Earlier this year, I wrote about NBC’s scheduling of Jay Leno five nights a week at 10PM.  At that time, I thought it could go either way.  It would be brilliant or a bust.

The early results, for the past three weeks, looks like, at least in the short term, it goes into the “bust” column.  It did start out strong – against reruns.  But when the new shows on ABC, NBC and Fox premiered the week of September 21, the audience moved away from the Peacock network.

Locally, a comparison of the same three weeks last year to this year show household ratings for the 10PM hour down 38% in Indianapolis.  The late news on the NBC affiliate, which depends to some extent on Leno’s lead-in audience,  is down 25%.

Nationally, NBC is down about 25% in households, but in the important Adults 18-49 demographic category they’re down 41%.  And, that’s the group advertisers crave.  There is no demographic data for Indianapolis at this time, but it’s probably not good news.

NBC knew it would be tough sledding against first-run dramas and that over the long run, Leno with 46 weeks of original episodes, believed it would prevail over the broadcast networks when they went into reruns.

Maybe it will evenutally be better on the bottom line for General Electric, parent company of NBC/Universal.  But, it looks like bust from here.

Yesterday in Washington D.C., with Congressional meetings over and four hours to kill before going to the airport, I headed over to the Newseum. The spectacular building, situated on Pennsylvania Avenue just across the street from the National Gallery of Art and a few blocks from the Capitol. Building, has been open a little less than a year.  

It’s a privately run museum and contains artifacts and displays with a heavy dose of First Amendment. It’s actually on the site of the hotel where John Wilkes Booth stayed the night before the Lincoln assassination. 

They’ve done a great job of reminding us the role journalism has played in our lives and how essential it is to our freedoms. This really hits home as many traditional media organizations face dramatically altered business models, suffering through falling advertising revenue, layoffs and, in some cases, bankruptcy and ceasing of publication,

 The seven-story building displays newspapers from around the world to peruse, hundreds of historic front pages to skim, hundreds of hours of news broadcasts to watch and hundreds of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos to examine. For media junkies, the Newseum is the ultimate in telling the history of print and broadcasting journalism.

There are 15 theaters, two television studios (ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos broadcasts from one on Sunday mornings), and a television master control center to explore. Visitors can create their own TV news report with the background keyed behind them. (And, of course, purchase the finished product for a mere $5).

The highlight is the 4-D Theater which takes the audience time traveling back to colonial times and through the beginnings of investigative journalism and Nelly Bly to war reporting by Edward R. Murrow. With special glasses and seats that move and rumble, you get a real experience as bullets come at you and explosions go off nearby.

My experience with most museums is that they tend to pander a bit to popular culture. There was a bit of this but for the serious museum-goer, there’s a lot to absorb. Like most of the museums in D.C., the place was filled with school kids, who hung out around the 9-11 exhibits and chased each other around with the requisite squealing. Not sure they knew, or care, who Murrow or Hearst or Winchell were, but it’s there for all.

I do worry about the direction print journalism is taking. The shift away from newspapers to online news has brought a new group of many publishers, quite a few with suspect credentials. But, it’s really no different that in the late 19^th century when technological advances in printing made it possible for new entrants to compete with the few newspapers that had been the sole source of news.

An afternoon at the Newseum does drive home how essential a free press is. I worry that the demise of the large newspapers and, even television network news divisions, will rob us of the strong, aggressive journalism that we’ve enjoyed throughout our history.

It’s 40 days to the shutdown of analog television signals and Washington is starting to wake up.   America’s television stations have broadcast volumes of public service announcements, done thousands of news stories, held town meetings and conducted numerous phone banks to prepare consumers for the switch to the digital-only future.

Today, President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team asked for a delay in the nation’s scheduled switch to digital television, citing funding difficulties. The team co-chair John Podesta wrote to key US lawmakers asking for an extension to the February 17 legislatively-mandated cutoff date.

“During the transition, we have discovered major difficulties in the preparation for the February 17 conversion from analog to digital broadcasting,” he said. “These weaknesses mean major problems for consumers.”

By early February projections suggested more than five million requests for coupons to be used to defray part of the cost of converter boxes would not be met, with the figure “increasing by hundreds of thousands every day,” he said.

