Sam Lawson, KPTM and KXVO Director of Promotions, will certainly discuss the two stations’ performance in the February Nielsen Market Research ratings. But in between, he can’t stop talking about what lies ahead in May for the Omaha Fox and WB affiliates.
“We’re going to have the season finale of “American Idol,” the finale of “24,” the finale of “Bones” – a show that is really catching on,” he said. “All of those shows are going right into the nine o’clock hour. So we’re really going to hunker down and continue to do what we do well.”
KPTM (Cox Channel 10) produces a 9 p.m. newscast that has to square off against prime-time programming from “The Big 3” networks. KXVO (Cox Channel 11) airs a 10 p.m. newscast that competes against more established and better-staffed news products from “The Big 3” network-affiliated competitors.
Toss in the fact that the Winter Olympics were going on for three of the four weeks of the February ratings period and it would be easy to hoist a white flag up the pole.
Instead, Lawson refers to the two stations’ uphill battles as “challenges.”
“We have challenges and we have issues,” he said. “Some of them are programming. We’re working on that. And we’re constantly working on the (KPTM) newscast. The improvements for people who have been watching that newscast for some time are pretty striking.”
Key to maximizing Fox’s potentially strong lead-ins is good promotion – something Lawson cut his teeth on at a Fox O&O in Cleveland, a UPN start-up in St. Louis and as the Affiliate Promotion Manager for Fox Broadcasting in Los Angeles. He is coming up on his one-year anniversary of being in Omaha.
“I appreciate our marketing guys,” he said. “During this next book, we’ll get a 30-second promo and be able to run a 20-second topical between 7 and 9 o’clock every night. That’s a couple thousand bucks worth of time they could be selling.”
Lawson said he would like to improve on the five household rating that KPTM garnered in November.
“I’d like to see us get another point,” he said.
For KXVO, which registered a single household point in the first week of the February book, but none after the Winter Olympics began, Lawson would like to see at least a demographic point across the board. The February ratings period was KXVO’s first book since launching a newscast specifically targeted to 18-to-34-year-old adults.
“We’re constantly making changes and people are beginning to respond,” Lawson said, referring to both stations. “I have high expectations for May.”
3 comments:
KXVO needs to make up their mind about their logo. Is it the WB 15 old logo or the kxvo15 new logo that looks like it was painted by a child?
Talk about spins... that was the MOTHER OF ALL! Come on, Sean, stop softballing and start asking the tough questions, like: “SHOW ME THE NUMBERS”. Wasn’t this supposed to be a rating’s breakdown? Instead, the only thing “broken down” is the management at that terrible Poop-ass calamity that should be shut down by the FCC. Word has it that the ratings expert at one Omaha station had to reconfigure their presentation tables to accommodate the ridiculously LOW rating that the KXVO newscast (heretofore to be known as the TRAIN WRECK AT TEN) racked up during its first ratings book. Ratings numbers and how they are presented have changed over the years, but apparently the Train wreck’s numbers were so incredibly tiny in February their “viewers” could probably fit in a phone booth. In the old days their so-called “ratings” would qualify as nothing more than hash marks.
What’s more amazing than Poop-ass’ insistence that its product is “improving” is the fact that they haven’t been abandoned by everyone of the remaining viewers they claim to to be serving. A company (and its lazy newsroom employees) that merely settles for warmed over slop to fill the black spaces between commercials is a mediocre “news” operation at best. When you realize that Poop-ass management obsesses more about the goofs and gaffs that happen during the production of its “news” broadcasts than it does about the actual content and what issues will actually impact its “viewers” lives—Then what they claim to be a “news” product is nothing more than a cynical charade. We have figured out what KPTM stands for: Keep Producing Televised Mediocrity
Calling an understaffed newsroom lazy is a bit harsh. Unless things have changed since I left the big O, many at that shop worked hard in spite of what they have to work with (I know my old shop sure hired a bunch of them). I'm sure they have a long way to go, but a couple of these posts sound more like criticism from folks with an axe to grind (maybe one of those "experienced" people mentioned or someone a little too close to them-if so, use your time to find a new job at a better shop instead of whining). Usually it's the people making the most money who complain about the one's making the least instead of being problem solvers themselves.
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