might have been inspired by MSNBC President Phil Griffin’s heart rather than his head.

I wonder if moving Schultz to the 4 p.m. slot is the first step in what eventually results in a switch — moving Hayes to 4 p.m. while Schultz moves back to 7 p.m. That might be a clever way for Griffin to save face without completely embarrassing Hayes, someone who Griffin obviously thinks very highly of.

I am in the camp that prefers Schultz’s performance style over that of Hayes or Rachael Maddow. Hayes and Maddow are better at actively discussing important issues in a way that that might have more impact on an opposing mindset. In the short-term however, the added fire and showmanship of Schultz does a better job at keeping my attention.

Fox Sports 1, the all new sports network by Fox, made its debut this morning by officially replacing Speed.

Fox Sports 1 has kicked off the festivities with the airing of auto race qualifying runs. The same thing most racing fans watched on the former Speed channel last Saturday morning.

Yes, Fox Sports 1 is a big picture project. Don’t judge the network for another five to 10 years once they can capture other big name sports. Yet with all the self-hype going into this new all sports network that is not ESPN, to have the first day flogged with auto racing seems highly ironic. It comes more across like a sorry plea to Speed channel viewers — “We’re sorry! We still love you and your NASCAR. We promise! Please don’t leave!”

Meanwhile, if Fox Sports 1 is the new golden prize of Fox Sports, then Fox Sports 2 is the bastard stepchild. By design, the press for Fox Sports 2 has been minimal, if non existent, and finding the bitch is nearly impossible. You sure won’t find it anywhere on the Fox Sports website.

Again, by design, Fox Sports 2 is more or less a spillover channel for Fox Sports 1. And they want all eyes on Fox Sports 1 today, and understandably so. Yet by doing it this way, they are already telling everyone that Fox Sports 2 doesn’t matter. Not the best way to introduce a new brand, in my opinion.

Would have been better off saving the Fox Sports 2 launch for when they had a useful reason for its existence. From the way it appears now, when they will eventually need Fox Sports 2, it won’t be much different then finding your local Comcast SportsNet Plus channel.

Farhad Manjoo wrote an excellent column for Slate explaining how Amazon.com CEO Jeff Blezo’s influence on e-commerce and marketing has been so innovative and how that might be relevant to the Washington Post.

Manjoo’s explains how the inexpensive information — and not necessarily the hard news — inside a newspaper played a huge role in attracting readers, and how the Internet curtailed that strategy.

For decades, newspapers made money by bundling two distinct kinds of data: low-cost information and high-cost news. The information—classifieds, stocks, sports scores, weather, entertainment listings, recipes, horoscopes, coupons, police blotters, obits—was widely popular and cheap and easy to produce.

… newspapers worked as a business, because they had a monopoly on the low-cost information. As long as there was no other place for their audience to go to for classifieds and all the rest, readers and advertisers kept paying for the ink, indirectly subsidizing the serious stuff.

Another column worth reading is by Cade Metz at Wired, about how Bezos’ Post purchase will likely tie with Amazon.

Metz also points out that high-cost news has not its own game-changing revolution the way music had via iTunes or movies via Netflix. Both iTunes and Netflix took existing products/services people already paid for and created a new model for them to receive the same but at less expense. Meanwhile, the best newspapers have come up with so far are paywalls behind their websites or mobile apps. Asides from the major publications, there’s no guarantee that model will work.

The thought of paying for online news is beyond outrageous among the young people today. You have the same problem, to a lesser extent, with music and movies, but the situation is a night and day difference because while newspapers have given their content away for free online for well over a decade, music and movies have not readily been available online for free. The workaround of downloading via BitTorrent (or previously with Napster) is illegal.

After a full day to think about it, the general consensus is that Bezos will somehow attempt to incorporate the Posts’s news content into the Amazon universe. And if Bezos is able to garner any type of success, it won’t be long before other tech giants, such as Google or Facebook, follow.

There’s plenty of buzz coming from yesterday’s shocker that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is purchasing the Washington Post. Obviously, the Post website has a lot of great content and reaction from various writers regarding the sale. Politico also has a variety of content worth checking out.

Dylan Byers has an excellent round-up of the purchase, what it potentially means down the road and more. Mad props as well for the headline “Bezos adds Washington Post to cart” (note, the headline has since been changed to “Jeff Bezos re-Kindles hope at The Washington Post” — still cute, but I like the original better).

I’m looking forward to observing how the Post evolves in the coming years, after enough time has passed for Bezos to implement his ideas and strategy. The looming question concerning newspapers is profitability and how to monetize the online and mobile app presence in order to pay for the high cost of journalism.

The last great hope is that someone like Bezos, a highly successful and innovate entrepreneur, and an outsider to the industry, can instill new ideas that result in a new money making model that other newspapers or news producing organizations may possibly borrow.

The demand for straight news on all mediums remains highly uncertain, as the soon to debut cable network Al Jazeera America is likely to soon find out. Can a news producing organization by itself be profitable? Before cable television, the respective news divisions at ABC, NBC and CBS were money losers that were primarily subsidized from the revenues generated from each network’s line of soap opera programming. I think something like that almost has to happen again, in a more modern sense of course.

Sam Zell’s purchase of the Tribine Company was the textbook example on how to turn a bad situation at a newspaper into a worse one. The combination of personal greed and unrealistic expectations curbed any chance Zell had from day one. I like to believe that Bezos is Zell’s opposite. I’m more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt  (as opposed to someone like Boston Red Sox owner John Henry, who is now eying to purchase the Boston Globe).

While we don’t yet know what Bezos’ expectations are for the Post, it might help if our expectations for Bezos remain in check. Running a news producing organization, such as one as large and influential as the Post, is quite the unproven endeavor in today’s modern world of journalism.

If Bezos turns out not to be the miracle man journalism has been waiting for, I have no doubts, it won’t be due to a lack of honest effort.