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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