In addition, the funds provided to support the conversion are “woefully inadequate,” Podesta said, pointing out that particularly low income, rural and elderly Americans would be hit.

The major networks, predictably, support the delay, in the “interest of the American consumer.”

But the Consumer Electronics Association, an industry group, suggested keeping the February 17 transition date. It says converter boxes are available in sufficient supply and consumers are aware of and prepared for the transition, but added legitimate concerns about the coupon program should be addressed immediately.

Having been involved with this for years and talking to viewers I’m convinced that moving the date is only postponing the inevitable.  There are many issues.  And even consumers who are able to get converter boxes are confused and have difficulty setting them up, getting a proper antenna on them and understanding how they work with their TV.

Congress provided a bailout for banks and the automakers.  How about a bailout for the consumers?

What Congress ought to do is fund a program that would make technicians available for viewers who need help.  Obama has compared the task ahead on getting the economy going to that faced by FDR.  How about a WPA approach – training unemployed workers to troubleshoot specific problems that the public could report to centralized groups?  Or provide coupons that could be used by confused consumers to hire one of the Geek Squad at Best Buy or some other enterprising group or individual.

It’s politically correct to vote for a delay, June 1 has been suggested as the new shutoff date, but I believe we’ll see the same result.  The only difference is that Washington suddenly woke up at T minus 40 when they should have woken up at T minus 1000.

The move to program Jay Leno at 10PM five nights a week next fall is either brilliant or a huge boo-boo.

NBC announced this week that Jay Leno, who’s leaving the late night slot he’s occupied for 16 years, isn’t going away.  A show with a format I’ll assume is a derivation of the current Tonight Show format will occupy the last hour of prime time from Monday through Friday.

On Monday, Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, told analysts at a media investor conference that NBC was considering cutting the number of hours or perhaps even the number of nights it provides programming.  He cited a  terrible fall season at NBC that was forcing the network to consider scaling back the number of hours it airs programming,

On Tuesday, he announced the Leno move.

Leno was problematic for NBC.  Looking to the future, the network promised Conan O’Brien, who was getting antsy in late, late night and looking around, that he’d get the Tonight Show in 2009.  In some kind of backroom arrangement, Leno agreed to step down.  That put him in play, although his contract with NBC prevented any discussion with competitors until 2009.   I’m sure ABC was interested.  I’ll bet some of the syndicators were interested.  But, NBC put a deal together under the wire.

So… is it brilliant or a boo-boo?

Brilliant

• It addresses the problem Zucker spoke to on Monday.  It eliminates the huge costs of developing and licensing programming that costs in excess of $320 million a year.  The Leno show will cost in the range of $90 million a year.  If ratings hold up, that’s a big windfall; if they don’t, it’s still a positive move, profit-wise.

• It keeps Leno away from the competition, which could have scheduled him up against O’Brien.

• It creates a somewhat DVR-proof show, assuming it continues to deal with current events.

• It provides a venue for hawking by the host of advertisers products.

Boo Boo

• “Stripping shows in prime time hasn’t heretofore shown promise of success.  ABC’s ill-fated programming of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? across four nights sent ABC prime into a ratings tumble that took years to dig out of.

• A lot of DVR viewing of shows recorded on prior evening takes place during the 10PM hour.

• The kind of material that Leno can use at midnight is a lot edgier than that he can use in prime time. There may be an expectation that he can’t fill.  Look for a ratings drop.

• It dulls Conan O’Brien’s dream of taking over the slot held by Paar, Carson and Leno.  He may still be playing second fiddle to Leno.  And going back to antsy.

• It’s hard to hold viewers for an hour in a talk format at this hour.  Look for the network affiliates to squawk about the lead-in ratings to the late newscasts.

But, habits are changing and the Writers Guild of America got an unintended consequence from their strike last year.  It upset the status quo in prime time and got the network heads like Zucker thinking.  Stay tuned.

Who says ABC gets all the attention? On this blog last month, I recognized Diane Keaton’s faux pas on its morning program Good Morning America. Here’s equal time for Jane Fonda on NBC’s Today Show.

And those (f**k and c**t) are only two of George Carlin’s famous Seven Dirty Words.  Who’s next?