CA
Ok it's very long but well worth the read, it has a section about Sky News in and that they are planning further integration with Sky in the future.
It's an interesting read, if you have time on your hands:
(Sky News section in bold)
With Ailes at Helm, FNC Ascends
Steve Donohue
Multichannel News
6/4/2001
Printer-Friendly version
E-mail this to a colleague
Roger Ailes seems to enjoy trashing the competition, including the cable networks where he once worked. But after taking Fox News Channel from the drawing board to first place in the all-news war in less than five years, the company's chairman is now in a loftier position to take potshots at Cable News Network and NBC Cable's MSNBC and CNBC. Ailes — who was president of CNBC before he joined FNC in 1996 — has also worked as a Republican consultant and as executive producer of Rush Limbaugh's syndicated television show. Multichannel News national editor Steve Donohue recently sat down with Ailes to talk about FNC's rapid rise, and to get his take on the competition and where the news business is going. An edited transcript follows:
MCN: It's been five years since FNC launched. It's still trailing CNN in households, but it's the No. 1 network in ratings. Did you expect to be at this point when you launched the network?
Ailes: We had a 5-year plan to kind of tie CNN. We think we have done that in four. We're in 65 million homes. They're in 81 million homes. But in the markets where you look at us versus CNN, we still have a 30 to 37 percent lead in terms of actual eyeballs.
So we are doing OK and I would say that I expected to be in this neighborhood four or five years ago.
MCN: Why were you so confident?
Ailes: I think that CNN was missing a whole segment of the audience that wanted fair and balanced news. I think that they had become a national and even worldwide brand of generic news. I think they have fulfilled their mission of making news the star, but sometimes news is boring, and I think that they didn't see the competition coming down the pike and they underestimated us.
And whenever I'm underestimated, that's the best thing I can have going for me.
MCN: When you launched, a lot of stories compared FNC to MSNBC —as head-to-head competition. At some point along the way, FNC stopped talking about MSNBC and you set your eyes on CNN. When did you begin to look past MSNBC?
Ailes: When they started doing Suzanne Somers specials and investigations of tattooed women in the middle of breaking national news events, we thought perhaps we were reaching for a different audience.
And so we decided to focus on the news and strictly compete with CNN. And it was really MSNBC's decision to leave news programming and pursue a quasi-entertainment, long-form investigation of Spring Break kind of thing that led us to believe that it was going to come down to us and CNN in the news business.
MCN: When you launched, you said that Fox News would target a younger demo, similar to the audience that watches Fox's broadcast network in primetime. MSNBC seems to have picked up that younger audience. A lot of people say that FNC attracts the daytime talk-radio listener, that you have an older demographic.
Ailes: Well, I don't think that's quite true. I'm not sure I ever said that I was going after the Fox primetime audience. I said that we would look for a younger news demo. Now the average news demo is 55 in America, as you know.
Our demo is younger than CNN's. We could — when you do shows like MSNBC does about tattooed ladies and sex on Spring Break and so on, you will get much younger demos. It just is that that is not news.
So I could do Daffy Duck and get younger demos, but it wouldn't be news. So at some point, we stayed in the news genre. CNN stayed in the news genre and our demos are younger than theirs. So I think we've won that game.
MCN: Are you targeting the younger demos now?
Ailes: Well, I think targeting younger demos is a dangerous announcement in news, because you have to get people who are interested in the news.
You can do that in many ways: your talent, your programming, your story selection, your writing, your graphics — all of those things can help. But I think chasing audiences by their age is a dangerous business in the news because some so-called young people, in their 20s and 30s, simply don't seem to be interested in news.
And I think that we're looking every day to try to go younger. MSNBC has a slightly younger audience than Fox News, but they pay an enormous price for it in terms of credibility. They do it without doing the news. I don't know what the demos are in Naked News [.com], but my guess is they're probably a little younger.
And MSNBC may go there next, although, having watched their channel, I'm against that, based on who they've hired.
MCN: Would you agree that much of your audience is that talk-radio audience?
Ailes: Do we pick up some of those people who listen to talk radio? Perhaps, at night, with Hannity & Colmes or Bill O'Reilly, we do. But Larry King has been doing that for years — getting people who listen to talk radio.
During the day, we do as much hard news and as much video-driven news as CNN. We do a lot more than MSNBC, because we don't have the library of Annette Funicello to air. So we're not doing as much Bobby Rydell and Annette Funicello or Fabian during the day as they are.
