It is doubtful if anyone ever has seen Steve Friedman in a chastened mood, but as the flamboyant onetime producer of NBC`s ”Today” show prowled the newsroom of his latest endeavor, ”USA Today: The Television Show,” he was at least subdued. He was beginning to feel like the captain of the Titanic.
”The vicious rumors, the scurrilous attacks-it`s all crazy,” he muttered. ”Anything you do that`s new or different has a rocky start. `60 Minutes` took eight years!”
If the nation`s media critics had their way, the video version of USA Today, the newspaper, would have about eight minutes. They treated the show`s Sept. 12 premiere as if it were a personal insult.
It was, after all, as ”different” as Friedman had predicted it would be.
Anchors could be seen strolling about in the background of the set, situated a few floors above the news operation of USA Today, the newspaper, in this Washington suburb. A state-of-the-art graphics department allowed the anchors to ”walk” across a giant front page of the newspaper, while a gaudy weather map served as a ”bumper” between commercials. Images chattered across the screen like frightened magpies, and cotton-candy stories mingled with unconnected factoids that flickered like heat lightning across screens the size of billboards.
It was unheard of, and the critics said so in harsh language. But history already was repeating itself.
When the Gannett Co. unveiled USA Today, a newspaper avowedly aimed at television viewers with attention spans the length of a ”sound bite,” the critics set upon it with equal savagery. ”McPaper,” it was dubbed in contemptuous reference to fast food for the mind.
A few years later, however, many of their own newspapers are copying it. Friedman doesn`t know whether to laugh or cry.
”Let the first person without a color weather map cast the first stone,” he said. ”I noticed there was a Barbara Walters special the other night on ABC, and she was walking all over the set. I notice the `Nightly News` at NBC now has a weather map just before they go into a commercial, and I notice that `Entertainment Tonight` has large report screens, too. We`re making an impact.”
But Friedman had to notice something else, as well. He had $40 million of Gannett`s seed money riding on ”USA Today: The Television Show,” not to mention his own considerable reputation as an innovative producer, and one month out, he was scrambling for damage control.
His show had been sold sight unseen to 156 television stations, strictly on the prestige of GTG Entertainment, a partnership formed between Gannett and former NBC President Grant Tinker. Of the 156 stations, 122 were running it in the key prime-time access hour. The responsibility was awesome. With the air of a man who has just uncovered a conspiracy to descredit the show, Friedman fingered competing syndicators as the true saboteurs.
”You can`t negate the fact that people covet our time periods,” he said. ”That`s where a lot of the hysteria is coming from. I`d be lying to you if I didn`t tell you I think some of them (syndicators and media critics) are working hand in hand.”
He was particularly incensed by a chart run in the Sept. 19 issue of the Wall Street Journal, showing declining ratings in most major markets.
”That chart came from a researcher at somebody`s firm,” Friedman said. ”They picked the worst night we had and showed the percentage drop in audience. This reporter didn`t come up with that on his own.”
But Friedman had been wrong about his format, and he admitted it. He was so eager to make his show unique that it emerged as a frenetic hodgepodge of lighter-than-air stories, attempting to reflect the fast, relentlessly optimistic mini-delivery of the newspaper. Images came and went so fast, viewers had reason to suspect they were being subjected to subliminal messaging.
”We obviously stumbled out of the gate, but we are working on correcting it,” Friedman said. ”I`ve made it a more traditional show. In the beginning, our aim was to comfort the audience, but I think by making it so fast, so quick, so fasten-your-seat-belts-the-rocket-shi p-is-leaving, that we threatened the audience. So I`ve given it a more traditional format.”
He also is bringing in Jim Bellows to help him fix it. Bellows, a veteran print journalist and former managing editor of ”Entertainment Tonight,” was severely mugged by the same critics the day ”E.T.” came out, and the experience left him empathetic.
He said he was so appalled at the unprecedented outpouring of bile over Friedman`s project that he volunteered to help out. After one day on the set, Friedman hired him. Bellows said he thought the show should be
”someplace between Jennings, Brokaw and Rather and `Entertainment Tonight,` ” which he produced from 1981-83, ”but not one or the other.”
”Where it is news, you`ve got to have a special dimension and an edge to it,” he said. But beyond that, Bellows, who will go to work full time next month, would define no blueprint.
”I`m so far away from the forest, I`m not even close to the trees,”
he said. ”I`ll have to be there, on the spot.”
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It was 2 p.m., and the show`s four young ”section” hosts-Bill Macatee, for Sports; Edie Magnus, for USA; Robin Young, for Life; and Kenneth Walker, for Money-were very much on the spot as they raced the clock to tape the day`s show. Magnus was having technical troubles as she struggled to complete a piece on DNA fingerprinting that eventually resulted in a delightful dust-up between a district attorney who was all for it and a defense attorney who considered it a threat to civilization. The piece was measured and well laid out, showing evidence that Friedman indeed was slowing the pace.
DNA was followed, however, by ”the hottest thing going in country music: Randy Travis,” a shallow, whiz-bang mini-profile of a country boy who made good. The show then segued into a solid New York story on the recycling of beer cans and soda bottles as ”a new industry for the homeless.”
The big sports story of the day was Macatee`s piece on ”The Dirtiest Team in the NFL: The Houston Oilers”-a reference to tactics, not personal hygiene. Most of the Oilers interviewed denied the proposition, though most of them seemed to take it as a compliment.
With the day`s show finally in the can as approximately a 50-50 mix of substance and puffery, Friedman gathered his anchors, producers and writers for a conference call with bureaus in New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles to brainstorm the next day`s input. While Friedman and his people volleyed a baseball back and forth like kids on a playground, ideas buzzed like bees.
Young pitched ”a wonderful pigeon story” she`d been working on, and Los Angeles proposed a piece on ”St. Silicon,” an eccentric metaphysicist
”who goes around blessing computers.” Friedman passed on both.
Paloma Picasso? ”Old story,” Friedman said. ”I don`t want to do her.”
Smokeless cigarettes? ”Go,” he said.
”What if we got Nixon and Mondale together to debate the importance of the offices?” a young producer asked.
”Stupid idea,” Friedman said. ”That doesn`t make you a bad person, but it is a stupid idea.”
”Johns Hopkins has come up with an anxiety monitor,” another producer said. ”You wear it 24 hours a day and it lets you know when you`re getting to the breaking point.”
Friedman`s adrenaline-charged staff collapsed in mirth. ”I`ll take a dozen,” someone shouted.
Another cheery issue of what Friedman calls ”the journalism of hope”
was being born.
In Friedman`s defense, few of the critics who bashed him noted that
”USA Today: The Television Show” made its debut against the Olympics, a natural damper. Ratings in the A.C. Nielsen Co.`s 16-market metering area were not spectacular, but by Oct. 11 they weren`t falling either.
The show posted a rating of 3.4 and an audience share of 9 percent with its September debut. By Oct. 11 it was 3.9 and 9. A single rating point in the local market survey equals 3,428 television homes, and a share is the percentage of homes tuned to the program. Friedman wasn`t about to give up.
”This is like a new-born colt,” Friedman said. ”It`s frisky. It stumbles around a bit here and there. It`s got to find its legs, but when it does, it will develop into a champion. The story will be told for us during the November sweeps.”
That`s when the networks throw everything they have at the audience because ratings for the period determine how much affiliates will be able to charge for commercials.
Even if Friedman loses there, however, it may not sink his ship. Gannett Co. took a loss of $233 million before USA Today, the newspaper, broke into the black, five years after its birth. Even in the ephemeral world of television, deep pockets make tough competitors.
