VIACOM'S BUY OF CBS PUTS MORE PRESSURE ON PAPERS TO GROW

Web will force publishers to gain access to video content – soon

Television and newspapers go together like fall and pumpkin pie.

The big media news last week was that Viacom, owner of Paramount and MTV, and CBS Corp., which operates the venerable television network, would merge to become the country's second-largest media company. The synergy, the pundits said, was that Paramount would now have a ready market for its television creations and CBS would have a supplier of TV content. More deals were to come, they warned.

The media landscape is changing once again, and it's becoming difficult to tell the players without a scorecard. Even with a card, the question has to be asked: Where do newspapers fit?

Well, it's clear that in one area, they don't fit anywhere. That's the arena of cross-ownership, where a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same market are owned by the same company.

When the Federal Communications Commission came down with its ruling earlier this summer on what is now called duopoly – the ability for a broadcaster to own and operate more than one TV station in a market served by more than eight stations – it put newspaper companies that own TV stations in a difficult position. (Count among them Belo, Gannett, Lee, New York Times, Scripps, Tribune, Washington Post and, as detailed by Senior Editor Pete Wetmore inside, Media General.)

While broadcasters who didn't own a newspaper in the market could own more than one TV station, the newspaper-broadcaster could not. Further, the cross-ownership rules kept many broadcasting companies out of certain markets – because they owned a local newspaper.

The inequity of the situation was clear to the Newspaper Association of America – it filed a protest with the FCC (again, see a Wetmore story inside). Shortly after the NAA's protest, I chatted with a former FCC lawyer for a few minutes. "It's clear," he said, "that the commission will have an opportunity to rectify this situation by granting a waiver."

The idea, the lawyer said, would be that a newspaper-broadcasting company would prepare a deal to buy a TV station in a market where it already had a paper and then submit a petition to the FCC for a waiver. Because of the duopoly ruling, the lawyer said, the FCC would be almost obliged to grant the waiver.

It appears, then, that all it will take to end the cross-ownership rule will be for someone to step up to the plate. But whether cross-ownership rules are completely abolished or just nibbled to death, there is a clear need for papers to ally with TV to survive in the future.

Right now, such alliances are pretty much window-dressing (I can't help but think of the rumpled newspaper reporter who is plopped in front of a camera to give commentary on a news story), but within years – perhaps months – cooperation between TV and newspapers will become mandatory.

As high-bandwidth Internet access begins to arrive in the home (either from cable TV, telephone companies or satellite service), newspaper web sites will be left in the dust if they do not have motion video. And while some newspapers are beginning to equip their staffs to understand the issues of TV (the Digital Photography conference held a couple of weeks ago at Florida's Poynter Institute had a videography sequence), the real deal will be access to the video shot by professional videographers. That material is the province of TV stations.

A newspaper that does not have access to video – both current and from the library – will be killed in the new media arena. And, as New(s) Media Columnist Steve Brier said to me the other day, "These TV guys do pretty good web sites."

There is a tremendous synergy between newspapers and TV stations and to be properly prepared for the 21st century, every newspaper publisher needs to have an alliance with a broadcaster. If that alliance were one of common corporate ownership, so much the better.

As Viacom-CBS shows, the stakes just keep getting higher.

– David M. Cole

Inside ...

• As FCC relaxes TV rules, Tampa, Fla., shows inequity of cross-media ban
• Television producers get first crack at paper's ideas
• More color capacity opens doors to giving advertisers choices
• New York Times' 15-cent jump not likely to set an industry trend
• Three morning dailies to go head-to-head-to-head in Iowa City
• If you print it, they will want it on your site
• Persons

From NEWSINC., Sept. 13, 1999, Copyright © 1999, The Cole Group. All Rights Reserved.