Station-Focused Sessions Return To NATPE

Broadcast TV will have a higher profile at this year’s NATPE conference next month in Miami than it did last year.

And that shouldn’t be too difficult since last year’s NATPE agenda included just one session devoted to broadcasters — a half-hour panel of station group presidents and CEOs titled “Top TV Station Groups: How to Stay Afloat in Turbulent Times.”

Dissatisfaction among top broadcasting execs with last year’s lack of attention paid to their business — which, along with syndication, had long been the traditional constituency for NATPE — has resulted in this new effort for next month’s NATPE, running from Monday, Jan. 16, to Thursday, Jan. 19, at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.

This time around, the agenda for broadcasters has been beefed up with at least six new sessions as part of a new “track” devoted to stations and station groups. In planning the new lineup of sessions — grouped under the title “NATPE Station Group Summit” — NATPE officials took suggestions from an advisory committee made up of major station group programming chiefs led principally by Emerson Coleman, VP of programming for Hearst Television, and Sean Compton, president of strategic programming and acquisitions for Tribune Media.

 “We have a couple of panels and presentations planned, and you have the programmers from each group pretty involved,” Compton told TVNewsCheck. “[The effort] is being taken seriously by all of the viable [station] groups out there.”

The Station Group Summit consists so far of six sessions for which panel members are not yet completely booked. The sessions are all scheduled for Wednesday of NATPE (Jan. 18) starting at 8:30 a.m. with a session titled “The Non-Traditional Launch: Who You’re Talking To and How You’re Getting It Done,” for which a description was not yet available.

That will be followed by a panel session titled “How GMs Lead in a Digital World,” a discussion about the challenges facing station general managers in a multiplatform universe.

At 10:45, the third session in the track is “Booked: Learn from Media Experts How to Get the Best Talent for Your Television Show.” The moderator is George Uribe, president-CEO of Guestbooker.com. The sole panelist booked so far is Todd Polkes, supervising talent producer for The View.

The next and fourth session has the working title of “ComScore Session.” No participants have been named yet, nor is there a description of the session on the NATPE website. But it is expected to be a presentation and discussion of comScore’s local TV audience measurement efforts.

Not to be outdone, there is also a Nielsen-focused session in the NATPE agenda, although the session is not being grouped under the “Station Group Summit” umbrella.

This session, “Nielsen Local 2020: Advancing Local Television Measurement,” is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Wednesday. The panel so far consists of two Nielsen executives — Kelly Abcarian, SVP, Nielsen Product Leadership, and Jeff Wender, managing director, Nielsen Local Media. According to a description on the NATPE site, the two will “showcase how Nielsen is transforming how local TV is measured” and “discuss and explore with industry leaders what it will take to advance local television measurement across this rapidly changing landscape.”

Two more sessions, followed by a networking social hour at 4:30, round out the Station Group Summit sessions on Wednesday. At 2 p.m. (running up against the Nielsen session), is “Stories That Belong on Digital and Stories That Don’t: Different Platforms, Different Content.” The panel so far consists of Arthur Hasson, COO of programming, Sinclair Broadcasting Group; Jonathan Skogmo, founder-CEO, Jukin Media, a company involved in curating user-generated videos and placing them in TV programs; and Phil Alvidrez, executive in charge of production for Right This Minute, a viral video show produced jointly by Cox Media Group, Raycom Media and E.W. Scripps.

The final panel event of the day focuses on syndication. It is titled “Station Group Summit State of the Union – Renewing Shows Vs. Finding New Syndication Models: Which is the Stronger Play?”

Moderated by Paige Albiniak of Broadcasting & Cable, the panelists include Tribune’s Sean Compton; Greg Meidel, president of Twentieth Television; Mort Marcus, co-president of Debmar-Mercury; and Vivi Zigler, president, digital, brand & audience development, Endemol Shine North America.