The Four Stories Every TV Fan Must Read Today: 04/06/2015

Here are the four stories that are today's must-read pieces for anyone interested in the television or media business.

1) Why should anyone care about the broadcast TV anchors? That's the question Frank Rich asks in New York Magazine and his conclusion is that the role has changed a lot since the days of Walter Cronkite:

Some two months into Brian Williams’s six-month banishment from NBC for making stuff up, it’s not known whether he will ever return to the anchor chair at Nightly News. It’s also not known whether anyone cares. The understudy who stepped in, Lester Holt, is leading in evening-news viewership as Williams did. No one is complaining that Holt’s résumé includes three years co-hosting the Westminster Dog Show but lacks those narrow Indiana Jones escapes from danger, whether in Iraq or New Orleans, that his predecessor conjured up to prove his gravitas. No one is fretting about whether Holt sullied the dignity of an anchor’s higher calling when he did a cameo on 30 Rock. No one seems to notice that Holt is continuing as anchor at NBC’s Dateline, the trashy news­magazine whose signature feature is "To Catch a Predator." 

2) It's only a few weeks until the annual broadcast network upfronts and BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield argues (free registration required) that they are becoming increasingly irrelevant:

In a world where there is an ever increasing number of ways to reach consumers with video advertising on mobile devices that is not limited to 30 second spots (in which storytelling is challenged), the entire concept of the annual television upfront appears dated.  Why should brands or advertisers lock-in such significant portions of their advertising and marketing dollars so far in advance?  Brands and advertisers would appear to be increasingly well-positioned to wait as more mobile/online video options not only create new ways to reach consumers at scale (ie. Periscope and Meerkat did not even exist a few ago), but should also help drive down the price of most television advertising.  We believe high quality video advertising inventory is going to explode over the next couple of years. There will always be irreplaceable video advertising inventory such as NFL Football, NCAA Tournament or live events such as the Oscars and Olympics, but why would you want to buy any of the following six-ten months in advance for example: ABC Tuesday Nights, Discovery on Thursday nights or VH1 any night of the week?

3) The announcement that South African comedian Trevor Noah had been chosen as the new host of THE DAILY SHOW caught a most fans of the show by surprise. Noah isn't well known in the U.S. and there were a lot of concerns that Noah's sense of humor wasn't up to the task of hosting such as beloved show. But as Atlantic's Douglas Foster found when he talked with some South African comics, Noah has a reputation for being a comic who can bridge the differences between very different audiences:

Noah is a post-Apartheid comic who specializes in mining material from melancholic episodes of his own harsh upbringing. His mother, Patricia, is a Xhosa-speaking black woman from Soweto township who fell in love with a white man from Switzerland in the early 1980s, a period when cross-racial romance was still illegal. Noah was born an outsider’s outsider—a light-colored boy in a black community who had to learn to cross multiple lines of difference, including language, color, and culture. Noah put it to a documentary filmmaker this way: “I’ve lived a life where I’ve never really fitted in in any particular way. Even now, people still debate on what I am. People say, ‘Oh you’re black,’ And then someone will turn around and say, ‘But he’s not black, he’s coloured.’ And then coloured people will say, ‘But you’re not coloured.’ And then when you get older it’s cool because you’ve lived everywhere and nowhere, and you’ve been everyone and no one, and so you can say everything and nothing and that’s really what affects my comedy and everything I say.” Perhaps his greatest strength as a comedian is his ability to serve as a translator across all these intersecting lines. In a polyglot world, he’s made it his trademark to explain ourselves to one another.

4) If you're a fan of rare and/or forgotten TV shows, then you are going to love the new web site RerunCentury. As Bob Poulson writes on Medium, the site makes it easy to view and/or embed every TV comedy that has been uploaded to the Internet Archive's Moving Image Collection:

The concise interface sorts the thousands of classic TV videos at Internet Archive into guides based on show title and year of original broadcast. Video links are embedded at RerunCentury with no account required, and no video advertising apart from any historic commercials intact within the original broadcasts.