Blaming Katie Couric on Judge Judy: Have you no shame?
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- March
- 12
Sometimes the business of TV is complicated—Nielsen ratings, sweeps, Q scores, demographics, advertising revenue—it’s a stew of equations, speculation, and people with MBAs who are supposed to know what they’re talking about. But even for us remedial dolts, this equation was supposed to be easy enough to understand:
Judge Judy + Katie Couric = ka-ching ka-ching
And yet, somehow, something went horribly wrong. In the NY Times this morning, Jacques Steinberg, the busiest man on the TV beat, breaks it down for us: At the same time the network was agreeing to pay Couric $15 million a year to take over the Evening News, they were doling out “several million dollars more� to Judge Judy, coaxing her syndicated show from New York’s NBC affiliate to CBS’s.
The dirty little secret of network news, you see, is even though the faces behind the desk tend to get the blame and/or glory, as any network exec will tell you, it’s all about the lead-in. Oprah of course is the queen and she keeps those eyeballs glued to the stations she airs on (mainly ABC affiliates). But Judge Judy, one of the highest paid women in entertainment, earns her salary for similar reasons. The only problem is, in this case, things didn’t work out that way. Steinberg explains:
“’Judge Judy,’ featuring Judy Sheindlin, has kept up her end of the bargain, raising WCBS’s ratings between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. by more than 10 percent.
But ratings for the half hour of local news that precedes Ms. Couric’s program in New York remain virtually identical to last year at this time. And not only has Ms. Couric received none of the intended bounce, her viewership is actually down slightly in New York, compared to a year ago, when Bob Schieffer was occupying the same desk.”
(AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 10:50 am by Suburbarazzi.
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