RIP, Channels

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