When Johnathan Rodgers took the job that brought him to Chicago a decade ago, it was under clouds of controversy. The first black general manager at WBBM-Ch. 2, Rodgers got the job when the station was undergoing a Jesse Jackson-led boycott because it had demoted popular black anchor Harry Porterfield.
As he prepares to leave town a decade later, the circumstances are much more pleasant.
True, Rodgers had to give up the job he got after the WBBM one–running CBS’ network-owned group of stations–because Westinghouse bought CBS and wanted its own people in place.
And true, his new bosses, unlike those at CBS, weren’t going to let him continue to live in Chicago, a sweetheart deal that demonstrated both his commitment to the city and CBS’ commitment to him.
But he’s going to a place, a cable operation, that, instead of being a lightning rod for criticism is more likely to be a magnet for praise: When Discovery Networks Inc. gets mentioned in the press, it’s often as an example of one of the things that are right about television.
Rodgers in late March was named president of Discovery Networks, which runs The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel and will launch the new Animal Planet channel (“all animals all the time,” as he says) June 1. A Bulls fan, he said he plans to let movers finally darken his doorstep to get him and his family near the Bethesda, Md., headquarters sometime after Chicago’s playoff run is over.
The transformation of 20-year CBS veteran Rodgers, 50, from network guy to cable guy was well under way when he visited Chicago last week to help present to advertisers the fall lineup of TLC and Discovery.
He was past the four-week, learn-the-ropes grace period he had allowed himself, a period mandated not only by the differences between network and cable culture but also by the fact that–because he was so focused on the network world–until he started interviewing to work there he wasn’t entirely sure what Discovery Networks did.
“I truly thought that Discovery ran natural history documentaries 24 hours a day,” Rodgers said over tea and a muffin at the Hotel Nikko, hours before the presentation Friday. “And that The Learning Channel must be one of these educational things where you can get a college degree. That truly is all I knew about it. I was wed to ‘BBM, ABC, Fox. These were the competitors.
“In my household, my evening’s choices of viewing were, you start at 2, 5, 7 and 32. My daughter would start at 54, which is Nickelodeon. My son would start at 29, which is ESPN. Now I’m supposed to start at the other end of the dial and work down.
“But I really had not paid that much attention to cable because, for one, we, CBS, weren’t in cable. I didn’t regard them as a threat either for viewers or for advertising dollars. So I have had to learn a lot about cable and I’m fascinated by it now.”
Unlike his other promotions, which came by performing well and by networking well within the CBS structure, the Discovery job, he said, was the result of outside interference.
Calling it “one of the great pleasures in life,” he says, “I got discovered by a headhunter.”
He had already made the decision that he was young enough to look around and see what might be available beyond the cushy job he believed CBS would offer. (“I think it could have been almost anything,” he said.) Discovery was looking for someone with deep experience in management and news to lead its efforts, which include not only the new-channel launch but also a stepped-up documentary production schedule and increased competition with cable’s A&E and broadcast’s PBS for the general-interest material that falls under the “quality” rubric.
“They called and I met with them,” Rodgers said. “It was a slow dance for a while. But I really became fascinated by them because I was coming from a world of broadcasting, where we compete for every rating point and demographic we get by whatever means necessary. Here in cable, The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel represent to cable operators quality programming. So to that extent they’re willing to pay us, and then they use the fact that they have us to sell their services to subscribers. So the fact that we get about half our revenue from the cable operators not only allows us to maintain this quality but in fact is a requirement for us to maintain this quality.
“And that was just such a different and foreign view of my business. It was welcome. You can be judged by what you put on the screen as opposed to how many people watch it.”
Another difference, he said, is that network thinking tends to be focused more on “survival” during the next ratings period, rather than on the long-term planning he has already seen more of in the cable world.
A military brat who graduated from high school in downstate Rantoul, Rodgers graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, then was a Sports Illustrated reporter before earning a master’s degree at Stanford University and switching to television in the early 1970s.
After an indifferent on-air stint, he landed his first management job in Chicago, where he was assistant news director at WBBM from 1976 to ’78. He went on to CBS’ Los Angeles affiliate, rising from executive producer to news director to station manager in five years.
Brought to network headquarters in New York, he was in charge of broadcasts including the late-night news “Nightwatch,” the weekend “CBS Evening News” and the morning “CBS Morning News” before being tabbed for the Chicago GM and vice president’s job.
In Chicago, Rodgers weathered the initial unpleasantness and allegations that he was brought in because of his race. (What helped him decide to take the job, he has said, is that he knew he deserved it and that it had been offered to a white man first.) The boycott faded, and what survived was Rodgers’ ability to make his station turn a profit.
Rodgers also had success running the CBS stations, a job he took in 1990. But one of his first moves from that post proved to be controversial, at least in Chicago. He named Bill Applegate to succeed him as WBBM general manager, and Applegate promptly gave the WBBM newscasts a sensationalistic tone that drew heavy criticism.
Rodgers says Applegate was pursuing a sound strategy to lift the station out of third place but just didn’t have the time to complete it.
“One of the reasons I brought Applegate in was in fact to turn the audience over,” he says. “Sometimes you have to go through a kind of shock treatment to rebuild your audience.
“Bill wasn’t brought in to shock the audience, but what Bill did in fact when he was successful–and if I have any regrets it’s that I moved Bill out of here to Los Angeles before his job was done–Bill had decided to take the Channel 2 audience from a sort of upscale North Shore audience and make it into an audience he thought was not being served, which was a blue-collar, working, south suburbs, South Side audience. And so the one rating period where he tied for first place, he had the lottery, he did that type of news.
“And you know, whether it’s tabloid or it’s populist news, Bill was doing the New York Post, New York Daily News. His observation was the upscale audience we maintained was like 60-plus (years old) and that WMAQ (Ch. 5) had sort of gathered the (younger upscale) audience, both with Ron (Magers) and Carol (Marin), who are real good at what they do, but also with the nature of their primetime programs. And unfortunately your primetime programming helps define who you are.
“Bill’s goal was always to take it to a point, stop, and then build on the operation. I let him talk me into going to L.A., which truly was a dream of his, but I think that change was too abrupt and hurt the station.”
Rodgers’ new WBBM general manager, Bob McGann, wanted “to be more upscale” again, Rodgers said, and the changes he implemented have left viewers still more disoriented at a time when a weak CBS primetime schedule has given the station little chance to effectively promote its latest incarnation.
“The fact is, I slept real easy with Applegate here because he picked the numbers up higher than they had been in like five years. But that was the goal, to get the higher numbers,” Rodgers said. “I sleep as easy now, as long as the programming is of quality, because that’s the goal here.”
