Friday, June 19, 2009

The Most Important News of Your Life in Less Than a Minute

I started thinking about this piece about 20 plus years ago. It was then that I began to notice that people's attention spans were getting shorter. I reached this conclusion by observing the popularity of the entertainment magazine shows on television, the slow but steady rise of USA Today as a news source in a time when newspapers were just beginning to feel pain of shrinking circulation and the emergence of CNN and the CNN Headline News service. Suddenly, news was available whenever one wanted it. I was traveling a lot in those days and it was most convenient to tune in CNN as soon as I arrived at a hotel in a new city. In 15 minutes, I knew all the pertinent things I needed to know to continue to appear to be a citizen of the world.

However, after growing up listening to long radio newscasts during the dinner hour which then gave way to long television newscasts during the dinner half hour (everything was shrinking), I began wondering why and how these start ups with their concise information capsules and, in the case of USA Today, the little charts that summed up some important issue could be as satisfying as the long form information I was accustomed to receiving. Very few of us thought "McNews" as it was called, would survive.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the generation that was about to take over the bulge in the population grew up on Sesame Street. You know, "Today's show is brought to you by the letter g, the color green and the number 4, boys and girls." So, if these kids were getting their information spoon fed to them in nice little mind sized easily absorbed chunks, how were they going to react to large mind numbing chunks of data that might require some sort of smack in the forehead to effectuate a kind of Heimlich Mind Maneuver to free a choking brain? Come to think of it, the music of the time had the same rhythm structure that nursery rhymes had. They were short, easy to learn and they rhymed. Just like the music, the news and information had a pleasant and easy to follow cadence. Sound effects were added to the newscasts to set it apart from the music. A Pavlovian teletype ticker separated the news from every other sound on the air. Even the voices of the news announcers had a certain timbre to them to further alert the audience to the fact that what they were listening to was the news. Maybe it wasn't the glass ceiling, sexism or lack of opportunity that banned the women from the on air news business for so long, but rather the culprit was their higher pitched voices being thought to be "unnews like." Women have been delivering news (good, bad and humorous) in their homes for years and everyone who heard these reports, understood them.

So, what's the point of this? The newspapers continue to fall like houses of ....well...wet newsprint. News has all but disappeared from many radio stations and television stations have added more news in hopes of staving off their declining viewership caused by the proliferation and fractionalization of cable and maybe the hope that without newspapers, they'll get another chance at regaining their once huge audiences. Video Rangers, that train has sailed.

The recent election in Iran where the government banned "traditional" news coverage, came right into our ears and eyes from the Internet, cell phones, Face Book and Twitter with its 140 character limit on content. It is a hoot to hear these news folks with their basso profundo voices explaining their information sources in terms of "tweets." The rabbit hole has been enlarged, Alice and we're all falling through it.


Thursday, June 4, 2009

Late Night Wars

My late father was a big fan of vaudeville.  Although we were almost the last people on earth to get a television because dad thought it was a fad, once we had it, we were unable to pry him away from it.  Why?  Because the early days of television were run by people from vaudeville.  Where else were the networks going to find people with the abilities to stage entertainment programming?  That's why the early TV shows looked like stage shows.  Uncle Miltie and Your Show of Shows, Ed Sullivan and the rest all looked like vaudeville.  My father was overjoyed and he and I watched a lot of television together.  Because of this, I was and am a witness to a bit of television history.  I was in front of the set when Steve Allen hosted the first Tonite Show on NBC.  I saw his first show and his last.  I saw Jack Paar's first shot at the late night show and his last.  I was there for Johnny Carson's debut and his finale, which, by the way, was the most emotional.  Therefore, I couldn't miss Leno's debut or Dave Leterman's either.  At the time I wrote a long memo to the broadcast company I worked for telling them what a mistake NBC made in letting Dave get away from them and how they would regret giving Leno the job.  Obviously, I was wrong.  Leno beat Dave handily most of the 17 years they competed.

I'm not sure why that happened, but I suspect that Dave's irreverence infected the way he delivered his own writers' material leaving the audience to wonder, if Dave thinks this stuff is so bad, why should I watch it?  Dave just might be too hip for the room as they used to say.

Now, the torch has passed again with Conan O'Brien taking over the Tonite Show and going head to head with Letterman.  Despite what you read, this is not a level playing field.  Dave is a good 20 years older than Conan and so is his material.  One pundit I read said "Dave has to "up his game" if he ever hopes to be on top in the late night ratings.

I think Dave is faced with the impossible task of changing his game to compete with a younger more likable Conan who is essentially doing a form of Letterman's shtick in a nicer way.  He could grab a great number of Letterman's younger viewers and essentially decimate the CBS late show.  Conan is certainly likable enough to keep Leno's older viewers which leaves Dave with not much.  To level the field again, CBS,  ABC or Fox might find some likable character who appeals to the average aged late night viewer who could drive a wedge between Conan and Dave and take 75% of the combined audience and put Dave AND Conan out of business.  Will that happen?  I don't think so.  I just think Dave will fade away and NBC will outright own late night.

Now, why should we care?  Personally, I don't care because I can't stay up that late anymore and the humor on both shows is somewhat lackluster to me.  However, the former broadcast business guy in me knows that these shows are vastly profitable because they are very inexpensive to produce compared to anything else on network television.  The profits gleaned from these late night modern vaudeville shows can pay for some  better prime time programming which I think needs to be drastically improved.   

What do you think?  Do you care?  Or do you want to be the biggest loser dancing with the American idol nanny while she has her home improved by the vast cast from the huge number of Law and Order cast members?