Writing this from 40,000 feet, flying back to Indy from Tampa. I spent the last two days with our news director, promotion manager and national rep programming guru visiting the huge Nielsen Media complex in suburban Oldsmar- two days of pouring over the diaries in which selected Hoosiers reported their TV usage during last November’s ratings sweeps. All of us are fried.

I haven’t done this for a long time, but it’s an eye-opening experience and I vow to put this on the schedule for regular visits. And, it’s not for the warm Florida weather as Indy gets snow and temperatures in the 20s. It was lousy, cold and rainy in Tampa – good days to be indoors.

We were there on an important mission. As you may know, in Indianapolis, and some fifty other TV markets, we get a daily report card gathered from meters attached to TV sets in nearly 400 area households.  They register the channel each TV in a home is tuned to and for how long. Then each day, in the wee hours of the morning, the devices dial into the huge Florida complex and dump data into a computer. That morning, we download the numbers they crunch and find out how many households were watching the prior day (with some statistical variance). And either spend the day smiling or grouchy.This data’s nice, but not detailed enough. Our advertisers not only want to know how many households are watching, they want to know who in the household was watching…and for how long.

That’s where the diaries come in. Five times a year, February, May, July, October and November, the Nielsen folks recruit thousands of families in each of the 200 plus TV markets to become a “Nielsen family”. Each family records their viewing for one week. This goes on for four weeks during each of those five months. (There’s actually a sixth month, January. But few stations still subscribe to that period. Actually very few still get October books; Indy still does. Not sure why, probably inertia.)

The recruits are asked to carefully fill in each diary with information about what program they’re watching, what station it’s on and who was watching. When the TV’s not on, they need to fill that column out also.

At the end of the week, they mail it back to Florida. All this for fifteen bucks as a thank you and incentive to follow instructions. Returned diaries are sent to editors to pour over them for usefulness. Thousands are tossed out for one reason or another. At the end of the sweeps month, Nielsen strives to have around 2,000 acceptable diaries in a market the size of Indy.

This is where it gets scary. And, I’m even more frightened after spending two days holed up reviewing the ones that made the cut. I say frightened because these folks control the fate of a lot of people. They affect the income of our sales people, the employment of our news people, the careers of our managers.

Some diarists take it very seriously, filling in the booklets with extreme detail. Usually it’s an older viewer, at least 60 years old, that is most complete. Some younger viewers seem to report fairly accurately. But it’s apparent all of them sometimes have no idea what they program they are watching or what station they are tuned to.

In this batch, WRTV got credit for folks watching CBS Evening News. That’s nice, but I’m betting the folks at WISH-TV aren’t crazy about it. We didn’t get a chance to look through all 2090 from last November but am guessing we probably lost some attribution on another program. So, maybe it all evens out.

It’s an imperfect system and a bit of an anachronism. Nielsen, to their credit, continually works to improve the process. One solution they’ve launched in about ten markets so far is People Meters which are alleged to record the viewing habits of individuals without depending on them to write down every time they watch TV. The early results are a bit controversial. People Meters will probably be in Indianapolis within the next five years.

Every day, stations fly into Tampa from around the country to review the diaries and see if they can figure what’s going on in the viewers’ minds. Today there were a couple of other stations, from Hartford and Roanoke, in other rooms down the hall. The RTV6 crew went at it pretty hard for about ten hours over those two days. After a while your eyes glaze over.

Diarists also have a chance to provide comments; sometimes helpful. We saw a lot of “too many commercials”, “no more reality shows”, “get rid of the political advertising”, “too much sex and violence”. I believe a couple of those, but the ratings continue strong for reality TV (see the success of mean-spirited American Idol) and sex still sells. Sorry.

So, all in all, it was helpful. It gives one some idea of how “sticky” your call letters are with viewers. You can learn what areas of the market need a little more attention. We’ll try to work on providing better news coverage in those areas; maybe our promotional messages will target their interests.

No, it’s not manipulation. It’s a popularity contest and attention must be paid. There’s a lot riding on it.

As I write this it’s 11 o’clock on Sunday morning. And, I’m moving up my prediction for the demise of the print copy of the local newspaper and the accelerated growth of online delivery of local news. It hits right where all the pundits center their predictions – customer focus and customer convenience.

My thoughts come from a morning of trudging through the snow every half hour or so, for the last four hours, to see if the Indianapolis Star had been delivered. Usually, especially in inclement weather, it’s tucked into a box under the mailbox.

Pouring through the Sunday paper over breakfast and while watching the morning TV shows is part of the weekend routine. With the overnight snowfall, I figured delivery might be a little slower. And, a call to their “trouble number” elicited a recorded message that production issues held up delivery to their carriers. Made sense. So, I kept checking the box. Every half hour.

Luckily, a neighbor called looking for the number of the driveway plow guy we used last year. I asked if they got their paper. The answer was yes, it was in the middle of the driveway and was there fairly early.

So, I went back out with the snow shovel and dug around, calculating how far a paper could be flung from a speeding car. After ten minutes of clearing the snow, there is was, the Sunday Star, buried under six inches of snow, a lot of it heaped on by plows clearing our street.

