Subject: Viewers Will Get To Place Orders For News Stories
Date: Published: 7/13/90 (82 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    Marketing & Media:
    Viewers Will Get
    To Place Orders
    For News Stories
    ---
    CNN's Interactive Program
    Will Be Shaped by People
    Voting Via a 900 Number
    ----
    By Michael J. McCarthy
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    ATLANTA -- Putting a Burger King twist on the news, Cable
 News Network is telling late-night viewers:  "Have it your
 way."
    In a first for television news, viewers of CNN's midnight
 newscast later this month will be able to vote for some of
 the news stories they want to watch by dialing a 900 number.
    The so-called viewer-interactive newscasts, on its
 Newsnight program, will open with the top six stories of the
 day in 25-to-30-second summaries.  In the next five minutes or
 so, late-night couch potatoes can dial the 900 number and,
 for 95 cents a call, make their picks.
    CNN will then run the top vote-getting story, which may be
 several minutes long, in the first half of the hour-long
 show, and the runner-up during the second half.
    "The viewer votes right now with a (remote) control
 device," said Joshua Loory, Newsnight's executive producer.
 "If there's a story on the air that they're not interested
 in, they're gone before you know it."
    Some media industry people were unenthused.  "I'm glad I'm
 retired," said Reuven Frank, a former NBC News president, on
 hearing CNN's plans.  "It's an abdication of their
 professional responsibility" to judge what is important for
 the audience to know and to present it in an interesting way,
 he said.
    CNN, a unit of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., disagrees.
 "We are still going to produce the majority of the newscast.
 But we're going to give our viewers a choice on two stories,"
 Mr. Loory said.
    Others believe the public may gyp itself, by voting
 against important stories and gravitating to the less
 hard-hitting ones -- like the recent CNN feature on the
 Alabama store that buys lost luggage from airlines and
 resells it to shoppers.  Or the gripping piece on the health
 dangers of tying a necktie too tight.
    If the vote-TV approach works, said Sanford Socolow, a
 former executive producer for CBS Evening News, "every local
 station in the country will pull something like this."  He
 added:  "If you've got a limited news budget, which most
 (local) stations do, and you have one story on city hall and
 another on some bear loose in the woods, it's sad, but
 understandable, that people will want to hear about the
 bear."
    For his part, Mr. Loory says he isn't certain which
 direction Newsnight's viewers, in some 260,000 households,
 will take.  But "my gut tells me they'll go after some of the
 harder stories," he said.
    The whole idea was the outgrowth of the 900 telephone
 polls that have become popular on television news shows.  Some
 recent Newsnight polls have focused on AIDS, civil rights and
 controversial rap groups.  The show even used its 900 poll
 once to ask viewers if 900 polls had gotten out of hand.  Some
 60% said yes.
    The 900 phone number approach to news selection bothers
 Lawrence K. Grossman, senior fellow at the Gannett Center for
 Media Studies and a former president of NBC News.  A special
 interest group, he said, could organize a 900 number campaign
 and distort the presentation of the news.
    And although NBC Nightly News doesn't have any plans to
 copy the new CNN format, the network show's executive
 producer, Steve Friedman, said, "It's kind of interesting and
 fun.  It's democracy in action."

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