All In The Family: The "New" Business Model

It was one of those "double take" moments. You know the kind: when you have to pinch yourself to make sure it's really happening? It was during the last commercial break in the 10 o'clock News the other night. A promo pops up on the screen urging KRBC viewers to subscribe to a call back weather service offered by our sister station, KTAB. The same service that KRBC also offers.
Now maybe I should clear the air on a few things here. While KTAB is our sister station and we share our resources, we both still compete with one another for viewers.
So, how could such a thing have happened? Well, in this case it was a mistake so simple, it's hard to believe it's consequence could be so glaring. But, it also speaks to the changes going on in television right now. It was human error. Somewhere along the line, someone put the wrong commercial number into the computer system and the spot that should have run on KTAB, ran instead on KRBC, It happens -- We are, afterall, just human. I think my counterpart on the other station summed it up best as we joked about it after the show: "Thanks," he said, "we need all the cross promotion we can get." But with more and more "centralization" going on and more and more responsibility being placed on fewer and fewer people, things like this will be bound to happen more frequently.
Now, a comment about something in the news this week: the Fox Television Stations and E.W. Scripps have created a local news service for their stations in Detroit, Phoenix and Tampa. Starting this month, the service "will pool content-gathering resources at general market news events, allowing the stations to save on duplicate efforts" and Fox and Scripps are amenable to opening up the service to other media partners in the three markets.
The idea isn't new: The Abilene Reporter News (which, by the way is now owned by Scripps) and KTXS-TV have been doing it for years. The trade publication Broadcasting & Cable noted recently that these are challenging times we live in and and TV stations, once bitter competitors, "are increasingly in a sharing mood", at least in the boardrooms where the bucks meet the bottom lines. Maybe the "news" business is becoming more about "business" than about "news".
There was a time when this kind of "centralization" would have been scorned, but in a study submitted during the recent duopoly hearings, it was suggested that keeping stations from owning more than one station in a market was outdated thinking. In the Information Age, there are now scores of places the public can turn to "get the facts and opposing viewpoints". Everyone's interests are served.
Those are my thoughts: what are yours.

Downing Bolls