2011 Big Deals: Oprah, Couric, Social Media

The 2010-11 TV season marked the seventh consecutive one in which Fox emerged as the top-rated broadcast network in the coveted 18-49 demographic, while CBS was the most-watched network for the eighth time in nine years.

For the 2011-12 season, the networks announced 39 new shows (12 from NBC, which had to restock its 10 p.m. slot after the Jay Leno disaster; 13 from ABC; five from CBS; five from Fox; and three from the CW). It was unusual in that of those shows, 22 starred female characters or were centered on women. The lineups also contained a number of comedies, driven by the critical and ratings darling of the season before, ABC’s Modern Family.

For a year that began with Two and a Half Men co-star Charlie Sheen publicly battling with CBS and show producer Chuck Lorre, 2011 is ending on a fairly quiet note.

Ashton Kutcher has done well replacing Sheen on the top-rated sitcom. Ratings surged early on and have been holding up. Moreover, CBS played it safe with its fall lineup by sticking with Monday sitcoms, including the new 2 Broke Girls, and dramas like the new Unforgettable. That strategy is paying off. As of Dec. 8, CBS ranks No. 2 in the adults 18-49 demographic with a 3.3 rating — flat to this time in 2010, according to Nielsen.

Fox made a big splash in the fall by debuting The X Factor, the new singing competition with former American Idol judges Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul. But that splash has quieted down. The show is generating about half of American Idol’s audience. However, it’s doing well enough in the fourth quarter, when Fox is traditionally weak, to boost the network’s 18-49 rating by 13% from last year. As of Dec. 8, it ranks No. 1 for the season with a 3.4 rating, although it will likely fall behind CBS by the end of December. The X Factor finishes its season on Dec. 22.

ABC is down slightly from last year; it’s in third place with a 2.7 rating. ABC’s highest-rated show among 18-49s is Twentieth Television’s Modern Family, which is tied with Two and a Half Men as the No. 1 comedy in the 18-49 demo.

“The sitcom was never dead,” says media consultant Shari Anne Brill. “But Modern Family represents the revival of the sitcom on ABC. CBS didn’t go dark — they’ve always had very successful sitcoms on Monday night.”

NBC rounds out the major networks with a 2.5 rating, down from a 2.8 this time last year. The network, which Comcast acquired in 2011, flopped with its shows, including its nod to AMC’s Mad Men, the canceled The Playboy Club.

Meantime, in daytime, ABC has made the biggest news. ABC canceled the daytime soap opera All My Children and replaced it with the talk show, The Chew.

Next month, ABC is replacing the soap One Life to Live with another talk show, The Revolution. And, perhaps most significant, the network returned its 3 p.m. time slot to its stations so they can air the upcoming Disney-ABC syndicated talk show, Katie with Katie Couric.

Syndication

In 2011, the biggest story in broadcast syndication wasn’t that Oprah Winfrey left her No. 1 daytime talk show after 25 years for cable’s little watched OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. And it wasn’t that Warner Bros.’ The Big Bang Theory debuted as the No. 2 off-network sitcom, trailing only Warner Bros.’ long-running Two and a Half Men.

No, the big story was the resurgence of syndication in the wake of Oprah’s departure. Notably, a slew of big-name talk shows hit the marketplace — four out of five of these were ultimately picked up by big launch groups for fall 2012.

The first out of the gate was Disney-ABC’s Katie. The ABC O&Os, which had been vital to Oprah’s success, became its launch group. ABC will air the show on eight of its 10 stations, including WABC New York and KABC Los Angeles.

NBC Owned Television Stations found homes for two shows: NBCUniversal’s Steve Harvey and CBS Television Distribution’s Jeff Probst with the Survivor host.

As it turned out, Fox TV Stations and Tribune Broadcasting picked up Ricki with Ricki Lake in major markets. Lake’s chances in the syndication market may have been helped by her strong performance ABC’s Dancing with the Stars.

Odd woman out was a Warner Bros. show featuring former Real Housewives of New York City star Bethenny Frankel.

Sony Pictures Television confirmed in December what many readers of the Nielsens had been assuming: Nate Berkus would not return for a third season, even though Sony had a three-year deal with the NBC stations.

Other talk shows won renewals, including Debmar-Mercury’s Wendy Williams and Jeremy Kyle. Warner Bros. renewed Anderson with Anderson Cooper, despite modest ratings.

Looking forward to 2012, syndicators will be pitching stations on a pack of off-network sitcoms, like Sony’s Community and Warner Bros.’ The Middle, which hope to join Twentieth Television’s Modern Family in off-net in fall 2013.