But certainly we're doing as much hard news as CNN is during the day. And I think that's a rap that our competitors put on us because they can't come to grips with our success; that we've outthought them. We outperform them. We put more news up.
As a matter of fact, there's a lot of evidence that on breaking news today, the thing that CNN owned at one time, the crisis news network, breaking news, they're coming to us.
MCN: Fox likes to point out that Bill O'Reilly beats Larry King consistently, even though they are not scheduled head-to-head. Would you consider scheduling The O'Reilly Factor head-to-head against Larry King Live to see who indeed is No. 1 in primetime?
Ailes: I would have no problem putting him at 9 o'clock, except that our primetime schedule is working, from five to six on. Why shuffle the deck just to prove a point that we've already proven? Are more people watching Bill O'Reilly at 8 o'clock, with fewer sets in use, than watching Larry King at 9 o'clock, with more sets in use? The answer is yes.
MCN: CNN has launched a marketing blitz in hopes of regaining the lead in the all-news war. Have you increased your marketing budget in response to that?
Ailes: No, we haven't increased our marketing budget in response to that. We're coming down to the end of our fiscal year. We will have not spent all of our marketing money this year. It's unclear what we'll do next year. We're waiting to see. We hear that Mr. [Turner Broadcasting System Inc. CEO Jamie] Kellner is an excellent marketer, and that's going to be his primary contribution over there to CNN. And so we're waiting to see what they come up with, but we'll be prepared to compete head-to-head when the time comes. The question is, 'What's your message?' Our message is that we're fair and balanced. We report, you decide. That's working.
They can't do that. They can say it, but they don't believe it, so they can't do it. And so consequently, they'll come up with other ways to try to get the CNN viewer back that we've taken.
We've taken, of course, many of the live ones. Many of the CNN viewers pass on to that great cable company in the sky.
And you know it's going to be tough. The first statement Kellner made … basically it was his version of what Khruschev said. He'll bury us in six months. So we are getting it blown up to post in our newsroom just to remind people that Mr. Kellner thinks he's going to swamp our boat in six months.
MCN: Will you match CNN [on marketing dollars], or will you look towards News Corp to help you step up the cross-promotion effort for Fox?
Ailes: Fox News Channel has become a very important part of News Corp., and News Corp. understands that Fox News Channel's winning is an important step, but I won't discuss how we'll do it or what we'll do. I think that in the end, Mr. Kellner has a great success in marketing, and I have had some success in marketing myself. So we'll see how it works out.
MCN: You became profitable in the fourth quarter last year?
Ailes: Yeah, that's right. We've just completed our second profitable quarter.
MCN: Does that account for the up-front launch fees?
Ailes: No. It's an operational EBITDA [cash-flow] breakeven. Obviously, we invested a great deal getting the company to where it is today, and we haven't repaid those dollars. At the same time, the asset value today of the Fox News Channel is at least four times the investment dollars.
MCN: Are you still paying $10 or $11 per sub for new launches?
Ailes: We are continuing to pay a diminishing amount of money as launch support. We have become the sixth- or seventh-fastest growing cable channel — the most in-demand cable channel. So the up-front dollars are diminishing quickly. We might pay with existing contracts. For instance, if Cox or Time Warner has an existing situation where if they add some on, they earn certain up-front dollars. There's probably still some money being paid under those contracts.
MCN: How much in total did you spend for launch costs?Ailes: The number has never been discussed and probably won't be by me because I don't honestly know, but several hundred million dollars.
MCN: I remember the old criticism was, these guys are only getting subs because they're paying for it. And now we hear stories about subscribers demanding FNC in certain markets. In retrospect, do you wish you had taken some of that money spent on launch fees, and invested it in newsgathering, maybe expanding your international bureaus?
Ailes: No. In the end, everybody knows that you have to have the distribution in cable to win. Then, you have to have a product people want to watch, and we were able to deliver the distribution and create a product that created a demand at the same time.
Would shades of doing a little more here, a little more there, have made some difference? Perhaps, but it's hard to argue with the fact that we're in over 65 million homes with a product people want, and we're breaking even ahead of schedule, and the asset value is huge.
[b]
MCN: How many international bureaus do you have?
Ailes: Four or five. London, Jerusalem, Moscow. We have a floating Middle East operation, Hong Kong — five. Then we have other people that we send over from time to time.
MCN: Is expanding the international coverage a priority?
