Paul Karpowicz: Meredith Broadcasting President and TVB Chairman

Paul Karpowicz

Paul Karpowicz is the President of Meredith Broadcasting Group, overseeing Meredith’s 12 television stations that reach nearly 10% of television households across the country and one radio property. He also oversees Meredith Video Solutions, the company’s new in-house production unit.

Karpowicz began his career at LIN Broadcasting Corporation in 1976 with WIL Radio in St. Louis. In 1979, he moved to the then Pulitzer-owned WLNE-TV in Providence, RI where he was promoted to VP/GM. Karpowicz returned to LIN in 1989 and spent five years as President and General Manger at WISH-TV in Indianapolis. In 1994, he was named VP of LIN Television. He joined Meredith in February 2005.

Currently, Paul serves as Chairman of the Television Bureau of Advertising Board. He also serves on the AP Broadcast Advisory Board, the Broadcaster’s Foundation Board, the CBS Affiliates Board, the Maximum Service Television (MSTV) Board, the NAB’s Television Board and the Board for Broadcast Music, Inc. Karpowicz is also the former Chairman of both the CBS Affiliates Board and the Television Board of the NAB. He has also served on the executive committees of the Rhode Island and Indiana Broadcasters Associations.

Q. Many people would think that TV stations have fewer potential synergies with magazines than with newspapers. What opportunities have you found for TV and magazines to enhance each other?

We have just recently announced the development and launch of a product called Better.TV; which is an online video site. It’s really a true collaboration between the print assets and the television operations so that we are able to create a wide variety of video channels using content and ideas and inspiration from things that appear in the magazines.

Q. You are still relatively new at Meredith. What have you changed since taking the job?

Meredith is a great company with a tremendous portfolio of television assets. I think if anything what I’ve brought to the operation has been some systems for creating accountability across all the departments. So we do quarterly sales meetings with the general managers, general sales managers, national sales managers, local sales managers and the rep so that everybody that is involved in the sales process knows that we are going to be reviewing this every 13-weeks. I think that degree of accountability is something that is very valuable and I think it has served us very well over the past couple of years.

We do the same sort of thing with our news directors as we finish up a rating period. We then circle back and talk to the GMs, news directors and promotion managers to discuss what worked and what didn’t work and to make sure we’re following the research and using the recommendations that are coming out of our consultants.

We really just want to make sure that we have a plan as we approach our news operations. I’ve tried to develop a sense of accountability across all the departments.

Q. You have both broadcast duopolies and duopolies based on airing a second network as a digital multicast. Are the opportunities equivalent?

I think they are. I think there are a couple of reasons they are a little bit different. One is when you’re doing a duopoly based on a digital channel you’re not able to go back and negotiate as strongly for re-transmission consent money as opposed to having a second full power signal in the market.

Beyond that once you kind of get past that and have negotiated your cable clearance there is nothing that says that that is not equivalent to a digital channel, there is nothing that says that’s not equivalent to a full power duopoly situation. So, no, I think they are pretty close.

Q. What are your plans for your digital multicast options and the opportunities in general?

I think it’s still a wide-open field out there. First and foremost we want to make sure we focus on high definition and make sure we provide the strongest possible high definition signal that we can because I truly believe that high definition is a unique selling proposition that we’ll have as television stations. Then, given that there is still going to be some spectrum left over I think in our markets we’ve done things like Telemundo on a digital tier. We’ve done My Network TV on a digital tier. We’ve done weather channels so I think there are a lot of opportunities there. Then as you look ahead there are some very interesting things that are happening in mobile applications and there are some companies that have mobile devices.

Q. We did an interview with ION Media’s David Glenn and Brandon Burgess on their OMVION mobile system, which I’m sure they’ve spoken to you about.

Yes, those are the kinds of things that are going to be pretty interesting and people have a chance to evaluate those. It does use spectrum so you’ve got to weigh whether that mobile application can be as cost effective and is the best use of spectrum versus other things that you might do in your local market—i.e. a local high school sports channel; weather channels, traffic channels, 24-hour local news, things like that.

Q. Your portfolio includes a single radio station, an AM in Saginaw, MI. Do you have any interest in acquiring more radio stations?

