CNN and NBC See How Other Halves Live

NEW YORK — Jeff Zucker’s friends back East at NBC News joke about the former “Today” show executive producer’s newly acquired, stereotypical Hollywood fondness for his cell phone and car phone that quickly became fixtures of his job as Entertainment President of the network.

Former WB Network chief executive Jamie Kellner, meanwhile, recently quipped to reporters that he has become so committed to news that he has had CNN, one of his charges as the new Turner Broadcasting head, tattooed on his posterior.

News and entertainment used to be separate spheres, but these days there’s a news guy in charge of a big network entertainment division and entertainment executives, Kellner and deputies such as longtime network programming executive Garth Ancier, in charge of CNN. Their different outlooks are shaking up both worlds.

In Hollywood, agents and producers have had to adapt to Zucker’s notoriously short attention span, learning to grab him in the first 30 seconds or else, says one agent. He makes decisions quickly, unlike his predecessor Ancier, who was more apt to ponder changes. Internally, he’ll abruptly cut off debate at meetings and insist that a decision be made.

Those reflexes are a legacy of producing three hours of live television, five mornings per week, at the “Today” show (which expanded to three hours in September). The news business, like sports, tends to attract decisive personalities and Zucker was widely regarded as one of the best, taking “Today” to a dominant No. 1 during a stint as executive producer from September 1994 to December 2000, when he was named to his new post.

“In the control room for three hours you make 200 decisions in a split second, and the rest of the day you make 50 to 100 decisions. You have to have confidence in those decisions. You don’t have time to sit and agonize over it, otherwise you’ll get left behind,” Zucker says of his years running the morning news show.

With so many decisions to make, “you have to have confidence that more of those decisions will be right than wrong,” Zucker says, adding that the biggest lesson he learned from former “Today” anchor Bryant Gumbel, who also came out of sports, is “it’s OK to make a mistake, as long as it’s not the same mistake twice.”

But industry observers also see Zucker’s news training in other areas, such as the launch of the British game show import “Weakest Link,” which dominated the buzz in its first weeks, with hastily added reruns popping up all over the schedule. “Morning TV and news programming are about good storytelling and great promotion, telling people what you’re going to do and then delivering,” says Tammy Haddad, a veteran news producer.

While at “Today,” Zucker was criticized, even by rival “Good Morning America” anchor Charlie Gibson, for at one point focusing relentlessly on the O.J. Simpson trial. “I know internally people used to say, ‘Enough already,’ but I believe when you have something, you just go with it, you just go with the story,” says Zucker of those days. “It’s just about focusing. If you take too many shots, if it’s scattershot, then nothing really cuts through.”

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Zucker’s had to try to allay fears that his arrival will mean a prime-time schedule overly reliant on news and reality programming. He ruffled some Hollywood agent feathers, NBC executives say, when a Jim Carrey interview from MSNBC’s “Headliners and Legends” series, a program which had run probably a dozen times already on the cable news network, was picked up to air on NBC in conjunction with a broadcast of Carrey’s “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”

Hollywood had better get used to the concept of such “re-purposing,” which NBC News perfected under former NBC News President Andy Lack, himself the newly named president of NBC. A Tiger Woods biography from MSNBC ran Friday prior to NBC’s weekend U.S. Open coverage and NBC Entertainment is in talks with the news channel about providing much more such inexpensive, recycled programming. Newsmagazine “Dateline NBC,” meanwhile, is going to produce some material for NBC in conjunction with its Saturday movies in the fall.

“When you first start to try something, not everyone understands what the goal is,” Zucker says, conceding that “some people weren’t crazy about” the Carrey MSNBC interview ending up on NBC. But “re-purposing material is something we’re going to continue to do,” he says. He wants a good mix of programming and “a good entertainment program is going to be on the schedule,” he says, but nonetheless “we’re going to look to NBC News and MSNBC to fill in some holes from time to time.”

For all the news executives that run the place, CNN has in recent years been criticized for reacting too slowly to a fast-changing world. Although Kellner and his team have made a number of quick, well-regarded changes to CNN’s on-air look and sound, vastly ramping up promotion and putting some bigger initiatives in motion in their first three months, many think the radical fixes and sense of urgency that CNN needs to stem audience erosion haven’t yet been seen. A new signature prime-time newscast, for example, won’t debut in the summer, but in September, when it will be up against new season entertainment shows, a crucial error in the eyes of many in the business.

CNN is only one of Kellner’s charges, however; he’s also had to deal with such disparate issues as a new brand for TNT and, just Friday, new management at Cartoon Network, where president Betty Cohen is leaving to take on a project for parent AOL Time Warner. Brad Siegel, president of general entertainment networks for TBS, will absorb her duties. Kellner himself says he’s comfortable with the pace of change, noting that “I would prefer to launch [the new newscast] when it’s ready, it’s more important that it be a big-time newscast.”

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But it’s also harder for entertainment executives to move to news than vice versa. The entertainment community adapts quickly to someone like Zucker because he has the power to buy programming from them; the vigorously protective news establishment, by contrast, regards outsiders with wariness.

Kellner, while talking at industry events about how he has discovered the powerful role CNN’s cameras play in the world, is quick to say in an interview that “I’m not a journalist,” and that he leaves that side of the business to his news executives. He’s concerned, he said, “with how do we schedule the network, make it more interesting, package it, promote it, use the two CNN channels together?”

Still CNN has avoided change for many years, Kellner said, so viewers would know what to expect and while “I certainly would never advocate changing for change’s sake, in the television world I come from, every year we try to change. In the fall, we change the schedule and the ad campaigns. It’s something the audience is very conditioned to expect, and they actually get excited about it. I think that instead of trying to avoid that, we’re going to embrace that more.”

Overhauling the stale CNN Headline News channel is a major priority and when the new look debuts midsummer, Kellner says, “People are going to look at Headline News and go, ‘Wow, that’s a new kind of newscast.’ It may be the youngest thing that we do by a good distance, and we hope it will attract a lot of younger adults.”

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Following Kellner’s orders to hire stars, executives at rival news operations say CNN management has been on an aggressive talent search. Among those hired for Headline News was former “NYPD Blue” actress-turned-rookie newscaster Andrea Thompson, setting off an uproar because nude photos from her past acting work are available on the Internet. Kellner promises more hiring is to come.

Kellner says he comes “from a world where instead of saying the script is the star, where we embrace the idea that there are some people the audience seems to want to watch more than other people. There’s a magical quality some people have when they [appear on] television. It’s something we’ve been pretty good at seeing in the past.”

So far, Kellner says, he’s pleased with the stars the CNN team has found. “Bringing [‘Moneyline’ anchor] Lou Dobbs back was a very good decision. He is a television star.” As for ABC News weekend anchor Aaron Brown, just hired to be CNN’s lead anchor, he “is a favorite of mine for a long time,” since he anchored the ABC News overnight newscast, Kellner says.

But Brown, well-regarded as a strong writer and reporter, is not a household name. Kellner says he has something else, however: “an ability to be a serious journalist as well as having a lighter touch . . . that light touch is that other dimension that we don’t always project, that we should project.”

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Times staff writers Brian Lowry and Greg Braxton contributed to hthis report.

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At TNT, which is promoting a commitment to expanding its lineup of original series, some false starts raise skepticism about the cable station’s strategy. F10