Ailes: I don't want to expand to the extent CNN did. I think they put so much emphasis on bureaus overseas that they ended up with 200 people sitting somewhere in the world pla
It's an interesting read, if you have time on your hands:
(Sky News section in bold)
With Ailes at Helm, FNC Ascends
Steve Donohue
Multichannel News
6/4/2001
Printer-Friendly version
E-mail this to a colleague
Roger Ailes seems to enjoy trashing the competition, including the cable networks where he once worked. But after taking Fox News Channel from the drawing board to first place in the all-news war in less than five years, the company's chairman is now in a loftier position to take potshots at Cable News Network and NBC Cable's MSNBC and CNBC. Ailes — who was president of CNBC before he joined FNC in 1996 — has also worked as a Republican consultant and as executive producer of Rush Limbaugh's syndicated television show. Multichannel News national editor Steve Donohue recently sat down with Ailes to talk about FNC's rapid rise, and to get his take on the competition and where the news business is going. An edited transcript follows:
MCN: It's been five years since FNC launched. It's still trailing CNN in households, but it's the No. 1 network in ratings. Did you expect to be at this point when you launched the network?
Ailes: We had a 5-year plan to kind of tie CNN. We think we have done that in four. We're in 65 million homes. They're in 81 million homes. But in the markets where you look at us versus CNN, we still have a 30 to 37 percent lead in terms of actual eyeballs.
So we are doing OK and I would say that I expected to be in this neighborhood four or five years ago.
MCN: Why were you so confident?
Ailes: I think that CNN was missing a whole segment of the audience that wanted fair and balanced news. I think that they had become a national and even worldwide brand of generic news. I think they have fulfilled their mission of making news the star, but sometimes news is boring, and I think that they didn't see the competition coming down the pike and they underestimated us.
And whenever I'm underestimated, that's the best thing I can have going for me.
MCN: When you launched, a lot of stories compared FNC to MSNBC —as head-to-head competition. At some point along the way, FNC stopped talking about MSNBC and you set your eyes on CNN. When did you begin to look past MSNBC?
Ailes: When they started doing Suzanne Somers specials and investigations of tattooed women in the middle of breaking national news events, we thought perhaps we were reaching for a different audience.
And so we decided to focus on the news and strictly compete with CNN. And it was really MSNBC's decision to leave news programming and pursue a quasi-entertainment, long-form investigation of Spring Break kind of thing that led us to believe that it was going to come down to us and CNN in the news business.
MCN: When you launched, you said that Fox News would target a younger demo, similar to the audience that watches Fox's broadcast network in primetime. MSNBC seems to have picked up that younger audience. A lot of people say that FNC attracts the daytime talk-radio listener, that you have an older demographic.
Ailes: Well, I don't think that's quite true. I'm not sure I ever said that I was going after the Fox primetime audience. I said that we would look for a younger news demo. Now the average news demo is 55 in America, as you know.
Our demo is younger than CNN's. We could — when you do shows like MSNBC does about tattooed ladies and sex on Spring Break and so on, you will get much younger demos. It just is that that is not news.
So I could do Daffy Duck and get younger demos, but it wouldn't be news. So at some point, we stayed in the news genre. CNN stayed in the news genre and our demos are younger than theirs. So I think we've won that game.
MCN: Are you targeting the younger demos now?
Ailes: Well, I think targeting younger demos is a dangerous announcement in news, because you have to get people who are interested in the news.
You can do that in many ways: your talent, your programming, your story selection, your writing, your graphics — all of those things can help. But I think chasing audiences by their age is a dangerous business in the news because some so-called young people, in their 20s and 30s, simply don't seem to be interested in news.
And I think that we're looking every day to try to go younger. MSNBC has a slightly younger audience than Fox News, but they pay an enormous price for it in terms of credibility. They do it without doing the news. I don't know what the demos are in Naked News [.com], but my guess is they're probably a little younger.
And MSNBC may go there next, although, having watched their channel, I'm against that, based on who they've hired.
MCN: Would you agree that much of your audience is that talk-radio audience?
Ailes: Do we pick up some of those people who listen to talk radio? Perhaps, at night, with Hannity & Colmes or Bill O'Reilly, we do. But Larry King has been doing that for years — getting people who listen to talk radio.
During the day, we do as much hard news and as much video-driven news as CNN. We do a lot more than MSNBC, because we don't have the library of Annette Funicello to air. So we're not doing as much Bobby Rydell and Annette Funicello or Fabian during the day as they are.
