You could draw them with your eyes closed: legions of newscasters with the same shellacked coif, same brisk neutrality.
"They're recycled, and they talk and act alike," said Barry Diller, creator of Fox Television and now chief of the Home Shopping Network. "They have this formula from Eyewitness News - but now the barrel is scraped down so harshly."
Slamming the homogeneity of network news, media maverick Diller last week sketched a plan for a loose nationwide network of alternative TV news. Eleven new stations - currently referred to as CitiVision - would aim to unravel the conventions of TV, fashioning a more woolly variation with homegrown talent, opinionated news, and programming organized like sporting events, sprawling out of its time slots as necessary.
"Hopefully, what we'll do is aggressively get what's going on in that community," said Diller. "It won't appeal to 78 percent of the audience, but we'll get 10 percent of true, real audience."
In the spirit of public access with a professional gloss, the stations will be a direct attack on the conformity of most programming.
"Most TV is McTV - pre-processed fast food coming out of national networks from 3,000 miles away," said Doug Binzak, executive vice president of broadcasting for Home Shopping Network subsidiary Silver King Broadcasting, which is producing the channels. "We'll be doing true local broadcasting with a sense of place."
Binzak said niche marketing has been embraced by many institutions in many media - magazines, radio, and the Net. "Even McDonald's announced last month that they're heading to regional menus to reflect the local culture," he said. Left behind in the rush, he added, is network television..
CitiVision will debut in Miami in March, with a roll-out in 10 other markets, including Chicago, New York, Dallas, and Boston, every other month thereafter. The channel will be available without cable and will bump the Home Shopping Network, which currently runs in the broadcast spectrum, into cable. The Miami pilot will feature eight to 12 hours of original programming, including news, talk shows, sporting events, and even some forays into semi-dramatic series.
"We want to create new kinds of programming," said Binzak, "somewhere between MTV's Real World and Fox's Melrose Place."
Urban alternative newspapers are the model for the journalism the stations will practice, Binzak said. Talent for the programs will be locally harvested, including recent college graduates and newscasters stuck doing local news for network-affiliated stations, Binzak said.
As original as Diller might think CitiVision is, the fact is that many cities across the United States already have (or will soon have) homegrown news stations on cable. Linda Moss, programming editor at cable industry journal MultiChannel News, estimates there are 40 regional news channels already. Some, like Time Warner's New York One with its 24-hour schedule of metro newscasts, already wield significant brand power.
Time Warner plans to start news channels in Orlando and Tampa Bay, Florida, this fall. Another big player is New England Cable News, a service for the Boston area that has a subscriber base of some 2 million.
With some two-thirds of America's households already getting cable, says Yankee Group analyst Bruce Leichtman, the fact that Diller's stations will be locally broadcast is not really significant. "He's in a very crowded field," Leichtman said.
The financial challenge of producing decent programming may be Diller's biggest hurdle. With somewhere between US$135 million and $175 million earmarked to develop all the planned channels, the stations will need to produce big revenue in advertising. If local wells run dry, Binzak conceded, they may be forced to turn to international markets for more funds.
"Despite the hyper-localized nature of its news, Miami is the capital of Latin America," he said. "The idea of having a Miami channel could be very interesting internationally, without having to bland-out or water it down."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
