SYNDI LEADER LOOKS TO SHAKE THINGS UP

Not long after the death of CBS Television Distribution CEO Roger King last December, speculation mounted as to which of the two co-presidents of the CBS syndication division would ascend to the top job.

Both had solid credentials.

John Nogawski had been president of CBS Paramount Domestic Television for four years before it merged with King World in September 2006.

But Bob Madden was Roger King’s right-hand man going back to the days when King World was an independent publicly traded company.

The uncertainty ended last month with the announcement that Nogawski would be the new president. Madden would stick around as senior executive vice president, responsible for managing CBS’s critical partnership with Sony Pictures Television (Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune) and Harpo Productions (The Oprah Winfrey Show).

Nogawski now sits atop the most powerful company in syndication with shows that regularly top the syndication ratings charts. In addition to Jeopardy!, Wheel and Oprah, the company distributes Entertainment Tonight, Judge Judy, Dr. Phil, Judge Joe Brown, Inside Edition and Rachael Ray.

Given the stable of staples, he could adopt a just-don’t-screw-it-up philosophy, but, in this interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell, he says he wants to reinvent the company for the new multiplatform age.

He says he is looking for new ways to repurpose and promote his shows on the Web, while aggressively seeking the next new first-run hit. And, if one or two of the shows he now has in development comes to fruition, he might even bring CBS back to NATPE.

An edited transcript:

Let’s start with a very broad question: What are the challenges and opportunities for CBS Television in the immediate future?

On the development side, we’re already looking at four different projects for 2009—none that I can go into great detail about yet.

We are also working for some big advances in the online space and we hope to begin showing the fruits of that labor probably around the first of the year. Those initiatives will take us outside our normal box into partnerships with some Web portals and some other major Web sites where we’ll start sharing our content in a way to further monetize it as well as to promote it.

We will also be reorganizing our company—not that anything is broken. But as a result of us having a major change at the top, we have decided that we are going to look at all the different areas inside our company and how we take what’s been working and use it and take what’s not working and kind of clean that up and do things better. Those things will probably hit starting by the fall of ’08 and certainly going into 2009.

How about some details on the four shows that you have in development?

I can tell you that they are all talent related. I can’t really go into any detail beyond that. We’re still in the process of signing up these people and deciding exactly what it is we’d be doing with them.

Oprah is developing a show around Dr. Mehmet Oz and is looking for a distributor. Everybody figures you to have the inside track on that show. Do you?

Well, she’s her own entity. You know, this reminds me of how it was with Dr. Phil. Everyone pitched that show at that time in New York. I walked in behind [Warner Bros.’s Dick Robertson and Jim Paratore. Then, as we were coming out of the room, Roger [King] and Bob Madden were standing there. So it’s the same process.

She and her team are going to look at everybody. The way people probably perceive it is that we might have an inside track just because we have done things with her, but we have nothing contractually that says we get her next venture.

When do you expect a decision on that?

I think they’re looking at trying to do something quickly, a week or a month. It’s probably in that time frame, but, you know, that’s their decision.

Now to your second point, online. You know the networks are all taking their primetime shows and putting them online. Are you thinking about doing the same thing?

Not the shows themselves. We’re really looking at what are the pieces that we’ve either produced or could produce to accent or augment our shows and our brand in the marketplace. So I’m not really into a rebroadcast. That’s where the networks have gone. I don’t really see us as playing the game that same way.

You don’t need to watch 22-and-a-half minutes in order to really get the experience. What people are coveting from our shows is the information that they provide. Look at Entertainment Tonight and all the different pieces that are wrapped up in that show. We can slice and dice and offer the pieces as breaking news or as a kind of Wikipedia of entertainment.