But certainly we're doing as much hard news as CNN is during the day. And I think that's a rap that our competitors put on us because they can't come to grips with our success; that we've outthought them. We outperform them. We put more news up.
As a matter of fact, there's a lot of evidence that on breaking news today, the thing that CNN owned at one time, the crisis news network, breaking news, they're coming to us.
MCN: Fox likes to point out that Bill O'Reilly beats Larry King consistently, even though they are not scheduled head-to-head. Would you consider scheduling The O'Reilly Factor head-to-head against Larry King Live to see who indeed is No. 1 in primetime?
Ailes: I would have no problem putting him at 9 o'clock, except that our primetime schedule is working, from five to six on. Why shuffle the deck just to prove a point that we've already proven? Are more people watching Bill O'Reilly at 8 o'clock, with fewer sets in use, than watching Larry King at 9 o'clock, with more sets in use? The answer is yes.
MCN: CNN has launched a marketing blitz in hopes of regaining the lead in the all-news war. Have you increased your marketing budget in response to that?
Ailes: No, we haven't increased our marketing budget in response to that. We're coming down to the end of our fiscal year. We will have not spent all of our marketing money this year. It's unclear what we'll do next year. We're waiting to see. We hear that Mr. [Turner Broadcasting System Inc. CEO Jamie] Kellner is an excellent marketer, and that's going to be his primary contribution over there to CNN. And so we're waiting to see what they come up with, but we'll be prepared to compete head-to-head when the time comes. The question is, 'What's your message?' Our message is that we're fair and balanced. We report, you decide. That's working.
They can't do that. They can say it, but they don't believe it, so they can't do it. And so consequently, they'll come up with other ways to try to get the CNN viewer back that we've taken.
We've taken, of course, many of the live ones. Many of the CNN viewers pass on to that great cable company in the sky.
And you know it's going to be tough. The first statement Kellner made … basically it was his version of what Khruschev said. He'll bury us in six months. So we are getting it blown up to post in our newsroom just to remind people that Mr. Kellner thinks he's going to swamp our boat in six months.
MCN: Will you match CNN [on marketing dollars], or will you look towards News Corp to help you step up the cross-promotion effort for Fox?
Ailes: Fox News Channel has become a very important part of News Corp., and News Corp. understands that Fox News Channel's winning is an important step, but I won't discuss how we'll do it or what we'll do. I think that in the end, Mr. Kellner has a great success in marketing, and I have had some success in marketing myself. So we'll see how it works out.
MCN: You became profitable in the fourth quarter last year?
Ailes: Yeah, that's right. We've just completed our second profitable quarter.
MCN: Does that account for the up-front launch fees?
Ailes: No. It's an operational EBITDA [cash-flow] breakeven. Obviously, we invested a great deal getting the company to where it is today, and we haven't repaid those dollars. At the same time, the asset value today of the Fox News Channel is at least four times the investment dollars.
MCN: Are you still paying $10 or $11 per sub for new launches?
Ailes: We are continuing to pay a diminishing amount of money as launch support. We have become the sixth- or seventh-fastest growing cable channel — the most in-demand cable channel. So the up-front dollars are diminishing quickly. We might pay with existing contracts. For instance, if Cox or Time Warner has an existing situation where if they add some on, they earn certain up-front dollars. There's probably still some money being paid under those contracts.
MCN: How much in total did you spend for launch costs?Ailes: The number has never been discussed and probably won't be by me because I don't honestly know, but several hundred million dollars.
MCN: I remember the old criticism was, these guys are only getting subs because they're paying for it. And now we hear stories about subscribers demanding FNC in certain markets. In retrospect, do you wish you had taken some of that money spent on launch fees, and invested it in newsgathering, maybe expanding your international bureaus?
Ailes: No. In the end, everybody knows that you have to have the distribution in cable to win. Then, you have to have a product people want to watch, and we were able to deliver the distribution and create a product that created a demand at the same time.
Would shades of doing a little more here, a little more there, have made some difference? Perhaps, but it's hard to argue with the fact that we're in over 65 million homes with a product people want, and we're breaking even ahead of schedule, and the asset value is huge.
[b]
MCN: How many international bureaus do you have?
Ailes: Four or five. London, Jerusalem, Moscow. We have a floating Middle East operation, Hong Kong — five. Then we have other people that we send over from time to time.
MCN: Is expanding the international coverage a priority?
Ailes: I don't want to expand to the extent CNN did. I think they put so much emphasis on bureaus overseas that they ended up with 200 people sitting somewhere in the world pla