|
‘Early Show’ makes big investment to solidify Charleston market
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
CBS’s “The Early Show” on-location broadcast from Charleston’s historic battery this morning wasn’t just intended to solidify the show’s ratings in the market, it’s also intended to be a hallmark of the program’s integration with 21st-century technology, said the network’s vice president for morning broadcasts at CBS News.
“This is retail television, certainly, but it’s also only a beginning of the coverage Charleston will receive as a result of our broadcast here Friday morning,” said Steve Friedman, who joined CBS after serving as executive producer for both the “The Today Show” and the “Nightly News at NBC.”
“Not only will people get an incredible sense of Charleston this week, the city will also be an integral part of our Web site, where people will be able to access the archival footage we post time and again,” he said.
But beyond exposure—exposure Friedman said was entirely unrelated to the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate to be broadcast by CNN on Monday—the city also received a decided, more immediate, economic bump from the broadcast as well.
More than 100 “Early Show” staffers were put up at local hotels for four days before this morning’s broadcast, and considerable logistical work and filming was done in the city for months beforehand, said Batt Humphreys, the former CBS newsman who is now communications director for Crew Carolina, which manages the Boathouse Restaurants, Carolina’s Carolina Catering and Simply Southern Products.
Friedman himself put the total cost of broadcasting from Charleston for one day at $240,000. Crew Carolina made all the local arrangements and has catered two meals a day for the crew since it arrived.
While on-location shoots such as the one that transpired this morning are nothing new in the television business, Friedman said they had gone out of style by the late 1980s, mainly because the concept had gotten stale and the cost of such endeavors was frowned upon by the corporate owners of the networks.
‘In television, imitation is the greatest form of thievery,” he said. “At NBC we took ‘The Today Show’ to Rome, to China ... and other people quickly followed suit.
“Later, shows such as the ‘People’s Court’ started doing on location shoots, which meant a handful of people showed up in a city, and they put an official-looking seal that said, ‘People’s Court, San Diego’ or something like that. I knew we had to do something different to keep the concept fresh, something bigger, but different can also translate into meaning costly, and the late 1980s and 1990s weren’t the time to do that.”
The jolt that gave the concept a shot in the arm at CBS and laid the groundwork for “The Early Show” coming to Charleston this week, was actually the network’s broadcast of the Super Bowl earlier this year.
During Super Bowl week “The Early Show” broadcast from Miami and it went so well that approval was given to the “Summer in the City” tour that is now under way.
“One thing I think people don’t understand about broadcasting is that you’re actually fighting a war on two fronts,” Friedman said. “You’re fighting your competitors, obviously, but you’re also fighting for resources and attention from your corporate bosses.”
CBS’s intentions in coming to Charleston were simple, Friedman said.
“What you’re doing when you’re practicing retail television is you’re coming into a market where maybe some people don’t know us, and more or less personally inviting them to give you a try,” he explained. “Your immediate goal, from the perspective of the broadcast, is to do substantially better in the market the day of your broadcast than you did exactly a week earlier.
“In Raleigh, for instance, our ratings went up 240 percent the day we broadcast there compared to a week earlier, and while you know those numbers won’t be sustained, happily, in Raleigh, we’ve seen some new viewers stay with us. We’re hoping for the same here in Charleston,” he said.
Friedman also said he hopes to use footage shot here in Charleston to fulfill another goal of “The Early Show” and the network as a whole—making television, which Friedman himself described as “old media”—relevant in the new media age of the Internet.
“To thrive in this new age of media we must come up with a system where TV not only helps the Internet—essentially where we are now—to where the Internet also helps TV,” he said.
“What makes that even more challenging is that today the whole spectrum of what constitutes broadcasting is so crowded, you really have to offer something, be it content or a level of interactivity that sets you apart,” Friedman said “It a sense, our experience here in Charleston is going to be part of that. We’ll post video from the actual show on our Web site, as well as a lot of the other offstage we shot preparing for the program, so that if someone in another part of the country, say, is thinking of visiting the city, they can get some kind of a sense of it from us.”
“You know, we feel for the first time in a decade that CBS really has a shot in the morning. So, visits to cities like Charleston represent a meaningful investment in the show and investment in our future,” he added.
As for Humphreys and his restaurateur partner Richard Stoney, the affiliation with “The Early Show” was only the start of their event planning for the television industry. Next week, staff from Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” is coming to town to begin preparing for a week of broadcasts coinciding with the South Carolina primaries in January. As it did for “The Early Show,” Crew Carolina is coordinating the local details.
|
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version
