It's Official: NBC Universal Trendlet Becomes Trend

NBC Uni Sales President Keith Turner splitting the company. That makes three high-ranking execs departing in the past few weeks, which, as discussed here, officially makes it a trend.

Any and all educated guesses as to the internal state of things that's behind all this welcomed.

Sometimes Psychological Motivations Are Not That Complex

Hank Greenberg must be in need of some attention.

Let's not forget that--how to put this?-- you can't put the Times in play, period. Or that Greenberg might be a little sore at how the Times covered certain aspects of his career.

My colleague Tom Lowry and I will be weighing in at greater length on this tomorrow (UPDATE: It's here), but should you have access to TheStreet.com, Jim Cramer sums it up nicely here. (I think this post sets a record for highest percentage of links behind a firewall. Sorry!)

UPDATE 11/30: Greenberg issues sorta-denial late afternoon of 11/29; his rep says he has "no present intention of significantly increasing his holdings." WSJ has more backstory on his reaching out to Morgan Stanley's John Mack, and interest in, oh, 17 or 18 more newspaper and media companies here--and, yes, that's another firewalled link!

This Will Not Disprove Any Theories . . .

. . . about how the modern newspaper company can't get anything done quickly.

I’ve harped on this before but, forgive me, I still can’t get over it. A mere eight years ago, Tribune was an absolute machine in its sector.

Today, no one wants it.

AOL: New Metaphor Sighted!

Is comparing AOL to network television a smart thing for its new CEO to be saying?

I will grant Falco this: I think this is the first time I've heard the metaphor of AOL-as-network-TV-of-30-years ago.

The metaphor of AOL as cable TV? Heard that. The one of AOL as The Thing That Will Change Everything At Time Warner, Just Wait? Absolutely? And--I am sure--there were others.

But--correct me if I'm wrong--AOL as Network TV? No.

O.J. Simpson, And The Difference Between The Book Biz And The TV Biz

News Corp. made a number of stunning miscalculations in the handling of O.J. Simpson's sort-of-confessional If I Did It, and chief among them is that it forgot the difference between the book business and the TV business.

The book business depends solely on the consumer, and gets goods to them through a network of merchants that, unsurprisingly, have a very strong sense of the First Amendment. A book as nakedly repulsive as O.J.’s could be, say, kept behind the counter and sold only on request. A big chain like Borders could--and did--announce it would sell it, but would donate the proceeds to a non-profit organization for victims of domestic violence.

The network TV business is entirely ad-supported. It's also dependent on local-market station owners subject to local pressures. And the range of programming that can appear on local stations is far more constricted than what books can be sold in the local bookstore.

Fox lost sight of the fact that the O.J. special—excuse me, that would be two O.J. specials, though why they thought anyone would stick around for both is kinda beyond me—is the sort of thing that would send any advertiser sprinting for the exits. (That they did, by the way, is rather astounding.) Even if they’d scored massive ratings they would have taken a hit in advertiser backlash. So the company couldn't make much off the broadcast, even with Super Bowl-sized ratings. And that doesn't even get into the obvious miscalculation that many local Fox affiliates were not going to want to touch this. Art Slusark, the spokesman for Meredith Corp, which owns Fox affiliates, said advertiser reaction was “a thousand to one, with people not wanting to be involved with it.”

(Sudden thought: Who was the one?)

I bet that had Fox dropped the plans for the TV tie-in, the book would have been published through its HarperCollins imprint. Enough booksellers would have weathered the outcry. (And outcry always equals sales.)

All that said, I am surprised that the project was actually called off. And I give it two weeks, max, before another publisher snaps the book up. (UPDATE: Many readers have correctly pointed out that rights issues may preclude a sale elsewhere, and that at least one obvious potential publisher, Michael Viner of Phoenix Books, has said he won't touch it.)

Newspapers And Yahoo, Their Star Reporters, And The Future Thereof

Today in the news we have:

--A very broad hook-up between Yahoo and over 170 newspapers, encompassing help-wanted classifieds and local news and search. These talks had been brewing for several months, as I previously discussed in this column. To an extent they still are, as other newspapers are still discussing this with Yahoo. (Note: That a very big, cross-company consortium of newspaper companies got it together to join forces with a theoretical competitor indicates the absolute terror many newspapers are feeling right now.)

--An actually interesting piece on what might become of newspapers by VHI Programming executive vice-president Michael Hirschorn for the Atlantic Monthly. One of his conclusions, perhaps unsurprisingly, is:

As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists–like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

--Which leads us to today’s news that makes Hirschorn look clairvoyant: two very smart, very big-name, and very seasoned political journalists at the Washington Post—John Harris and Jim VanDehei—are splitting the Post to hook on with “a new political Web site.”

