Friday, February 24, 2017

Megyn Kelly, Matt Lauer, and the Battle for the Future of NBC

 
In his high-profile, high-priced hire of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, NBC News chief Andy Lack placed a major bet on star power. But Lack’s biggest, priciest talent, Today’s Matt Lauer, provides something of a cautionary tale. With morning news being one of the last mass television markets, its personalities can draw fire as well as ratings.

By Sarah Ellison

ndy Lack, the chairman of NBC News, is seen by many of his peers as an old-school newsman in the mold of the late Roone Arledge, the famed ABC News president. Arledge played a major role in establishing ABC News as one of the leading evening newscasts in the 1980s and 90s. He did so in part by hiring big names and high-profile talent—for instance, wooing Diane Sawyer away from CBS News, even though ABC already employed the very visible Barbara Walters. Lack is currently on his second tour at NBC. He joined NBC News in 1993, rose to the top of the news division, then left in 2003 to head up Sony Music. He returned in 2015 in the wake of the scandal involving news anchor Brian Williams, who was revealed to have embellished, among other stories, his experience during an incident in Iraq in 2003.

Recently, Lack pulled an Arledge: wooing away Megyn Kelly from Fox News. The move generated a flurry of headlines not only for its audacity but also because it was initially unclear just what Kelly would be doing at NBC. More than anything, the idea seemed to represent an act of faith in what high-profile talent, rather than mission or content, can accomplish: star power as business model. Until her hiring by NBC, Kelly was the wildly successful host of Fox News’s The Kelly File, a political and current-events show on weeknights that was one of the highest-rated cable-news programs in the country. NBC is paying Kelly more than $15 million, far less than the $25 million a year she was offered to stay at Fox. NBC went to her with a blank slate, according to a person close to Kelly. “Everyone else came to her with an idea of what they wanted.” 

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Source: Vanity Fair (via The Empire Report)

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