MMC's senior director, Hank Price, who is general manager of WXII-TV12 in Winston-Salem, N.C., is the subject of a new broadcast leadership profile - the first in our MMC Faculty Focus series on the remarkable people who teach in MMC's programs and work with us on research. The report, "The Price of Owning The Market," can be downloaded here. What follows is an excerpt of that report, written by Tracey Robinson-English.


WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - In this city of southern comfort is a guy who has led four powerhouse TV stations and supervised one of the highest-profile (but unsuccessful) attempts to transform TV news, at WBBM in Chicago.

He's now in the enviable and unusual position of running WXII-TV12, an NBC affiliate, that his group owners want him to use as a laboratory for the changes needed to compete in the digital age - a station that on his watch has risen from the ratings dump to the number one slot in every category.

WXII's makeover is catching the industry's eye against a backdrop of incredible sameness that is crippling television news nationally.

"One thing that makes WXII such an interesting case study is that it is almost impossible to move from No. 3 to No. 1 in local television markets today," says Michael P. Smith, executive director of the Media Management Center at Northwestern. "That takes strategy, leadership and talented people to make it happen. When all three are in alignment, good things happen. I think the key factor in making WXII number one in all time slots is a clear and compelling strategy and a leader who is a true builder. Hank has a picture of excellence and the energy, drive, enthusiasm and spirit to make it happen. Those leadership skills also transcend to the classroom, where he gets excellent evaluations."

With some zany twists infused into the newscast mix - like hiring a comedian to rap traffic reports - and reporters working every angle to dominate breaking news on and off turf, WXII created a smart media strategy that differentiated the station from its competitors.

Not only that, Price teaches the next generation of broadcast leaders at both the Media Management Center and Kellogg School of Management.

Meet Hank Price, president and general manager of WXII and senior director of the Media Management Center, one of the gurus of media management.

Over the span of his 37-year career in television, Price has developed a knack for transforming television stations into news leaders including Gannett-owned KARE-TV in Minneapolis, with the risk-taking attitude of a maverick and a large capacity to shift gears quickly to meet the demands and realities of the market. At 59, he is one of the nation's most revered television news executives, a survivor of the changing tides of television news and a passionate champion of change.

"I'm a believer in television," said Price. "TV's not going away. It's going to be incredibly important, especially with high definition. I'm just not a believer that there's room for as many people doing it."

Price is on the front lines of a revolution in the television industry. Faced with a devastating predictability among stations across the country and viewers with more media options, the television industry has lost the loyalty of audiences nationally, he said. Survival in the digital age of choice means forgetting the past and shaping the future in spite of a great deal of uncertainty.

Price's insights echo a new Media Management Center/Medill study, The Local TV News Experience, based on a survey of about 1,400 local television news-watching adults in the Chicago metropolitan area and a content analysis of 46 randomly selected night-time news programs on five of the main commercial broadcasting networks: WBBM CBS2 Chicago (news at 10 pm), WMAQ NBC5 (news at 10 pm), WLS ABC7 (news at 10 pm), WGN-TV (news at 9 pm) and WFLD-Fox 32 Chicago (news at 9 pm). (Download the report at www.MediaManagementCenter.org/localTV.)

The main findings from the survey:

• Local television news has seen competition for audiences increase as mass audience fragments, appointment viewing disappears, and Internet usage explodes.
• Viewers have very similar experiences with the five local news programs. That is, no program caused its viewers to react or feel differently than the others.
• Overall, the stations are more similar than they are different in the content of their night-time news programs.

Situations similar to Chicago's reverberate throughout the country, causing more and more viewers over time to disengage from local TV news and increasingly to connect to other forms of media for news and information. In other words, the television news industry nationally must find ways to win back and reconnect with viewers based on what viewers want and need.

To download the complete case study, The Price of Owning the Market, go to:
www.mediamanagementcenter.org/research/price.pdf.

Price teaches in MMC's executive training for broadcast executives, the NAB Management Development Seminar.


More MMC Faculty Focus profiles