Broadcasting & Cable Magazine

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 10:44am on Monday, January 18th, 2010

Is pool news coverage of the State of the Union address really objective?

Broadcasting & Cable reported on January 18, 2010:

"To be sure, the pool strives for and achieves objectivism. But the ideological divide in Washington inevitably imbues the proceedings with controversy. Veteran pool producers say they have never received complaints about their handling of the speech from administrations. And there are no guidelines—official or unofficial—designed to achieve parity in cutaways between the president's supporters and detractors.

“There's no input whatsoever that anyone in officialdom has,” says David Bohrman, senior VP of programming and Washington bureau chief at CNN, which is the pool camera for this year's State of the Union.

There is an open line in the pool truck during the speech so that other networks can request certain shots. And the pool director will get a copy of the speech so that he can anticipate whom to direct the camera on and when. But neither the administration nor the Speaker of the House's office has any say in what the cameras do or don't show at any given moment.

“It's completely up to us what we do,” Bohrman says. “There's no influence at all.”

The full story:
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/444576-Networks_Prepare_for_Union_Spectacle.php

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 7:15am on Monday, December 28th, 2009

FCC Says Broadband No Threat To Broadcasting, Broadcasting & Cable magazine reported on December 27, 2009:

"FCC broadband advisor Blair Levin tells B&C that he does not think any of the commission's plans for spectrum reclamation "threatens the future of over-the-air broadcasting."

But he also says that broadcasters own actions and revenue streams do not support retaining all of their spectrum all of the time.

Levin's team has been working over the holidays as they bear down on a Feb. 17 deadline for getting the national broadband plan to Congress, a deadline Levin tells B&C they will meet, if not beat.

He says broadcasters need to be thinking about how to work with the FCC to help resolve the looming spectrum crisis, and calls "quite extraordinary" some broadcasters suggestion there is no looming crisis. Though he concedes the crisis is not yet upon us, he also suggests that the time to fix the roof is when the sun is still shining."

For more information:
http://www.broadcastingcable.com

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 7:07am on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Broadcasting & Cable, Multichannel News And Tech Pub Twice All Sold To NewBay Media, the Los Angeles Times reported on December 1, 2009:

"Founded in 1931 by Sol Taishoff, Broadcasting & Cable Magazine covered the industry primarily from a Washington perspective for decades until relocating much of its editorial operations to Los Angeles and New York.

Like many industry magazines, it has seen its advertising pages diminish over the last several years. In its heyday, the magazine had a strong influence with regulators and Capitol Hill insiders.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Broadcasting & Cable was once sold for $75 million to Times Mirror in the 1980s and then a unit of Reed Business Information acquired it in the early 1990s for less than half that figure."

The full story:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2009/12/broadcasting-cable-magazine-and-multichannel-news-sold-to-newbay-media.html

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 2:31pm on Monday, April 6th, 2009

The era of the star television news anchor is over, according to an interesting story in Broadcasting & Cable magazine by Michael Malone on April 6, 2009:

"When he broke into television in 1985, WBZ Boston anchor Jonathan Elias says he viewed some of the star talent he worked with as "glorified meat puppets"-blow-dried know-nothings who rolled in just before their newscast, read through their script and delivered the news without setting so much as a single wingtip on the mean streets of the market. "I remember the disdain we had for anchors," Elias says, "their feet on their desks, rubbing your nose in it that they made five times as much as we did."
Twenty-four years later, Elias is in a position that most in local TV would kill for—anchoring the 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. news and reporting for the 11 p.m. at a network-owned station in a sophisticated Top 10 market. But he's hardly got his feet up. Elias' typical day sees him blogging, addressing viewers' e-mails, pitching in at story meetings, rewriting scripts, incorporating Twitter into his viewer dialogue and hitting the streets of Boston after doing the evening news to flesh out stories for the 11 p.m.

In short, Elias is using all available resources to gather news. “You've got to have a lot of tools in your shed to play in this environment today,” he says. “The days of minimal expectations are over—everybody's expected to be fully engaged on all fronts.”

With the local TV economy wheezing, the mega-million-dollar anchor, tasked solely with reading the Teleprompter, is going the way of the LP record and the thriving daily newspaper. In an era where content, not talent, is king, that giant salary is being put to better use in hiring a batch of hungry multimedia multitaskers. Those all-star anchors who have been able to avoid the sack thus far are often compelled to take on a wider range of duties and, with an “economic gun pointed at their head,” in the words of one industry watcher, do it for significantly less money."

Read the full story:
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/191239-Cover_Story_Dawn_of_the_Post_Star_Anchor_Era.php