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With ‘Strategic Alliances,’ the Map Gets Messy
by Mike Hoyt
Mike Hoyt (mh151@columbia.edu) is CJR's
senior editor. He left The Home News to seek his fortune in 1977.
Got
a pencil? Time to draw some dotted lines on your ever more convoluted big-media
map. Connect NBC News and The Washington Post and Newsweek, as well as MSNBC
Cable and MSNBC.com, plus washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.com. Reserve solid
lines on your map for ownership ties (such as Microsoft’s stake in MSNBC). Use
dotted lines for "strategic alliances" like this one, an agreement
to share "news material and technological and promotional resources"
that was announced (jointly, of course) in mid-November.
"We are pleased to be teamed with The Washington Post and Newsweek in our effort to deliver news across all available media platforms," Andrew Lack, president of NBC News, said in the press release. "We are positioning our print and Internet properties for the multimedia world of the future," said Alan Spoon, president of The Washington Post Company, which owns both Newsweek and the Post. Well, okay. But what is the driving force here? Increased impact through joint distribution? Cheap content through sharing? Mutual promotion and hype? A way to offer more options to advertisers, across multiple media platforms?
All of the above, surely. We asked Tom Wolzien, an NBC News veteran turned media analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., to rank the reasons for these and other such alliances, but he declined to put them in any particular order. "It’s all a big circle," he says. To compete "in a world of increased [media company] size, you have to have more resources to produce more proprietary reporting. That increases your audience, thereby allowing you to increase your advertising. Which, in turn, allows you to do more [journalistic] stuff." How do you get those additional resources to produce more reporting? "I can either spend more money," he explains, "or I can add more through alliances."
In a Time Warner, Disney/ABC, Viacom/CBS, News Corp. kind of world, Wolzien contends, such alliances are necessary. "Everybody has come to the conclusion that nobody is big enough to do it alone." Still, I have a word-association problem here: when I hear the word "alliances" I think "entangling."
The deepest hunger for content, of course, is in the bellies of twenty-four-hour cable and the Web. And within days of the announcement of the Post/Newsweek/NBC alliance, these parts of the two companies were feasting. "Our daily news meetings now are just fascinating — having all this stuff to choose from, which is all world class," says Merrill Brown, editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com. "We are seeing daily Washington Post budgets, the first time they’ve been distributed outside the building. And it’s thrilling. The choice between the White House reporting of NBC News and the White House reporting of The Washington Post is an editor’s dream." Meanwhile: "Washington Post and Newsweek people are appearing extensively on both cable networks in this family [MSNBC and CNBC]; MSNBC clips are appearing on washingtonpost.com. Most of these things began happening within forty-eight hours" of the agreement. Brian Williams, on his MSNBC news show, has stopped turning to New York Times reporters, as he had under a previous and more limited alliance, and has started gathering wisdom from Post people.
There’s more. Washington post.com (which will keep its own address and identity) "gets video content from around the world from NBC News," Brown says. "Can’t beat it. MSNBC Cable gets access to both the people and stories of The Washington Post and Newsweek in advance of everyone else, which helps them in terms of both depth of content and breaking news." And in the old media arena: "NBC News gets access to Newsweek ahead of everybody else in the world." And as for the Post, "We think exposure of its articles to a much larger audience is great for both the journalism and the business of The Washington Post — and for whoever gets the story."
Some time in the year 2000 MSNBC.com will merge with Newsweek.com and become Newsweek.MSNBC.com, sucking up content from all over the alliance. That Web address will fly under the Newsweek banner on the cover of the print magazine, "which we think is pretty cool," Brown says.
Pretty cool, I guess. It would be cooler if these media companies spent money for more content instead of merely sharing — funding additional reporting, increasing the net knowledge and the variety of voices. (And will some partners in the alliance eventually decide they no longer need to duplicate each other in certain areas, and thus reduce reporting?) Still, if these individual entities get richer in terms of content, it’s hard to complain too loudly.
But hold the champagne for a question or two. First, about the "promotional resources" part of the deal. To what extent will joint promotion affect editorial judgment? (The word Tailwind comes to mind here, a case of two newsroom cultures adding up to less than the sum of their parts.) Or, more subtly, how will we know for sure whether the mention of a Washington Post story on NBC News, or a Newsweek story on Today, or a CNBC story on MSNBC, came about because of an editorial decision or a business decision, a boost for a partner?
These are all honorable journalistic institutions run by honorable people. But people move on. Institutions evolve. Things happen. Eric Effron, in a fine column in the January Brill’s Content, points to the Today show’s coverage of a recent deal between NBC itself and Lou Dobbs, the financial journalist who bolted from CNN not long ago. In the deal, Dobbs agreed to host a syndicated radio show and publish a newsletter. An NBC corporate press release casually explained that, "As part of the ongoing publicity and promotion for the newsletter and radio show, it is expected that Mr. Dobbs will be interviewed as an occasional guest on NBC News programs and on programs of other media outlets . . . ." Say what? That same day, Effron notes, NBC’s Today show gave Dobbs a puffball interview in its seven o’clock hour, more a piece of "promotion and publicity" than of news.
Then, of course, there are new opportunities for conflicts of interest among all these strategic partners — in coverage not only of the bigfoot owners involved, GE and Microsoft, but in coverage of each other. People who scoff at fears of big corporate media sometimes argue that, if Big Media Company A commits a journalistic crime to boost one of its octopi-like interests, that crime will be eagerly reported by Big Media Companies B and C. But what happens when they are all festooned with the dotted lines of strategic alliances? This deal and others like it (The New York Times is talking to ABC, for example) bear watching.
Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Post, says that his newspaper, for one, will continue to cover NBC, GE, and Microsoft in the same way as always, and I believe him. "This will not change or color our coverage. I know it will be more difficult for readers to see it that way because we have a relationship with them." He said this via his media reporter, Howard Kurtz, now of The Washington Post/Newsweek/NBC News/MSNBC Cable/CNBC/MSNBC.com.