Also, for fall 2013, Sony is out with a new talk show from Queen Latifah.

In November, Regis Philbin left Disney-ABC’s Live! with Regis and Kelly after 28 years. Kelly Ripa snagged a five-year contract extension to continue hosting the show. Since Philbin’s departure, producers have been running through guests hosts. A decision on a permanent replacement is expected next spring.

National Journalism

The year ended as it began, with NBC the leader in the network news ratings. The Brian Williams broadcast was No. 1, followed by ABC and CBS. And all three newscasts posted viewer increases in the 2010-11 season: NBC Nightly News  was up 2.7%; ABC World News with Diane Sawyer was up 3.3%; and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley was up 2.7%.

And much like their evening news counterparts, America’s morning shows are on the rise as well. In the second quarter, NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS’s The Early Show added a combined 1.2 million viewers compared to the same period last year.

But while the overall news rankings may not have changed, much at the broadcasts did.

Rumors began in the early part of the year that CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric would leave the network when her contract expired at the end of the season. She was offered a spot on 60 Minutes, but in the end chose to leave and pursue a syndicated talk show for fall 2012.

The worst-kept secret in the TV business finally came at the end of April with the official announcement that she was leaving CBS. The announcement that she was going to ABC in a talk show deal and would also appear on some network news broadcasts came a few weeks later.

Couric was succeeded at CBS by veteran CBS journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

Also leaving CBS News during the year was its senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield.

CBS wasn’t the only network to suffer defections from the news department. Shortly after the Couric announcement came word that Meredith Vieira, Couric’s successor at Today, was leaving her co-hosting duties. She was replaced in June by Today’s news reader, Ann Curry.

In May it was announced that Jim Lehrer, the long-time anchor of PBS Newshour would no longer be part of the regular daily anchor rotation team, but would still appear on many Friday evenings.

There were also changes at the management levels. In February, Sean McManus stepped down as president of CBS’s news division to become chairman of CBS Sports. He was replaced by Jeff Fager, as chairman, and David Rhodes, as president.

In November, former Univision news exec Alina Falcon was picked by Telemundo to head its news and alternative programming at both the Spanish-language network and its O&Os.

New projects abounded in 2011.

In May, NBC announced it was developing a weekly newsmagazine to be hosted by Nightly News anchor Brian Williams that would have a place on its fall primetime lineup. Indeed, the network gave the new show a three-year commitment. In the weeks and months that followed, journalists were added to what was named Rock Center with Brian Williams. They included Rome Hartman as executive producer, CBS’s Harry Smith, former ABC Nightline anchor Ted Koppel, Meredith Viera, Tom Bettag and Natalie Morales.

Over at CBS, after Scott Pelley settled in at the Evening News, the network turned its attention to fixing its anemic morning news broadcast, the Early Show. It called on Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Erica Hill to head the renamed CBS This Morning when it debuts on Jan. 9, 2012.

CBS also took a couple pages from its past, announcing the revival of its long-running “On the Road” segment made famous by the late Charles Kuralt for Pelley’s broadcast, with Steve Hartman doing the reporting this time. And just last week the network announced that Charlie Rose and Lara Logan will host Person to Person, an interview program modeled after the groundbreaking Edward R. Murrow series of the same name.

ABC was busy in December, moving to replace Christiane Amanpour as host of ABC’s political talk show This Week with George Stephanopolous beginning Jan. 8. And just days later, it debuted a new political news website, OTUS (Of the United States), featuring political reporting and analysis from ABC News journalists, as well as a “Political Stock Market” ticker that tracks the current “value” of each 2012 presidential contender.

Also on the political reporting front, CBS News and the National Journal formed a team to follow presidential candidates throughout the 2012 election season, reporting for CBS News, cbsnews.com, and nationaljournal.com with online dispatches, video and social media updates. Reports will appear on both organizations’ websites.

There were some trying times for foreign correspondents. CBS’s Lara Logan was covering the aftermath of after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in Cairo when, separated from her crew in the crush of the mob, she suffered what CBS called “a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating.”

Just two days later, Miguel Marquez, an ABC News correspondent, was set upon and beaten while covering protests in Bahrain. He was not seriously injured.

Local Journalism

Finally starting to recover from cutbacks, local news in 2011 made plays to secure its future by improving the quality of content, adding more newscasts and proving its worth in situations like natural disasters.

NBC Owned Television Stations adopted a particularly aggressive strategy. The group’s owner, Comcast, pumped millions into expanding news, which included hiring 130 new employees, doing more enterprise reporting and adding 10 newscasts in eight markets.