We would like to but realistically, the Saginaw situation is somewhat unique. Based on the market size it’s feasible to survive with a single radio station in that market particularly because it’s attached to the television station. Any more in our large markets it would be pretty difficult to single out one radio station that we could get at a reasonable cost and change the format, turn it into an all news thing and run it in conjunction with the TV station as we do in Saginaw.

Q. So that would be the plan?

That would be the plan. If we were to find the right radio property that matched up in our markets we would be very interested in that but, and we have looked at a few unfortunately the pricing has not been at a level that we wanted to participate.

Q. Why did you want to be Chairman of the TVB?

I think this is a very interesting time for TVB and I hope I’ve got a lot to offer. The TVB ePort initiative, which is really front and center on the TVB agenda, is a very, very important initiative.

The concept there is to just make the buy/sell transaction process for broadcasters as easy as possible so that in an era and during this digital transition whereby we’re going to be selling our multicast channels, we’re going to be selling web sites, we’re going to be selling our regular stations, we’re going to be selling all this stuff. We want to create a platform that makes it as easy as possible for agencies to do business with us.

This is a great time to be a TVB with that initiative plus all the other things that TVB stands for relative to the value of local spot television and, again, during this digital transition I don’t know that there’s been a more interesting time in television history where we actually convert from one system to another as we go from analog to digital. This represents a bigger change than when we went from black and white to color. This is going to be a pretty neat time and I’m really very happy to be part of TVB right now. It’s a great organization, a great group of
people over there and I think we can accomplish a lot.

This transition represents something that is equally as monumental for the viewer to go from just regular analog to a high definition picture. You know it’s pretty dramatic.

Q. There is so much change going on right now with the actual content itself—where it’s being delivered to, how is it being delivered? The TVB is sort of a locus for all of that, to link it up with what the advertiser and agency needs are.

Yes, because we don’t want to go into the future with all these great technologies, all these great innovations, and then not have a way to sell it. So it really is incumbent upon us as the TVB and people in the industry to say okay we’ve spent the money to build out our digital facilities, we’ve built out our web sites, we’re creating tons of content, we’re creating real viable assets here but if we don’t figure out how to make these as attractive as possible to the agencies we’ve lost the war.

Q. What are your immediate goals for Meredith?

We’d love to grow the group in terms of our coverage of the United States. We’re about 10% now. We’d love to get larger. We want to continue these initiatives with the publishing side as we’ve done with Better.TV and extend the viability of these very strong Meredith Brands, Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle across as many platforms as we can whether it’s VOD or digital or online or whatever. I think we as a company we are uniquely positioned to try as many of those different platforms as we can. I guess that’s an area that we’ve identified as a major goal.

Q. TV remains heavily dependent on the Automotive sector for advertising and on Political for a huge inflow of cash every other year. Should TV worry about its dependence on those two sectors?

Well it’s wonderful to have them but we also understand that it puts you in a very difficult cycle. We all are spending a tremendous amount of time trying to develop new categories, trying to develop new local business and that’s really what you can do. I mean this last off-season election was just unprecedented in the amount of political that was out there and as we go forward it looks like political will continue to be just an enormous player in the television world but it does again in those off cycles it presents a challenge. I don’t know any broadcast group out there that hasn’t had those meetings where they’re saying okay we did a lot of political last year what are we going to do this year to offset that? Everybody scrambles and you do the best you can.

Q. How fast have you been able to grow Internet revenues? Do you see Internet operations becoming a major cash-flow source for TV companies?

We’ve been able to double our Internet revenues over the past couple of years. Now having said that we were probably behind where we should have been so we were coming off a relatively small base. We do expect that this is going to be a very high growth area for us going forward and will represent a significant
amount of our total business. Now you can’t let the tail wag the dog. We still have even if it gets to a point where it represents 10 or 15% of our business that we still have to protect the other 85% of our business; which is regular spot TV. So, yes, we absolutely will continue to put a lot of investment and resources into that
area and we do anticipate that we’ll see very, very good growth but we’re not going to lose sight of the big prize, which is our regular spot business.

--by Carl Marcucci

Editor’s note: this is archived from 6/07