Spin Control…

Broadcasting & Cable’s Marisa Guthrie writes about MSNBC’s HD launch tomorrow and interviews MSNBC President Phil Griffin…

If a news network is going to attract casual viewers and turn them into loyal viewers, it helps to be in the same HD neighborhood as their cable news competitors. MSNBC in HD will launch at different times on different MSOs. It will debut on Cablevision on June 29 and on Time Warner in July. By the end of August, MSNBC HD will be available in 11 million homes.

Being part of the same HD real estate with CNN and Fox News is one thing, but brand awareness is another. “We still have to get our message out,” Griffin concedes. “This year, we’ve just been constantly trying to make noise in a positive way so that people know who we are.”

That din includes new dayside programming: The Meeting With Dylan Ratigan from 9-11 a.m., and an hour hosted by health guru Dr. Nancy Snyderman at noon, premiering with the June 29 HD launch. (Carlos Watson hosts a news headline hour at 11 a.m.)

“We’re changing dayside away from the TelePrompTer headline news to Dylan Ratigan and Dr. Nancy. And we’ll continue to do that less–of people sitting behind a desk, reading TelePrompTers,” Griffin says. “Our audience knows what’s going on. They’ve got BlackBerrys. They’re on the Web. So we’ve got to give them more.”

Riiiiiiight…that’s why FNC and CNN routinely do better on Dayside News than MSNBC by a significant amount…because their audiences know what’s going on.

The reality is, it’s not about “TelePrompTer headline news” being inadequate in today’s information age. I patently reject that assertion, in fact I reject the assertion that headlines is all that cable news does. What happened the past few days with Michael Jackson proves as much. There is still a significant role to be played by it because viewers will still tune in to find the latest news going on because it usually is delivered quicker than you can get via the web or a Blackberry. The challenge of “Teleprompter headline news” is to deliver meaningful news content in an engaging manner. FNC and CNN are doing it better so that’s where the viewers go. MSNBC Dayside News has been on a downward slide for a couple of years now as the network has been forced to work with less and less and the content coming out of it, except in politics which has flourished, has been too narrowly focused and hasn’t been competitive enough with what FNC and CNN are doing.

That’s some pretty good spin going on there. Make the story about the audience already knowing what’s going on so they don’t need to do “TelePrompTer headline news”…rather than acknowledge that NBC isn’t willing, for a number of reasons, to put the resources and effort into MSNBC Dayside (for anything other than politics) to make News competitive with what FNC and CNN are doing. That’s the real story here, which you won’t find anywhere in this Broadcasting & Cable article.

Note to Guthrie: The “The Place for Politics” tagline was created well well before the Obama/Clinton debate in 2008.