Recently laid-off staffers at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, the LA Times and The Seattle Times might want to pay attention: a buyout does not necessarily mean a slow, painful march to journalistic insignificance. Sometimes, it’s just the thing to reinvent your career.
Last November, after more than 20 years as a TV critic at major newspapers, David Bianculli found himself out of a job. The Daily News, where Bianculli had worked for almost 15 years, failed to renew his contract for reasons both financial and creative (more on that below). When it was first suggested that he start a Web site, he discounted the idea as “so LA.” But as more and more people recommended it, he made the move — despite having no Web experience.
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The site launched on Nov. 5, 2007 — the same day the writers strike began.
Called TVWorthWatching.com, it focuses on reviewing and discussing quality television — not on panning the latest reality crap. “It says something when the domain name TVWorthWatching.com is still available,” he said. “It’s an underreported area.” The site includes daily recommendations on what to watch, a frequently updated blog, DVD and TV reviews, and the highly entertaining TV jukebox, which plays WAV files of classic TV themes.
This isn’t Bianculli’s only gig — he writes a column for Broadcasting and Cable, frequently subs for Terry Gross on the National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, and will start teaching full-time at Rowan University this fall. Now that several other critics are finding themselves without a paper or magazine to call home, and since other newspapers as a whole are having trouble adjusting to the Internet, Bianculli’s foray into online journalism is an experiment worth watching.
Name: David Bianculli
Position: TV critic
Resume: NPR’s Fresh Air (1987- ), Broadcasting & Cable (2008- ),
TVWorthWatching.com (2007- ), New York Daily News (1993-2007), New York Post
(1987-93), Philadelphia Inquirer (1983-87), Akron Beacon Journal (1980-83), Ft.
Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel (1977-80), Gainesville Sun (1975-77)
Birth date: November 15, 1953
Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA
Education: B.S. (Journalism), M.A. (Journalism & Communications), both from the University of Florida, Gainesville
First section of the Sunday Times: “Week in Review” – specifically, Frank Rich
Favorite TV show:Lost, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Guilty pleasure: Sleeping
Last book you read:Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
As your own editor, how do you keep yourself from going overboard after being a slave to column inches and deadlines for so many years?
I’m not as caught up in the length — I realize it’s bottomless, but the excitement for me being my own boss is if I think something is a good idea, I don’t have to justify it, and I can do it. There are ways where it’s good, and there are ways where it’s bad. The bad way is I think ‘Well, during the writer’s strike, I’ve got to write all of the late night talk shows.’ That’s an additional six hours a night on top of everything else I’ve been doing just to stay current. Had I still been working for the New York Daily News, I wouldn’t have done that. There would have been no reason to, because it wouldn’t have gotten in the paper. Figuring out what to do with my freedom has been one of my biggest challenges — not to go too far.
Has your critical voice changed?
No matter what paper was employing me, I’ve always written for myself. I’ve never changed my voice or tone to match my employer. So I don’t change the way that I’m writing, but I have found that there’s a freedom in that whatever I want to write about, I can. That minimizes the pain of writing for yourself and being under-compensated.
What’s your readership like, and how does that affect revenue?
At this point, the number of readers you need for an ad base is like 60,000 readers, and this past month I was below that, at 30 [thousand]. I was larger before. It’s like when you try to lose weight and you don’t look at the scale; I haven’t looked for months. The daily traffic is between one and 3,000. It’s still what I consider very low based on what I was used to at the Daily News and what I hope it will grow into. The people who have it as favorites and signed up for the email blasts is up to 1,000-2,000 readers, but I haven’t emailed anyone. I don’t want to annoy anyone!
One thing I didn’t expect that’s become apparent now that it’s nine months in: the readers that I do have are gratifyingly intelligent. The comments, the responses — especially when I’m asking for opinions — has been really heartening.
Did you sit down and write out a business plan?
I had a two-point plan, and it turns out the third point is the one that came through first, and was the only one I hadn’t considered. The first thought was, ‘There’s only two ways of making money.’ If I’m reviewing things — box sets, CD, theme songs — and I put a link to Amazon.com and they go straight from my site to buy it, Amazon gives you this four percent kickback. It’s nothing if you do it with 100 people, it’s not much if you do it for a 1,000, but if you grow exponentially, after a while that’s a good thing. I don’t expect that, but I wanted to review the stuff anyway, so I figured [I’d] at least implement that.
