By
JOHN OLESKY (BJ, 1969-96)
Channels,
the Beacon Journal’s weekly television guide, was born in January, 1981. It died in March,
2014, another victim of the overwhelming expansion of technology.
MBO,
PD and NFL played roles in Channels’ birth.
Editor
Dale Allen needed to come up with an MBO (Management by Objective) under his
name, even though MBO effectiveness had been discredited by 1980 everywhere
except by Knight Newspapers. The Plain Dealer unveiled its TV guide that
embraced the burgeoning cable channels lineup.
And
quarterback Brian Sipe was having a banner year for the Cleveland Browns that
brought him the Associated Press’ Most
Valuable Player award and incredible TV ratings in Northeast Ohio when his team
played.
And
I was brought aboard to succeed George Davis as Television Editor because this
new TV guide world was a complex technology, and I was the BJ newsroom’s
electronics coordinator.
We
three wise men – Allen, Features Editor Jim Nolan and myself – put our heads
together and decided the perfect time to launch Channels would be on Super Bowl
Sunday, 1981.
Ah,
the best laid plans of mice and men . . . Sipe threw a pass instead of the Browns going for a game-tying field goal against the Oakland Raiders (the famous Red Right 88
play that was intercepted), lost the AFC title game. So Channels would start without a push from having
the Browns in the Siper Bowl, as we were going to call it.
I
spent six months, with Nolan (who never used a vowel in his memos; who knows
why) demanding new page proofs with every mockup, even if his only changes were
to add punctuations. Hey, it brought me more than $10,000 in overtime pay in
1980, which would be equivalent to $30,400 today. And it paid for the Jones
family with its Classic Pools company on Nimisila Road at Manchester Road to
gouge a massive hole in my Cuyahoga Falls side yard and put in “the pool that
Channels built.”
The
technology still was crude, so it took someone skilled in formatting to handle
Channels. And it turned the remainder of my career from been-there-done-that boredom
to fresh excitement.
When
the weekly alphabetized movie listings were longer than the space we had for
it, I concocted a string-of-macros format for scrubbing out plotlines for films
that had only 1- or 2-star ratings. This slowed down the BJ computer system so much
that, after outcries from the copy desk, I had to wait till after the 3-star
deadline before I could implement it.
This
slowdown was so predictable that, when Knight-Ridder honchos came to the BJ to
see if the Akron newspaper REALLY needed more powerful mainframes, Allen
stopped by my desk and said, “Don’t bring us to a halt, but slow down the
system.” I did. A convinced KR gave the BJ the money it wanted for a more
powerful system.
It
cost the BJ about $400,000 a year to have an outfit in Glen Falls, New York
print the first Channels. Later, a Medina firm was used because they would do
it cheaper. In recent years, the BJ began printing Channels in-house and saving
even more money.
Now,
by not putting out a television guide at all, the BJ has reduced the cost to
zero.
When
the BJ began printing Channels, the cable channels and local stations’ network programming
fit onto one page. Today, Time Warner Cable has channels that go from 1 to
1,810. And a cable guide on your TV that tells you what’s on them all, even if
the changes were made a day ago.
There’s
just no way that newspapers can compete with that. So the BJ doesn’t any more.
RIP,
Channels.
To read the explanation of Channels’ March march
to death by Rich Heldenfels, the third of three editors who wrote for Channels
under my guidance (after David Bianculli in 1981, and then Mark Dawidziak,
still at the PD), click on http://www.ohio.com/blogs/heldenfiles/the-heldenfiles-online-1.258385/mixed-notes-monday-1.472114
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