Who missed a trick?

Journalism is an ephemeral trade, and the passing of time can sometimes be cruel to even the most acute of commentators. It might seem harsh to point out an exemplum… but it’s also quite amusing.

So take a bow, James Harding, business editor of The Times, who took delight two weeks ago in chiding ITV’s headhunters, The Zygos Partnership:

The Zygos Partnership, ITV’s headhunters, seems to have its own head in the sand. The commercial broadcaster hired Zygos months ago to draw up a list of candidates after Charles Allen’s belated departure. But Zygos has not deigned to contact almost any of the potential leading candidates. Now, there are some excuses for this. Perhaps Zygos is looking to wow investors with a surprise choice. Quite understandably, ITV wants to conduct the recruitment process behind closed doors.

Nonetheless, ITV and Zygos have been humiliated. The perceived inactivity has left the company vulnerable to a takeover: NTL, the cable operator, has leapt on a leaderless company. More than that, NTL has embarrassed Zygos by showing it how to do its own job: Sir Richard Branson and Bill Huff, two of NTL’s leading shareholders, as well as Jim Mooney, the chairman, have in a few short weeks lined up a potential new chief executive in Michael Jackson, the former chief executive of Channel 4. …

There are a couple of lessons for headhunters. One is that recruitment may need to be secretive, but sometimes the process has to be explained in public. The other is that executive search can provide an opportunity to canvass for ideas as well as people. ITV and Zygos have seemed so intent on pulling a rabbit from the hat that they seem to be missing that trick.

Ain’t hindsight grand?

ITV makes the Grade

Michael Grade’s shock transfer from BBC to ITV is (pace the Norfolk Blogger) good news for television. The main commercial channel desperately needs a big hitter, a guy who understands budget lines - but, just as importantly, understands programming.

As I’ve argued before, good television is not determined by having one public service broadcaster funded by a licence fee, but by having a plurality of channels competing to drive up standards.

Before my boss, Tim Gardam, became my boss, he was a senior TV executive. A couple of months ago, he delivered a lecture in honour of Donald Baverstock, a legendary controller of BBC television.

It’s well worth reading in full, but this section will suffice for now. Not least for its devolutionary vigour, and spooky prescience:

If you look at the sad plight of ITV today, and recall its confident beginnings, its
seems to me that ITV’s mistake, around 2000, when faced with the tidal wave of digital competition, was to misunderstand where its residual power lay. Its sense of its public self, equal in stature to that of the BBC, was in fact its greatest asset.

As late as the 1990s, News at Ten was better than BBC News, ITV drama more adventurous, ITV Arts scheduled earlier in the evening than the Arts on BBC 1, ITV ran authored documentaries with equal impact. But, in facing the frightening competition of multi channel television, ITV chose deliberately to disavow its public inheritance, not to modernise it. In doing so, it diminished itself in the public’s imagination and in public esteem.

ITV did need to create a single brand, but I think it made a strategic mistake in seeing its regional identities across Britain as a problem not an opportunity. Think now what an unrivalled asset those old ITV local loyalties would have been in the online world where success depends on building up a close identity with one’s users. The ITV regional brands would have created extraordinarily powerful portals driving viewers through the TV screen to online networks targeting different communities of interest in Yorkshire, Granadaland, Tyne Tees, and across England. Local advertising revenues online would have replaced lost television advertising. …

Is it too late for ITV as a whole to recover its public stature? I don’t think it need be but I don’t think it wants to. Its public impact, as authentic as the BBC’s, used always to be its greatest asset, and one no new rival can hope to supplant. The modernisation of those values is a task which Lew Grade and Sidney Bernstein would once have relished to take on.

Okay, so ITV has landed Michael, not Lew, Grade - but close, and a cigar.