The other thing was the potential for advertising. There’s a division that should always exist between editorial and advertising. I’m doing it partway the right way in that no advertising will ever influence what I write or don’t write. But where I [thought I would] allow the wall to be semi-permeable is [by not accepting] any advertising for any show or network that I don’t support.
The funny thing is I got my first ad and, in terms of setting my ad policy, I asked my readers. They had a different plan than I did. They weren’t concerned. I was saying that my idea was I wasn’t going to accept any advertising from any show I didn’t like and seeing if they would trust me as readers, but the feedback I got from them was that if ABC was foolish enough to advertise Wipeout on my site, then I ought to take the money and run.
The third way that I haven’t thought of is that the Web site would advertise me. I hadn’t considered that. I thought ‘Well, I’ve been around.’ But the Web site has people seeing me in a different way. Now I’m writing a weekly column for Broadcasting and Cable and doing two or three blog things for them, and all of it will refer to the Web site. A couple of times, I’ve been interviewed by [Fresh Air] host Terry Gross, and she was kind enough to mention the Web site and ask me about it, and horary for public radio. Every time there’s a mention like that, there’s a big spike in people who check it out.
| “I would love for this site to be the Gilligan’s Island for castaway TV critics.” |
Is it difficult to get into the business aspect of marketing the site after having spent so much time in editorial mode?
I’m right at the phase where I’ve got to find someone to do marketing and advertising. Since I’ve launched, I’ve focused on nothing but editorial. My focus was to have something new on the site every day, having a reason for the readers to come back, and to build a reputation — then to deal with my everyday life, and if I have time, do the other stuff. [PBS’s] POV came to me and wanted an ad, and it’s now running for the second month. Now I can go to places and say look, this is a place where people advertise. In my career, I have a lot of friends at the networks that I could ask, but I don’t want to go to them. I want someone else to — but I don’t know who that is. If it’s not me, it’s easier to say no, but I suppose in these economic times, it’s easy to say no to everyone.
It’s still very early. I don’t know if I’m being too patient, but I always thought it was a two-year launch. I had to prove to people that I would still be here, and then have enough of a body so that if a cable network wanted to advertise, they could go back through one or two or three months and see what I was about.
When you left the Daily News, you were quoted as saying they gave you an offer you couldn’t accept.
Yes, a “reverse godfather.”
A lot of people were talking about the decision in financial terms. But in some interviews, it also sounded like content-wise there were some considerations in play.
I think it was a mixture of things. I tried not to take it personally, and you look at what’s happened [to] so many TV critics of my era with decades of experience. This is happening to a lot of us, where people are saying it’s cheaper to get someone else or we want to go into a different direction. Or the history that we know maybe doesn’t resonate with the readers we want to attract. Diplomatically the best thing I can say is, where I was trying to work it out so that I could stay, it really did became clear that where the paper was planning on heading: ‘No.’
Do you think mainstream criticism is going down a snarky route, being nasty for the sake of nastiness?
Mainstream stuff not so much. I see a reliance upon more of that in stories. The reviews, the TV Critics Association as a body I think is still in pretty good shape. It’s just really nobody knows — no one in the television industry, no one in the newspaper industry –knows what’s happening next. A friend of mine, Jon Storm, (who is still the television critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer), [and I] came out of some news conference where they were talking about how to attract young people to evening newscasts, and he looked at me and said, “We’re an industry that doesn’t know what it’s doing, covering an industry that doesn’t know what it’s doing.” Newspapers are all trying to do the same thing — attract the next generation of readers and in some ways repelling the readers they do have and not playing to their own strengths. On the Web site, I’m really finding different ways to do what I know how to do, and hoping there’s still enough people who want it.
So what is that?
I can see how you’d be befuddled. It’s presenting a clear and hopefully authoritative point of view and being as journalistically objective as possible.
| “I didn’t know at the time where I was going to land, if I was going to land, I was basically out of a plane with no parachute. My approach, rather than curl up in a fetal position and die, was to say, ‘Here are all the different things I can pursue.'” |
What has the response been to your site?