The last bit of behavior, it’s true, surfaced semi-regularly in 1999 and 2000, and almost without exception ended in tears. (I’m still pining for the big food Web play that NYT food writer Molly O’Neill left the paper to run. And who could forget CNN’s Lou Dobbs brief bit as CEO of space.com?)

There is a big difference today, of course. There are actual revenue models to wrap around such ventures.

Oy. Timing.

Two top NBC Universal executives have fled to other companies in the past two days: Randy Falco split to run AOL, and its President of cable and domestic TV David Zaslav just left to run Discovery Networks.

Two, as every good journalist knows, is but one shy of the three necessary for a trend. OK. Fine. Call it a trendlet and let's admit that this doesn't look particularly great for NBC Universal.

Funnily enough, my latest column for BusinessWeek is about NBC Uni and some interesting stuff they're talking to advertisers about. But--timing!--the column went out the door on Tuesday, one day before Falco's flight was announced and two days before Zaslav's was.

Reader's Digest Goes Private, And The Irony Thereof

The private equity-i-zation of media companies is rapidly leaving the realm of the hypothetical, if you go by the $21 billion worth of private equity deals for media companies announced before noon today.

My colleague Tom Lowry and I will be taking a crack at the $18.6 billion Clear Channel deal elsewhere on businessweek.com. (UPDATE: It's here.) But just so Reader’s Digest Association, taken private for $2.4 billion (including debt) by Ripplewood Holdings today, isn’t totally ignored . . .

How the mighty valuations have fallen. Ripplewood gets Reader’s Digest for, essentially, a one-time multiple of its most recent fiscal year's revenues—cheap, historically speaking. In early 1999, Reader’s Digest came thisclose to a major deal with Time Warner unit Time Inc. At the time, its stock price was trading in the mid- to high twenties. Yesterday it closed at $15.40.

Former CEO Tom Ryder, who retired last December 31 (Eric Schrier is now CEO, but Ryder remains Chairman through the end of ’06), strove mightily in the early years of his tenure to get a deal done for the company. A Reader’s Digest deal would have been much less sexier for Time Waner than the AOL deal—but also a hell of a lot less disastrous. Reader’s Digest had ferocious direct-mail bona fides, and a database consisting of tens of millions of names . . . which may have made Time Inc. later attempts to prop up its massive magazines’ enormous circulations much simpler. (On the other hand, it would also compound Time Inc's current troubles of reinventing general-interest, big-circulation titles like Time.)

Reader’s Digest also had talks with Bertelsmann in 2000, in which they brought in management consultant’s McKinsey & Co. to evaluate combining some units joint-venture style. These discussions also proved fruitless. Still, in late 2000, Ryder went as far as to tell me “if something doesn’t happen,” in terms of some kind of deal, by the end of the company’s fiscal 2001, “someone’s sleeping.”

I can’t help but sense serious irony in that a Reader’s Digest deal ended up happening not one year after Ryder’s tenure as CEO ended.

Jon Miller Out At AOL . . .

. . . Randy Falco, President-COO of NBC Uni's TV Group is in. Very quickly, and hopefully coherently:

1. One outside exec's quick take: "Maybe they wanted a content guy to back up their positioning as a content company. That's [been the problem] . . . great sales team, great traffic, [expletive] content."

2. If so, well, Yahoo's current situation may indicate getting the outside content guy is not the best road to go down.

3. Or is the underlying problem not that AOL has spotty content--but that it's a technology company in which the technology has rarely been as good as it should be? (Try watching a video clip in tmz.com versus watching a video clip on youtube.)

I'm throwing up some quick thoughts at the end of a long day.
Do tell me: What are yours?

Just In: 732 New Potential Bidders Surface

Given all the recent developments, I'm starting to wonder who isn't interested in all or part of Tribune.

Scenes From An Actually Interesting Breakfast

That would be a confab this morning sponsored by The Week magazine, at which Sir Harold Evans moderated a panel on the topic of The Digital Media Revolution. (Stop nodding off--this was actually very spirited, and panelists said things other than sales pitches for their respective outfits.)

The Panelists: Yahoo's Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig, MTV Networks President/COO Michael Wolf, WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell, and Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin.

What The Panelists Said:

"If I could get some of that magic dust to sprinkle on my company, I wouldn’t have to wake up at 8 AM to see you.”
--Sorrell, to Evans, regarding Google's valuation versus WPP's.

"The founders didn't want to do it."
--Karmazin, blaming Yahoo founders David Filo and Jerry Yang for why CBS (back when he ran it) didn't end up buying Yahoo back in the day.

"We are being valued at what traditional media companies [are]."
--Rosensweig, outlining Yahoo's current lament.

"You would think they would [have launched] MySpace."
--Karmazin, opining that, given AOL's massive success with AOL Instant Messenger, well, they shoulda thought of MySpace first.

