Abraham J. Simpson

Catching the 4 pm open (hooray for a day off?), and the winter 2023 open includes a Chopper 6 shot.

And there is plenty of coverage of world events from a multitude of sources. Were there to be something truly monumental happen, it might be bare bones initially, but the major national and international news outlets would get the coverage going. There are correspondents out there filing for the web, and it stinks many of them are far from loved ones today. That doesn’t mean every news outfit needs to act like it’s just any old manic Monday. The regulars would be off, for the most part, and you’re not using fill-ins for no meaningful purpose.

Good. For crying out loud, it’s Christmas. Skipping a morning newscast is perfectly fine.

Absolutely they will, in due time. There’s a zero percent chance they will forego having a helicopter as part of their news gathering in the long term. Much as the newscasts must go on even when they have to report on their own sad event, they’ll eventually need to go back to having a helicopter.

The winter openings were also used at 10 am and noon. Don’t know about the morning hours or 4/5 pm. Normally, they don’t roll out the new season openings until after the official arrival time, which would have been the 11 pm today. Absolutely understandable if this was the reason (not that they need a reason), as it was a bit sad to see the prominent shots of the copter in some of the openings used yesterday.

There’s plenty of time for investigating particulars. Perhaps people can hold off on casting aspersions for just a bit.

Horribly tragic. They’ve confirmed both individuals aboard were killed, which seemed inevitable from what little was shown of the crash site.

This is unfortunate https://6abc.com/action-news-helicopter-6abc-chopper-6-crash-new-jersey-philadelphia-crew-wpvi-tv/14205051/

The reality is that to a viewer, it's just TV. And that's the way the business needs to operate. Yes, for the time being, they're feeding out some things in linear fashion, but that is one component of a video business. Consumers braving more choices is a good thing. If enough people want a soap, great, Days can happily do its thing over on Peacock, and if you want to watch it at 1 pm daily, that's a perfectly fine option. Being "free" to do things is always preferable.

I would also say teachers don’t deserve to be begging for, or dipping into their own limited pay for, basic classroom supplies. They also shouldn’t be working in (in far too many cases) unhealthy and outright dangerous conditions. They shouldn’t be held to impossible standards and being told to do more with ever-fewer resources. And yet here we are. The intent isn’t about magnanimity, it’s putting things into the larger societal framework. There are a whole lot of people in a whole lot of jobs who could fairly be called massively underpaid. And these groups will sometimes commiserate with each other, but also turn on each other. Take teachers - when a strike happens, particularly in working-class/blue-collar type areas, communities often split into factions of “they deserve more than they’re getting” and “they’re overpaid; they only work 9 months; they’re grooming kids” and related vitriol. “Let them try to do my job” (whatever that is) “and see how they like it.” It can get really ugly. When newspaper journalists go on strike…wait, do those still exist? Anyway, there’s a lot of the public that respects what they do and understands they get paid crap wages. Lots of us get paid crap wages. But there’s also a huge part of the population that sees it as no loss that there’s less journalists at work. They’re all just liberal mouthpieces or some such thing. They’re hacks. They’re whatever. Empathy and sympathy are in short supply for industry upon industry. It’s sad, but it’s reality. I don’t know that a deeper societal change is possible, but I feel safe in predicting one-off skirmishes are generally not going to move the needle all that much. A little symbolic win here and there, sure. But not without trade-offs, and sometimes losses that counter the gains. I’m old enough to say my generation isn’t going to be around to see a structural shift. I hope the upcoming generations make progress, and find ways to move from less successful battles that pit groups against each other to more productive changes that benefit everyone.