Meantime, stations belonging to ABC, Cox, Belo and Gannett launched 4 p.m. newscasts in the lucrative timeslot long occupied by Oprah, which ended its 25-year broadcast run in May.

More local TV was being aired in 2011 that ever before. The RTDNA/Hofstra University annual survey found the average station aired five hours and 18 minutes of news a day; network affiliates aired even more: five hours and 36 minutes.

Nothing this year tested local TV news more than Mother Nature.

The most compelling weather-related story of the year by far was the horrific tornado that hit Joplin, Mo., in May, killed 159 people and displaced thousands, including local TV reporters who provided wall-to-wall coverage between catnaps on company couches.

In August, there was the Virginia earthquake and Hurricane Irene.

Some stations tried to innovate. In April KAUT, Local TV’s station in Oklahoma City, created a niche-oriented news to lure the market’s military viewers. In March, Tribune’s KIAH in Houston launched its long awaited anchorless news.

In September, KOMU in Columbia, Mo., launched U_News@4. The social media format makes viewers integral parts of newscasts thanks to technology like video chats and Tweets.

New Media

Broadcasters began the year fighting a threat from some websites that distributed TV stations’ signals over the Internet without the stations’ consent. FilmOn and ivi were blocked by a district court judge, and a bipartisan trio of senators introduced a bill that would make such action a felony. Another service, Bamboon, proposes to serve subscribers and circumvent copyright laws by assigning each sub his or her own antenna and space in the Bamboom cloud.

On a more positive note, stations were busy throughout 2011 beefing up their online and cross-media activities. CBS CEO Leslie Moonves introduced an initiative to create online hubs in markets using the combined resources of its local TV and radio stations to compete more effectively against local newspaper sites and Yellow Page directories.

And cross-platform activity was crucial for stations across the South during the spring’s deadly tornados. Many used a combination of broadcast, website and social media to reach viewers on the Internet and on portable, battery-powered smartphones. And the stations also used those same tools to gather news and to direct coverage.

More and more stations TV stations rolled out apps for smart phones and tablets with the support of technology and software vendors, hoping that the apps will eventually provide a substantial, new source of advertising revenue. One such venture was the Mardi Gras Parade-Trcker app from WWL New Orleans.

The other hot trend was the integration of social media into TV stations, as well as networks and advertising. Half of the advertisers in the Super Bowl developed social media campaigns to capitalize on the buzz generated by their game spots. And many stations turned to Facebook to get vital information to people during extreme weather events such as floods, tornados and blistering summer heat in the Southwest.

NBC Owned Stations rolled out “The 20,” an initiative that taps the top Twitter influencers in each market to help curate local news and issues. WESH Orlando, Fla., even launched a 99-cent iPhone app to stay up to date with the Casey Anthony trial.

There was another side to this social media craze: a Frank N. Magid study showed that Facebook is becoming more of a mass medium with more people using it during workday hours — 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — than watch TV.

Social media also found its way into syndication when social TV companion app Umami made a deal with Entertainment Tonight and The Insider. Umami will sync companion content on iPads for the syndicated shows as well as additional video clips that might otherwise have gone unused.

Online streaming continued to flourish in 2011 as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon made a series of content deals. Satellite provider Dish Network owner Charlie Ergen was weighing a move to offer live cable channels via the Web, likely under his Blockbuster brand name.

This nontraditional TV viewing was growing, with a Horowitz Associates study showing that 31% of city consumers watch TV content on computer/laptops, mobile devices or tablets, or streamed from the Internet to the TV through so-called “over the top” devices, such as Apple TV, Xbox or blu-ray DVD players.

And the latest RTDNA/Hofstra University Survey showed that 70% of TV stations say they have a “three-screen” approach to news. In addition, more than three-quarters (78.4%) of stations provide local news content to one or more other media — beyond their own station or website. 

All this station Web activity has boosted bottom lines. CBS was offering twice as many ads per show on its website as it did in 2010. The CW network shows four times as many. Dozens of shows from major cable networks now carry as many ads online as they do on TV.

The Belo stations expanded their ad reach with a deal with Yahoo that included the broadcaster’s stations in Dallas-Fort Worth; Seattle-Tacoma, Wash.; Portland, Ore.; New Orleans; Spokane, Wash.; and Boise, Idaho.

With all this increase in ad activity, Nielsen announced that its new Online Campaign Ratings service — which looks to bring TV-style measurement to online advertising, including video — had received a stamp of approval from the Media Ratings Council.

To read Part I, which covered the year’s developments in business, retrans, management, multicasting as well as regulatory and legal developments in Washington and elsewhere, click here.