"I don't feel comfortable not putting the lion's share of my [ad] budgets" into traditional media.
--Karmazin, responding to a very smart contradiction pointed out by Sorrell. Which I didn't take perfect notes on, but which is approximately reproduced below:

"Why is it package-goods manufacturers still spend only two or three percent their ad budgets on the Net? Seventy to eighty percent of car-buying decisions are influenced by the Internet, but it's only five to ten percent of car manufacturers' budgets."

And, lastly, the best media/marketing throwdown line of the morning:

"We collect more data in a day than Wal-Mart does in a year."
--Rosensweig; no explanation necessary.

Los Angeles Times, Britney Spears Offer Case Studies In Media Management!

Surely it's entirely coincidental that Britney Spears and the Los Angeles Times (and by extension Tribune Co.) both essentially buried bad news by putting it out there yesterday.

I mean, why else would they do it? It's not like there was an election going on or anything.

[coughing]

[protracted coughing]

[really severe, protracted, rib-dislocating coughing]

In the Times' case, the news about the departure of editor Dean Baquet works on multiple levels. Not only was much of the bandwidth of the national media--which has avidly jumped all over the the 'unrest at the Los Angeles Times' narrative--fully taken up with the election to pay much heed, the same was true for much of its own newsroom.

It's Not Just MySpace. How Soon Before Everyone Is Partnering And Competing With Google?

Judging from the news about Google Print Ads, maybe sooner than we thought.

Here's one thing I am wondering: Is the prospect of Google allowing advertisers to place ads in newspapers (and, later, magazines) bad for media-buying agencies or . . . well, or what?

Let me know what you think.

Time Warner: Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom Today!

Regarding Time Warner's surprisingly decent earnings report of yesterday, and Time Inc.'s what-took-them-so-long push into a more aggressive Web strategy:

Old CW: AOL's walled garden approach allowed competitors to build massive leads in Web advertising; locking up key magazines in long-term arrangements kneecapped Time Inc.'s attempts to establish thriving online businesses.
New CW: There's nothing but upside from here!

(Apologies extended to Mickey Kaus, Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch, and, uh, anyone else I am stealing this idea from.)

Breaking: Upcoming Launch Viv Magazine Actually Tries Something New

The latest take on the digital magazine is here—and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is coming from outside the extant magazine-industrial complex.

Viv is an independently published health-and-wellness play with certain New Age overtones aimed at women 35-plus. It’s set to launch Dec. 1 with a Jan-Feb ’07 issue. You will never see it on a newsstand. Rather it’s solely downloadable from the Web, and viewable through Zinio Systems’ online reader. Zinio has become something of an industry standard for American magazines seeking to translate the magazine experience into something Web-i-fied—it allows editors page layouts like magazines and lets readers flip through pages, but it also allows advertisers more interactive ads. One potential drawback: You need to download Zinio’s reader onto your computer to make the entire endeavor work.

(I should probably disclose two things here: One, I am not the biggest fan of Zinio, and two, BusinessWeek publishes a digital version through Zinio.)

A Cliff’s-notes version of Viv that showcases some of its interactive chops—one can change the model’s yoga pose, or toggle between different makeup combinations--for those who have not yet downloaded the Zinio’s reader can be found at its Web site, vivmag.com.

Viv is backed by David Gilmour (the founder of the company behind Fiji Water, not the guitarist for Pink Floyd). It’s based primarily on the West Coast. Its Editor-in-chief is Anne Russell, who formerly edited American Media’s Shape; its publisher, Barbara Moses, was a former sales-side executive there.

Despite its online-only status Viv will assume the accoutrements of print magazines, like rate bases (the circulation that’s guaranteed to advertisers), audited circulation, subscriptions and a cover price. A year’s subscription—six issues—will run $30, but single copy prices are not yet set, said Russell. The first issue will be free.

Viv’s staff totals around 20, and it’s based in Thousand Oaks, California. Advertisers already on board include Estee Lauder and luxury giant LVMH. Ad rates are somewhat variable, depending on how much storage space the pages bells and whistles take up.

The notion of doing an entirely digital magazine has been frequently discussed among the halls of major magazine publishers, but none have taken a leap like Viv. (Time Inc. did try the Web-only Office Pirates, but it was operated as a straight Web site and in any event died a fairly quick death.) I’d be telling a very big lie if I said Viv's success was guaranteed, or even likely.

But I can’t help but think this: I just returned from the American Magazine Conference, where a bunch of top execs once again made the argument of how magazines are embracing the Internet, oh yes, we truly get it now, whatever “it” is. And yet it takes someone far outside from any big magazine company to try something that smacks of the next-generation magazine.

UPDATE 11/2: As I've been reminded, Viv is not the first magazine to try an all digital approach, nor the first to do so through Zinio. That would be Citizen Culture, which converted to an all-Zinio format in December of last year.

Needless to say, Citizen Culture, too, was launched outside the auspices of any major publiching company.