I’m not blaming anyone. The papers were late. The delivery folks were in a hurry. But delivery service like that is bound to speed up the conversion of customers to online and drive them even more to television news.

And, as Martha Stewart is fond of saying “That’s a good thing.”

NATPE turned out to be a pretty good convention after all. As always, the best part is seeing old friends made over a quarter century in the business. A lot of the folks that started as traveling salespersons trudging around the U.S. peddling shows to guys like me are now heading up the sales operations at all of the major studios. I knew them when. Others have moved on and own their own companies, many of them delving into new media. We had some great memories.

And, it was fun running across people you worked with and haven’t seen in years. A pleasant surprise was bumping into a lady I worked with in Toledo in the late 70s, Ann Pace Sutton. She was Ann Pace then and a fireball who was the most creative promotion person I had ever seen. She works now for Post Newsweek in Jacksonville and has for years. And she still has that same spark. There were many others. I’d go on but I’d bore you.

One thing I have to mention before closing: McCarran Airport. What was years ago, when I first came to Las Vegas, a dusty airfield outside of town is now a booming transit center in the middle of the Strip. It handles more than 46 million visitors a year with fairly good efficiency. The lines are long, particularly at Security, but they move quickly.

Most impressive is the availability of free Wi-Fi with a strong signal anywhere in the airport. The home page gives you complete access to flight arrivals and departures, flight and gate status and, my favorite, a listing of all the facilities and their proximity to your gate. One can click on and find the nearest restrooms, pay phones, ATMs, gift shops, even restaurant, by cuisine.

It’s a model for every airport to emulate. I’m hoping the folks at the new Indy terminal are looking at this idea. Did I mention that it’s free?

I’ve been meaning to post while here at the NATPE convention, but the days are long and the pace more frenetic than I thought.

In my last musing, I was lamenting the old days when shows got launched here and how, with the market power amassed by a few, there were a lot of barriers to entry that prevented new ideas from being hatched and launched on air.

I am pleased to report that a bit of that is alive and well. And it’s refreshing.

One group, Program Partners, is working with Merv Griffin on a new game show. The presentation isn’t particularly polished but they’re going about it the right way. And they seem to be convincing a lot of stations to come along with them. Our station in San Diego is on board for fall.

Another group, Debmar Mercury, is getting some traffic with their new offerings. And Warner Brothers has an interesting show based on the website TMZ.com. It’s getting a lot of buzz. Our San Diego station picked that up as well.

In the case of Program Partners and Debmar Mercury, these firms are owned and headed by veteran syndicators who believe in the business and are finding a way to bring new ideas in a crowded and difficult marketplace. And that’s good for business.

I’m heading out to Las Vegas this weekend to attend a convention. This one is the National Association of Program Executives (NATPE), now in its 44th year. I’ve been going for more than 20 years.

During the last few years, the convention, in my opinion, has struggled to find a focus. It used to be huge, taking over the Las Vegas Convention Center. Now, it’s shrunk down to fit the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. It used to be the venue where deals were made, where new programs were launched. Deals were cut on the convention floor and in smoke-filled suites for shows like Wheel of Fortune, Entertainment Tonight, Oprah, Judge Judy and other shows of those types.

These are the syndicated programs that local television stations run in time periods where they don’t have local newscasts or network programming. The Hollywood studios that produce them need to have the show sold to one station every in TV market, like Indianapolis, in the United States. At the minimum, the studios need coverage of at least 80% of the U.S. population.

There used to be an electricity in the air as deals went down. You ran around to hear the buzz to make sure the show you were buying was going to be “cleared” on a good list of stations. The rumors flew, the truth was stretched and the good times flowed. That’s pretty much gone. And, I miss it.

This week, we’ll see very few new programs offered and much of what’s being readied for next September is already sold. Consolidation in the industry has created mega-groups which a syndicator can enlist to launch a program with only one deal. Some groups have stations in so many large markets they are crucial to the ability of Hollywood to launch a show. They can even control the content and type of show.

And, on the studio side, consolidation there has limited the offerings and provided a few with the power to leverage new shows, getting clearances for shows that might not have seen the light of day if the station renewing a show didn’t need the renewal.

Right now in Indianapolis, the traditional affiliates together need about 13 hours of syndicated programming a day. CBS has programs in eight of those hours. If you include the other stations, the numbers really go up.

CBS shows? Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil, Montel Williams, Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, Insider, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, Rachael Ray, Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown. Those are just part of the list. Then there’s the slate of shows coming off the networks and now sold in reruns. It’s a huge list. And it gives CBS tremendous market power.

There used to be many. Now there are few. Oh, there are a few small guys but good luck to them on getting their programs launched. It’s tough for them to even get their wares seen. The shots are called by CBS, Twentieth (Fox), NBC/Universal, Buena Vista (ABC) and Warner Brothers.

So, we’ll go and see old friends and see what’s being offered. But, most of the deals are already done and the buzz of old will be silent. I miss the old days.