Sunday, April 08, 2007
Klein on AM Changes: No Cookouts Planned on Columbus Circle
USA Today has a pretty good write up about the anchor changes on American Morning. In the artcle Klein comments on the format:"CNN could have taken a page from that recipe in hopes of growing a program that averaged just 376,000 viewers last month, down from 510,000 in August, as MSNBC's increasingly popular rival Imus in the Morning crept closer with 354,000 viewers and Fox News' Fox & Friends continued to win the cable time slot with 692,000 viewers.
But, CNN chief Jon Klein says, "it doesn't make any sense to put the same product in the market that everyone else has. It's always wise to differentiate, and companies that don't do a good job differentiating themselves or their TV shows tend to wither away and die. We don't spend a lot of time here saying, 'Gee, how do we capture the essence of (Fox News') Bill O'Reilly?' "
Instead, Klein plans to stick to Morning's hard-news format while replacing anchors Soledad O'Brien and Miles O'Brien."
There are more comments from the future anchors of American Morning:
What I like about it is there's no fluff," Roberts says. Offering hard news does not have to "taste like medicine. It just doesn't have to be earthquakes, fire, pestilence, disease and plane crashes. There are a lot of things that can be considered hard news under that serious umbrella: medical news, lifestyle news and religion.
"I definitely think there's not just a niche but a broad audience for a show that's just about the news — like picking up the newspaper in the morning," he says.
Chetry, 32, was born in Nepal, daughter of a Nepalese Peace Corps executive and an American mother, and raised in Maryland. She cut her teeth in local cable and anchored a morning show in Sacramento before moving to cover overnight news at Fox.
"There are times I find myself looking at (network morning news) and saying, 'Where is the news?' " Chetry says. "People need to be informed about what's going on, and there's a ton going on. But at the same time, it can be delivered in a way where people also find bits of humor and enjoyment and end up feeling good as well."
# posted by ATN @ 10:33 PM 
