Financial News, Front and Center: What Took So Long?

The New York Times - THERE is a well-worn but telling newspaper industry joke: “If it bleeds, it leads.” But that has never applied to the elementary, if trickier, parts of business news — things like the federal budget deficit, current account shortfalls, or quarterly losses at companies like G.M.

Despite the dramatic rise in stock ownership among ordinary Americans through 401(k) plans and electronic trading, financial news has remained, at best, an afterthought for most general-interest publications. Even though many financial threats the world faced in recent years were hiding in plain sight — in the pages of the business press — the broader media’s longstanding indifference to economic news helped keep it safely out of the public dialogue.

Forget about television. Viewers tend to find business chatter more boring than a test pattern or a Charlie Rose interview. It has never delivered ratings — even CNBC considers an audience of 600,000 a pretty good day, and the network’s unaccountable loudmouth, Jim Cramer, is lucky to get a quarter of that.

Now that the global financial system’s belly-flop has become Topic A, the mainstream media has stifled its yawns and is digging in ferociously. In this news cycle, the press has become so obsessed with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Edward M. Liddy, A.I.G.’s dollar-a-year C.E.O., that even Octomom and Rihanna have trouble grabbing air time and column inches.

Suddenly, everyone has an opinion about how to retrofit financial markets for the next economic earthquake. The same talking heads who once prided themselves on their inability to balance their own checkbooks are now engaged in “Crossfire”-esque shouting matches over newly proposed hedge fund regulations or debt-to-capital ratios for banks. Television, predictably, is discovering that sexy extra little something that had always been missing from the financial story: lynch mobs. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/media/12media.html

Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable

Editor's Note: Broadcast TV is facing the same demographic shifts as newspapers - a loss of mass audience which is affecting its ability to collect a premium for advertising. This will have an important impact on the future of traditional broadcasters moving forward. Like newspapers, the broadcast business model is broken and no one knows how to fix it.
The New York Times - CBS, home to “60 Minutes,” the “CSI” franchise, “Two and a Half Men” and the new hit crime drama “The Mentalist,” is having a better year in prime time than any other network.

And yet, as at the other networks, profits have declined sharply at CBS.

For decades, the big three, now big four, networks all had the same game plan: spend many millions to develop and produce scripted shows aimed at a mass audience and national advertisers, with a shelf life of years or decades as reruns in syndication.

But that model, based on attracting enough ad dollars to cover the costs of shows like “Lost” and “ER,” no longer appears viable. Network dramas now cost about $3 million an hour.

The future for the networks, it seems, is more low-cost reality shows, more news and talk, and a greater effort to find new revenue streams, whether they be from receiving subscriber fees as cable channels do, or becoming cable networks themselves, an idea that has gained currency.

The last bastion of the big network audience is the Super Bowl and other live events like the Grammy Awards and the Academy Awards. The rub is that those have traditionally been viewed as promotional outlets for a network’s other shows, and rarely make money themselves.

Ratings over all for broadcast networks continue to decline, making it harder for them to justify their high prices for advertising. Cable channels are spending more on original shows, which bring in new viewers and dampen their appetites for buying repeats of broadcast shows.

For the networks, the crisis is twofold: cultural and financial. For viewers, the result is more low-cost reality shows, prime-time talk and news programs and sports from the institutions that once made “Hill Street Blues,” “All in the Family” and “Cheers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/business/media/28network.html