Hiring Oscar-winning writers isn’t going to change the trajectory of soaps. They are a relic of a bygone era with a few left chugging along, closer to the end than the beginning. Throwing money you don’t have at a dying genre isn’t going to change it. So great, squeeze what you can out of it and look toward the future, not the past. Audiences aren’t the same and aren’t going to want the same things. Splitting the soaps down on the broadcast schedule to alternating days is pointless beyond getting a portion of the schedule open for something else. Daytime is a 5x a week pattern for good reason—it’s the most common way we live our lives. Of course there are exceptions to this, but by and large we go to school and work during the same times (primarily daytime) weekdays. A soap twice a week simply makes no business sense; daytime doesn’t follow the prime time approach (although CBS has been turning prime time this fall into a good approximation of daytime with so many Price is Right and Let’s Make a Deal specials ). Viewers aren’t going to burn out if you offer more news because they’re not watching all of it. That just isn’t a thing that people are tuned to one channel from 4 am to midnight, actively engaged and suddenly experiencing news fatigue because the station added a newscast. They watch bits and pieces that fit their schedules. There seems to be a fascination with counting the number of hours in forums like this, but your average viewer is not doing that. (And if people totally burned out on news available much of the day, someone better warn Ted Turner back in the 1980s .) NND fits better in today’s reality than Days. Sorry old-schoolers, it just does. It’s more economical, it connects to the brand and it’s helping some affiliates. And while ABC rides GH into its inevitable sunset, GMA3 is a better fit than if they’d kept another dying soap. Heck, it fits better than the Chew. That was a perfectly fine effort that had a nice solid run. But this is strategically better. CBS is a bit different in that their morning show has never had the success of a Today or GMA. It’s harder to build a base there for an afternoon news hour, though certainly not impossible. Just a heavier lift with results that would need to be viewed in that context IF they ever went that way. Not saying they will. They managed to get new life out of Price is Right, and have a decent enough counterpart in Let’s Make a Deal, so what comes next in a post-soap world will be interesting to see.

It is often popular and easy to blame some general group of people and paint them as some kind of Snidely Whiplash cartoon villain, but sometimes people with a specific skill set who excel in their field make what the market will support. Is it fair someone who can hit a baseball will collect whatever hundreds of millions the most recent contract was for? Makes me roll my eyes, but in reality, if they think that investment will fill the seats and move the merchandise to recoup the cost (and of course, I know it's part of a team, and the team being successful is part of the filling seats/selling merch equation), then whatever. Lots of other people in the organization undoubtedly work hard and do their best, and they aren't making that bank (I'm talking staff here, not players). Strikes are powerful tools, and if someone can organize one and make it successful, more power to them. It's not easy. Hell, it's often very risky to understate it. It's also not always an easy sell to garner public sympathy--sometimes yes, sometimes no. We're in a bit of a time in the nation where more attention is paid to the CEO/average worker gap, and there may be ways to leverage that, or it could end up backfiring, so to speak. I would suggest that the best target is the CEO type position, it's an easier concept to sell. Joe the sales guy who happened to make a nice living because he's darned good at selling doesn't make the same compelling comparison when you're trying to get sympathy on a large scale. Bob Iger? Ok, that's doable. Not going to win over everyone, but there's a difference there. (And not to pick him specifically, he was just the first example that popped to mind.)

Facts aren't blame, really. Some things just are. And there isn't always a unicorn out there, "if only" someone spent more or wrote better or whatever. People were leaving soaps for long time. Then gas tanks almost empty there; throwing more money at a dying genre is pointless. Its not blame to say key audiences in 2023 aren't the same as in 1983. It's also overly broad to just label all news division programming with one brush. It struck me on a recent NY visit to the NBC store the distinct merchandise for the third and fourth hours of Today. There is, of course, the main show umbrella, but the other hours are treated as somewhat unique entities. The content isn't identical, and that is typically true at the local level as well. There's a whole thread here somewhere about how the 10 am hour on WABC is noticeably different from the other newscasts, and even among more traditional newscasts, tonality varies. If there was some magic formula for success and a profitable bottom line, someone would be trying it. Millions upon millions of dollars overall are at stake, people's jobs are at stake. No one is just sitting around ordering up another hour from the news division on a whim or so they can get out the door in time to make it to happy hour. You have a population segment that gravitates toward the likes of Maury and Springer. Some that like the Kelly and Mark or Kelly Clarkson type shows. Some who can't get enough court shows. And then there are a bajillion streaming options, sports galore, cable channels with movies out the wazoo, dramas, sitcoms, etc. That pie has been sliced six ways from Sunday. It's easy to say "do something different." It's much harder to actually find that "something" that delivers the profits it needs to. This is really interesting. Cutting back from 5 days is one thing, but that is a guarantee you're off the broadcast network. You're not getting a three-day a week slot (or whatever) there. But to the point of less characters and sets...from what I saw of those days seeing Y&R, there were very few characters. Generally the same old actors from before and a few seemingly disposable new ones--generally offspring or other relatives--and that's it. Two or three people to a storyline being told that day, and maybe 2 or 3 storylines being covered max. Even then, the characters seemed to them mix and match among scenes, so you really weren't getting more actors, they just shuffled among the sets and fellow castmates in some kind of weird, soapy square dance. Also didn't count many sets. At least a half dozen over that span looked pretty much like they did years ago. I'm assuming they got some fresh paint here and there. The others looked like SNL skit sets--in that they could easily be repurposed with minimal effort to become something else generic for limited use. Of course, casts and crew cost money, so I am not literal when I say this, but I have to wonder where the money is going. It isn't into the product. And I know the soaps were never high production value. They were cheesier than cheesy. Always. But it looks like they're down to fumes, and that makes sense. Tastes change.

