Two Tough Jobs For Two Proven Execs

Over the past month, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with two of broadcasting’s newest TV station group CEOs: Valari Staab of NBC Owned Television Stations and Rebecca Campbell of the ABC Owned Television Stations.

The similarities between these two executives are striking.

Both executives have engaging personalities and proven aptitude at running major market TV stations.

Both earned their management stripes under the former ABC group head Walter Liss, whose retirement in May 2009 made way for Campbell. Campbell had been GM of both WPVI Philadelphia and WABC New York. Staab was GM of KGO San Francisco when she was tapped last spring by the new controlling owners of the NBCUniversal.

Both are career broadcasters who managed to make it to the top without a background in sales or even news. Staab started in marketing and creative services; Campbell; in local programming.

Both are facing daunting challenges in their new jobs.

But here the similarities end. The nature of those challenges couldn’t be more different.

At NBC, Staab has before her a full-blown reclamation project. After years of General Electric penny pinching, the NBC stations have fallen into disrepair. When she arrived last spring, nothing much was working on the daytime schedules, and there was nothing much to build upon.

Campbell, on the other hand, is charged with maintaining her group’s reputation as local TV broadcasting’s premier franchise.

For decades, as either Staab or Campbell can tell you, the ABC O&Os have enjoyed a level of sustained excellence unmatched across the entire mediascape. While others struggled with the manifold disruptions of the digital age, the ABC stations hummed along year after year.

Through serendipity or plain smarts, the stations assembled the mother of all broadcast days: GMA to Regis & Kelly to The View to the soaps to Oprah to news to the indestructible Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

It’s hard to say who has the toughest job.

Even with the big Comcast investment, turning around the NBC O&Os will not be easy for Staab. There are a lot of holes in the daytime schedule to fill, and getting people to change their news-viewing habit will require a long and sustained effort.

And Staab can count on little help from the network. The fall primetime schedule, the first under the new Comcast ownership, was a bust. Ratings are actually down from last season. Tonight has yet to recover from last season’s Leno-at-10 debacle and may never.

Even the Today show, which has given the O&Os a wasted head start every morning for years, is watching its lead over second-place GMA shrink. All NBC has going for it is Sunday Night Football and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, hardly enough to build a broadcast day around.

But the new owners have given Staab a big budget — tens of millions of dollars, she says — to add and rehab newscasts, restore creative services departments at each station and move in some new syndicated programming that will create some audience flow. To do it all, she’s adding 130 new employees to the payroll.

This season, progress will be measured by how well the new and improved newscasts, bolstered by the extra promotion, perform. Next season, it will depend on her new syndicated talk shows. She has made two big bets, on NBC Universal’s Steve Harvey and on CBS Television Distributions Jeff Probst. How will they do? Nobody has the foggiest idea.

It will be no easier for Campbell. Roughly coincidental with her ascension in May 2010 has been a series of decisions by the network and syndication stars that threaten to destabilize the group.

First, of course, was Oprah’s decision to end her remarkable 25 years in broadcast syndication last May so she could concentrate on her cable network. Campbell chose to replace Oprah at 4 p.m. with news in five of her eight markets and so far the results are encouraging, but not great. In New York, WABC has slipped to second place behind WCBS with Judge Judy.

Then, another mainstay, Regis Philbin, announced his retirement.

His show likely got a nice bounce this week as producers milked the retirement for all they could — for six straight days. (As I write this, I realize that I just missed his final show.) And it’s going to be fun for the next several months as they try out potential new co-hosts. Even if guest-hosts are duds, it will keep the show in the news and people talking.

But sooner or later, ABC is going to have to select a permanent co-host and there is no guarantee that the show will hold the numbers it has been enjoying.

Meanwhile, the network decided to whack two of its long-running, but tired, soap operas, All My Children and One Life to Live.

To replace them, ABC has come up with two new shows, a cooking show, The Chew, and a Tim Gunn-led lifestyle show, The Revolution. The Chew stepped in for Children in September. The Revolution will take over for One Life in January.

Well, that makes perfect sense, except that the network also decided to give back to its stations the 3 p.m. hour starting next season, presumably to make room for the new Disney-ABC syndicated talker with Katie Couric, but did not cancel General Hospital, which now occupies that hour.

This means, come September 2012, the ABC O&Os and a whole lot of affiliates will have four shows and only three slots. One will have to go. All we know now is that it will not be Katie.

That’s a lot of churn for a station group that hasn’t had to deal with much since the Reagan administration.

But no one is panicking, certainly not Campbell. The group still has The View, the great momentum from having their markets’ No. 1 newscasts and respectable network programming. This season, the network is again running third with about the same audience as last season. ABC World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer is the solid No. 2. And GMA, as noted above, is gaining strength against Today.

So, I put it to you, who’s got the toughest job? 1) the woman who has to build a station group from the ground up and will eventually be called on by the new owners to account for their massive investment or 2) the woman who took over the group at the pinnacle of local TV broadcast and must eventually demonstrate to her bosses that she can keep it there.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be reached at 973-701-1067 or [email protected]. You can read his other columns here.