It’s been really gratifying. One of my favorites: two months in, one of the people writing in just complimented the other people who were writing in. They said, I just wanted to say, ‘I like your site and everything, but I really like the people who write back to you, because they write in complete sentences and have interesting thoughts.’ And I went back and looked over the letters, and I’ll be damned, there was no shorthand and they knew how to spell and I took that for granted, but you don’t see that on a lot of sites. That’s been really gratifying, and I think some people have been following me in one place or another for 15-20 years, and they thought it was fun to come along. It’s still young – it’s a mom and pop operation and there’s no mom, so it’s still coming along.
Do you have technical staff?
I have two people that are helping me do the site — one guy that’s designing it and one guy that’s done all the computer magic. Those poor guys… The designer is Eric Gould — an architect in Boston. He never designed a Web site before. He’s an old friend of mine, and I was talking to him about the difficulty in finding a designer. I’d found one that was willing to do in six months for 40K, one who couldn’t start for three months and would do it for 30K. And it was like, this is not what I’m imagining. I talked to [Eric] and said I guess if I’m going to have to find a designer, I’m going to have to come with really good visual aids as to what I want. What I do is the equivalent of cave paintings and stick figures, and I do things on my computer that aren’t anything like real web sites.
I sent him a couple of pages, and he said, ‘Let me play with this.’ And what he sent down a few hours later looked like a Web site page. I called him up and said, “What do I have to do to get you to not do this just to show it to someone else, but just to do this for me?”
He’s really brilliant, but he doesn’t know anything about computers. So I found another guy who’s brilliant with computers but doesn’t know anything about design — Chris Spurgen. His day job is programming with Disney Web sites, so I talk to him and he says, ‘Sorry, I had to spend the day putting up a Hannah Montana Web site, and I got a million and half hits in the first 20 minutes,’ and its like, okay, now back to mine.
Are you learning the technical end?
I’ve learned the technical stuff to put up the photos and put up the article. It’s annoying, but it’s going okay. It’s not what I was trained to do, not perhaps the best use of my time, but if you don’t get it up there, the readers won’t come back.
Why a Web site? Why not just teach, or write a book, or find work at another paper?
In retrospect, that’s a very good question. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn’t know at the time where I was going to land, if I was going to land, I was basically out of a plane with no parachute. My approach, rather than curl up in a fetal position and die, was to say, ‘Here are all the different things I can pursue.’ I don’t know what will happen, I don’t know what will become a reality, I don’t know what will become satisfying, so I went in a lot of different directions. And the Web site was one, where perhaps because it was more under my control than most, was realized. It won’t be smart unless it’s a financial success, but I’m proud of it.
Between getting another writer and getting the advertising, it’s evolving. What I should be doing right now is getting the word out about the site and getting money into the site. It should be a high priority. I’m hoping to find an ad director or marketing director in the next week or two. I’d love to get ads while I still have an ad to show them that I have an ad.
How much time are you spending on the site a day?
A minimum of two and a half, three hours a day, It’s more than I expected. I’m writing a minimum of two stories a day, five days a week and doing all the uploading.
Everything to me is triage. There’s still a couple of elements that aren’t there, but most of them are. When I started I envisioned a site that was so much grander than it should have been. It’s not just one page, it’s 10, 12, 15 pages. I thought it would be no problem to do an interview once a month, but I finally got rid of that because I didn’t have time to update it. Instead, I had the space to bring on a new writer — and I hope to add two or three more.
You recently brought on writer Diane Werts — how did that come about?
Diane took a buyout at Newsday. She was another New York critic like I was, and wanted to keep her voice out there. She just filed her first report from the Television Critic’s Association, so the site is breaking news. As more and more critics take buyouts or get downsized or get fired or get “reverse godfathers”, there will be more people who will want to do things and keep their voice out there. I know who the good voices are. I value their experience and talent. If they want to write for me, if I can get the money in the site and the ad revenue going and compensate them, I’d love to have them. I would love for this site to be the Gilligan’s Island for castaway TV critics.
Kate Dailey is a freelance writer and former editor at Men’s Health and Women’s Health.
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