How does NBC head honcho Jeff Zucker keep his job and keep getting promoted? Maureen Dowd very publicly raised those questions in her New York Times column, on Wednesday. The headline on the column was “The Biggest Loser.” Many of us who have worked in television, especially those with NBC experience, have been asking the same questions for years.
An inescapable part of Zucker’s legacy will be the failed experiment of moving Jay Leno to prime time. Now, just four months later, NBC is going to move Leno back to the traditional Tonight Show time slot following the late local news.
Perhaps less obvious to those outside the business has been the erosion of NBC’s local news operations. Once thriving stations owned by NBC now struggle in their markets. Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Diego, no longer enjoy the news ratings success they did ten years ago. For years, TV stations have been doing more with less, then even more with even less; in the process many truly lost their way. This shrinking budget syndrome, followed by falling ratings, is not exclusively the problem of NBC; others, too, have had similar losses. What is distinctive about NBC is that very little has been done to replace popular shows or improve the stations. The once proud peacock now shines mostly on big events like the Olympics and Superbowl. “Must see TV” has become mundane.
During my time as an NBC news director in San Diego I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff Zucker when he was executive producer of the Today Show. I found him to be friendly, thoughtful, and extremely creative. His later success did not surprise me. Like much of the industry in the last decade NBC had to adjust to changing technology and demographics. But rather than concentrate on building for the future NBC cut whenever it could and reacted only when it had to. The mantra that owning a TV station was a license to print money became drowned out by the ever-louder litany of doing more with less. Eventually people noticed and stopped watching. And when younger “customers” started to trade in their TV remote controls for laptops and text enabled smart phones nobody seemed very concerned.
For NBC and its TV stations to make a comeback will require renewed focus on building something of value and a clear understanding that cutting costs alone will not improve the assets. The media ecology is changing rapidly and only the nimble will survive. Playing it safe, doing things the way they have been done before, only more cheaply, has been a prescription for failure. Most important, commitments to presenting stories that matter about a station’s community must again become central to the way stations operate.
Jeff Zucker has a lot of company when it comes to leaders of failed or struggling media enterprises. Once mighty newspapers have folded and upstart hyper-local websites are trying to fill the gaps. Local television should have an important place in the new ecology. But leaders who only think about cutting the fat sometimes get so carried away they eventually destroy vital organs. Zucker’s desire to save a few bucks by replacing expensive dramas with the less costly Leno show at ten should serve as an object lesson for anybody who believes the key to success is doing more with less.
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