'NYT' Fully Masters New Medium of Television
While we remain unable to get TimesSelect to recognize us as home subscribers — a kindly Times tech dude emailed some tips for fixing things, but they didn't work — we're thrilled to see that the Gray Lady, flummoxed though it might be by this ten-year old medium, has at least finally mastered a half-century-old one.
Deputy managing editor Jon Landman pointed out to his newsroom staff earlier this afternoon that the Times television operations cleaned up at the Emmys last night, earning as many statuettes as HBO and only one fewer than the big three. The big Timesian winner was, of course, "The Secret History of the Credit Card," which we don't know how we missed.
Landman's full, kvelling memo is after the jump.
Successful TimesSelect access, on the other hand, appears to be much, much further away.
From: Jonathan Landman
To: Newsroom
Subject: TV Awards
Sent: 09/20/2005 02:36 PM
We admit it. The New York Times is not a TV juggernaut.
Yet.
The ol' 1,000-mile journey begins with you-know-what, and we're more than a few steps down the road.
The ratings for our two-and-a-half-year-old channel, Discovery/Times, are growing at a double-digit pace. Its offerings are about the make the cover of a Sunday newspaper TV guide (a first). Profitability is no longer an accountant's fantasy. And last night our people grabbed three Emmy awards, the same number as HBO and a haul plenty big enough to claim a place at the table with the big guys. (ABC, NBC and CBS had four apiece.)
"The Secret History of the Credit Card," produced by The Times for PBS's Frontline, won the News & Documentary Emmy for best investigative documentary. It was reported by Patrick McGeehan (then of Bizday), Nelli Kheyfets Black and Lowell Bergman, and produced by Nelli Black and Dave Rummel, under the supervision of our director of documentary television, Ann Derry. As Dave said in his acceptance remarks, it was a tough subject to make appealing on television, but that's what we're all about.
Discovery Times Channel won two Emmys (from five nominations, more than any cable network of any size except the History Channel and MSNBC).
They were "Reporters at War," a four-hour series produced by Jon Blair and featuring John Burns, among other war correspondents, in the category of best historical programming, long form, and "Declassified: Nixon in China," a historical program commissioned by the Channel from ABC News Productions, for outstanding individual achievement in research. "Liberia: An Uncivil War," which earned industry attention for the channel with its success at film festivals around the country, had two Emmy nominations, as well, and "Word Wars," about competitive Scrabble players, was nominated in the category of outstanding cultural programming.
The Times even had a finalist over the weekend in the entertainment Emmys, for best nonfiction program. It was "Last Letters Home," which was produced by HBO based on the Op-Ed page letters from soldiers in Iraq, and supervised for us by Jane Bornemeier.
So please raise a glass to all those folks, along with Lawrie Mifflin, who runs our in-house TV department, and Vivian Schiller, boss of Discovery/Times. They may not be big, but they're damn good.