The New York Times
ANYONE RUNNING A MOVIE STUDIO OR A THEATER CHAIN
Never mind hacking, who stole all those moviegoers? Ticket sales at the box office fell 4 percent this year versus last year, and in the first nine months, profits at Regal Entertainment, the No. 1 theater chain, were down 50 percent compared with the previous year. More worrisome still, the Nielsen Company said last week that movie attendance for Americans ages 12 to 24 dropped 15 percent in the first nine months of 2014, compared with the same period a year earlier.
Movies have become a tent-pole business, meaning that they are dependent on blockbusters garnering huge domestic and international box office sales that mint franchises the studios can ride for years. If young people — a critical demographic — are too busy cocooning with their little screens or looking at bigger and bigger ones at home, it’s going to make that corner office on the studio lot feel like a sauna.
PHIL GRIFFIN, PRESIDENT OF MSNBC
Those familiar with television news will tell you that Mr. Griffin is one of the smartest people around, but you wouldn’t know it from MSNBC’s ratings. Stalwarts of the liberal-leaning channel — “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Morning Joe” — are posting some of their lowest ratings ever and some of the fixes that Mr. Griffin has come up with — Ronan Farrow, anyone? — went nowhere.
Cable news outfits are always compared with Fox News, but that channel is in its own business, which involves grilling and serving red meat to devoted conservatives. With a Democratic president viewed by many as disappointing, and control of both houses belonging to Republicans, liberals are less interested in tuning in to chronic outrage. It’s been said that television news is a business where elections, in the form of ratings, are held every night, and by that measure, MSNBC is losing its base. Eventually, attention will focus on both the overall approach and the leader of the ticket.
PHILIPPE DAUMAN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF VIACOM
As head of Viacom, Mr. Dauman makes serious coin — $37.2 million in salary, stock and options last year — which is swell for him, but with big money comes significant expectations. Viacom’s once-storied collection of channels now looks more like stuff you’d find in the bargain bin. Ratings for its networks, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, dropped 15 percent in the quarter that ended in September and while Mr. Dauman rightly points out that Nielsen data failed to capture viewing on other platforms, there is no denying the broader trend.
Nickelodeon, which produces about half of the company’s profits, has been in a pronounced slide, and Comedy Central will have to reboot part of its nightly programming now that Stephen Colbert is headed to CBS. I’m not the only skeptic: Disney’s stock is up almost 25 percent on the year, while Viacom’s dropped 11.75 percent. Sumner Redstone, the chairman of the company and controlling shareholder, is 91 years old and no clear succession is in place, so it’s hard to know exactly where the pressure will come from. But by any objective standard, Mr. Dauman is up against some brutal realities in an increasingly Darwinian cable world.
DEBORAH TURNESS, PRESIDENT OF NBC NEWS
Ms. Turness, a British television news executive, was hired in August 2013 to turn around a division where the “Today” show had fallen from the top of the morning heap and its lead in nightly news was being challenged. She hired Jamie Horowitz, an executive from ESPN, to overhaul the morning show with a great deal of fanfare, and he lasted all of 10 weeks. His firing, after reports of conflicts with talent and executives at the network, was a significant embarrassment for Ms. Turness. And the slow-motion, inelegant dismissal of David Gregory from “Meet the Press” kicked up additional negative chatter about her management approach. Network news is a tough racket to begin with, but Ms. Turness is coming off a big stumble. She will have to dust herself off, because 2015 will be no more kind.
MARK THOMPSON, CHIEF OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
The question of how quality news outlets will make enough money to support robust newsroom staffs is not specific to Mr. Thompson, who was brought in as chief executive from the BBC two years ago, but it has deep implications at The Times.
Digital and print news providers face crushing pressure from so-called programmatic sales, which lowers the yield on advertising; the switch to mobile, which is harder to make money from; and the rise of platforms like Facebook, which compete for readers interested in keeping up with the news.
At The Times, more than half the revenue now comes from consumers, not advertisers, and fully half of the digital consumers arrive via mobile devices. But just 10 percent of digital advertising derives from mobile, a disconnect that will create big problems if it lingers.
Although The Times’s metered model opened up a new source of revenue — there are now 875,000 digital-only subscribers — new lower-cost online-subscription approaches like NYT Now have not taken off as hoped. Mr. Thompson has the full confidence of the company’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., but declines in print advertising and circulation have created holes in revenue that a recent round of buyouts and layoffs can’t begin to fill. That very tough math will be squarely on Mr.Thompson’s desk in the coming year.
JOSEPH RIPP, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF TIME INC.
After being cut loose by Time Warner last year, the new publicly traded Time Inc. announced a flurry of digital initiatives and lots of restructuring. But since the spinoff, Time Inc. has lost senior executives, the flagship People brand continues to struggle and talk of acquisitions seems far-fetched. Mr. Ripp puts a brave face on it, pointing to increased digital ad sales, but it becomes more obvious with each passing day that Time Inc., once a symbol of New York publishing might, will probably not continue as a stand-alone magazine company. Look for Mr. Ripp to cut a deal with Meredith next year that will scan as a merger, but is really a sale.
AND THE REST
There is a big list of people and companies that may not be on the hot seat in the calendar year, but who will still be rowing upstream. After some wins with “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black,” Netflix stumbled with “Marco Polo,” an expansive, expensive series that fell flat. With Amazon and others increasingly in the picture, it will take lots of new programming and new hits to stay ahead of the crowd. ... Unless something world-changing is underway, live news is not working on CNN as it once did, and Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, has yet to crack the code on programming that will help the network escape the tyranny of the news cycle. ... Marissa Mayer has many other problems at Yahoo, but her big foray into news and information looks like a bust. The high-level talent hired as part of the initiative seems to be in witness protection, and analysts are openly discussing a merger with AOL, another longtime behemoth with some identity issues. ... David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president and Beltway ambassador, put a great deal of shoulder and rhetoric in pushing through the merger with Time Warner Cable. But what looked like a fait accompli now seems much less so.
Keep in mind I could be wrong about a lot of this speculation, and if I am, my own chair may heat up a bit. In an increasingly fraught environment, no one in media-land can expect to live a life beyond consequence.
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