Brown: Stations Should Share Online Info

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The long-standing competitive barriers between broadcasters are going to have to break down in order for traditional television companies to succeed in this new media world, Colleen Brown, President and CEO of Fisher Communications, said Tuesday.

“I believe the new paradigm should be collaboration and not competition,” said Brown, a keynote speaker at the BIA/Kelsey Digital Strategies for Broadcasting conference in Jersey City, N.J. “We must work together.”

Acknowledging the approach “goes against the broadcasters’ code,” Brown said that sharing information is nonetheless an important component in traditional television companies’ ability to succeed in the face of new and emerging platforms.

Otherwise, she said, too much time will be lost to figuring out what does – or doesn’t work.

“We must openly share information,” she said. “Success in a few markets is not going to benefit the health of the industry.”

While there is no one-size-fits-all answer for TV stations, there are several tenets of transformation that Brown said broadcasters universally should adopt, starting with erasing the notion of broadcasters as TV or radio companies rather than multimedia businesses.

“Local broadcasters need to think beyond TV, beyond radio and think of their brands in the broadest sense possible,” Brown said.

“Today the lines between media types are increasingly blurred,” she said, adding that media companies, in turn, must more be more aggressive in promoting the idea that sales and news teams across platforms must work together in promoting the larger company ecosystem.

“We need to tear down existing walls between our properties,” she said, acknowledging that such restructuring means huge changes for the way broadcasters have long operated.

“Broadcasters aren’t going to go away, but the business model will change more than it has in the last 25 years,” Brown said.

That may not always be easy to swallow.

“Clearly this is not a good time for people who don’t like change,” she said, adding that broadcasters, nonetheless, have few options but to do so if they are going to succeed.

“Things are not going back to the way they were.”

Practicing what she preached, Brown has overseen Fisher’s response to new technologies in several ways, most notably launching 124 hyper local “neighborhood” web sites, answering what Brown said is “a clear desire for relevant neighborhood connections that we as a television service could not provide until we figured this out.”

In doing so, Fisher changed newsroom culture -- arming reporters with iPhones so that news content could be captured and filed 24 hours a day, incorporating user-generated local content and, to Brown’s surprise, creating a new kind of news ecosystem in the process.

“It creates a vibrant news ecosystem, which is the whole 'aha' thing we didn’t think through,” she said.

In turn, the neighborhood sites also lured about 1,500 new advertisers, primarily local merchants, who could not afford to buy TV or radio time. Though the neighborhood sites don’t command the big price tags that TV and radio spots do, there are clear financial benefits to selling a multitude of lesser-priced ads, she said.

“It’s OK to roll up the nickels,” Brown said. One hundred fifty sites that generate, say, $2,000 a month could yield $3 million a year for a broadcast company, she said.

Bracing for the next wave of technology to hit it big – mobile TV – Brown said it makes perfect sense for broadcasters to be on top of that wave, especially considering that mobile TV is exactly what both audiences and stations should want.

“It’s the cultural extension of what we should be as a television industry,” Brown said. “It should go with you wherever you go.”