NYT: NBC News May Get New Chief

[DeepModem Mom]

NBC News May Get New Chief
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: May 26, 2005


Neal Shapiro, the president of NBC News since 2001, has told his superiors at the network in recent days that he would like to leave his post, two senior executives at NBC Universal said yesterday.

Though the request was characterized as coming at Mr. Shapiro's initiative, it comes just weeks after Jeff Zucker, president of the NBC Universal Television Group, helped engineer the dismissal of Tom Touchet, the executive producer of the "Today" show, in response to that program's rapidly falling ratings lead over its principal rival, "Good Morning America" on ABC....

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In one sense, Mr. Shapiro, who was named to his current position in spring 2001, has presided over an immensely successful and profitable division of NBC. On his watch, "Today," "NBC Nightly News" and "Meet the Press" have all been consistently rated No. 1 in their respective time slots. Also on his watch, NBC executed the first anchor transition on any evening newscast in more than two decades, as Tom Brokaw yielded the anchor desk to Brian Williams in December. Mr. Williams's broadcast has yet to lose a week in the overall ratings since....

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It certainly did not help Mr. Shapiro that the work that helped win him the news division presidency, his leadership of the "Dateline" newsmagazine franchise, has become increasingly irrelevant. In his previous position, as executive producer of "Dateline," Mr. Shapiro oversaw as many as four hours of regular prime-time programming a week. Next season, "Dateline" is scheduled to be broadcast just two hours a week.

Over the last few years, the public appetite for such shows - on CBS and ABC, as well as on NBC - has waned. Last week, the chairman of CBS, Leslie Moonves, announced that he was canceling the Wednesday spinoff of "60 Minutes" because of low ratings. On NBC, the Friday edition of "Dateline" has drawn an estimated 8.9 million viewers each week since September, a loss of nearly one million viewers when compared with the same period during the last television season. The Sunday edition of "Dateline," broadcast opposite the highly rated main broadcast of "60 Minutes," has also lost ground this year....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/business/media/26nbc.html