Many things in life aren’t excused, they just are. Some careers pay more. Some fields pay more. Sometimes those overlap. Every place I’ve worked, sales got perks beyond what anyone else did. Life isn’t perfectly even.

A commission based team gets rewarded for successful sales. Good, bad, anywhere in between, it’s not any one group of people or one industry where that doesn’t happen. And if you’re not a successful seller, you’re not bringing home that big payday. I could never, ever in a million years be good at a sales role. So I’m never, ever going to be getting commissions commensurate with what I bring in. Oh well, that’s the world.

Not sure it means anything for “credibility.” We all understand people move on, and of course some settle in for long stretches, too. As for the money aspect, for better, worse and everything in between, the bottom line is what it is. You aren’t going to get the same viewership and ad revenue in a world that has splintered into a million different viewing options. The slices of those pies get smaller. It undoubtedly sucks, and like many fields, sucks more as time goes on. But there are far bigger macroeconomic issues at play that aren’t unique to the industry and aren’t going to be solved in one industry alone.

We all know, however, the issue is demographics and the bottom line. You can’t spend on a soap in 2023 like you did in 1983 (adjusting for inflation, of course). The audience isn’t there and the ad revenue isn’t there. There may be “many people,” but that isn’t what it once was and isn’t as profitable as it once was. There are theoretically infinite choices available for people who want “escapism.” Corny soaps may work for some, but there are streaming options and satellite channels out the proverbial wazoo offering other options. How Y&R continues to milk the same stories from the 1980s confounds me. My mom was a Y&R and eventually B&B viewer. As her mental state failed in her final days, I’d put on her recordings of them on occasion, not really expecting it to break through the haze of dementia, but maybe something familiar could be comforting on a subconscious level. Dear lord, it was the same people on the same sets telling the same tired stories as when it was on in the college lounges back in the day. It looks stale and cheap to be blunt. There will always be people who resist losing something, and their complaints tend to be disproportionate to the actual viewership. The audience, of course, is the product. And if you don’t deliver the product the client wants…even this non-business major knows that’s a bad business plan. You don’t need the same raw numbers, you need an audience that clients want to buy and pay decent money to do so, while controlling your expenses.

If something is airing inside a show I’m already watching, that’s about it. Click on gossip? Pass.

It’s so interesting to me. Be they colleagues, friends or family, no matter what they’ve shared with me, or me with them, I will always respect without objection when they want to keep something private. I certainly would not presume that just because someone I watch on TV has talked about “X” that they have ceded any right to maintain privacy over “Y.” The “borders” can be wherever they need to be for each person and are free to move and change at any time. Then again, I also don’t care who you get it on with. If there’s an HR type violation, ok, whatever the consequences are, they are. I’m also not presuming anyone needs to share those details, assuming no criminality and a resulting public record. I might be moderately curious, but no one owes me anything. Life will move on just fine. Maybe I’m just an outlier.

If the anchors of a midday “news” show aren’t medium famous, who is? More obsessive special interest fans aside, it’s not like they’re Hanks, Aniston or Clooney. Said in a bit of jest, of course. Seriously, however, the over focus on people’s love lives is just absurd at times.

I’m not sure I see news as low effort. People do put in work to do their parts and do it well. No one I know in that space dials it in. Are there exceptions? Heck, of course. There’s not an industry where that isn’t true somewhere. But people put in the effort to present content that gets viewers in a world where viewership is ever-more fragmented. But that’s just me.

I never understood the degree of hullabaloo over two consenting adults doing whatever it is they do. The issue with their spouses is among all of them, not anyone else’s business. But whatever, what’s done is done and the world goes on, ideally not hearing one more word about their love lives, wherever they ultimately go.

They’ve had a pretty good group of incoming reporters of late.

I’m more amazed they used their sports account handle with a straight face for the WWE announcement.

Two on that same hard shift can’t be easy, but “having it all” is a mirage, regardless.