Friday, November 4, 2005

Todd McInturf / The Detroit News Local TV stations dedicated more than 30 hours total Wednesday to uninterrupted coverage of civil rights legend Rosa Parks' funeral.

Parks' long funeral hits TV pocketbooks

Local stations lost ad revenues but aren't sorry they stuck with extended coverage.

By Mekeisha Madden Toby / The Detroit News

Error processing SSI file Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

In unprecedented coverage, local TV stations dedicated more than 30 hours combined to civil rights legend Rosa Parks' funeral.

Such attention came at a price, as all three local news stations, WJBK-TV (Channel 2), WDIV-TV (Channel 4) and WXYZ-TV (Channel 7), broadcast the funeral without commercial interruption. WDIV and WXYZ were on the air 11 commercial-free hours, from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m., while WJBK's coverage went uninterrupted from 10 a.m. until 6:30 p.m.

WDIV lost about $80,000 in ad revenue and production costs, estimates Steve Wasserman, the station's vice president and general manager. WJBK and WXYZ chose not disclose what the coverage cost them.

But, Wasserman says a financial loss does not eclipse what it took to give Parks' passing its due.

"This is what local television is all about," Wasserman says. "You had all three television stations devoting countless hours to the funeral of a legend.

"It was important and the right thing to do."

The stations expect that the funeral coverage drew high viewership, though actual ratings numbers were not available Thursday. But unfortunately for them, the high numbers won't help financially.

"It's the equivalent of the Detroit Pistons having record attendance numbers the same day it decided to give tickets away," says Matt Friedman, a partner at Marx Layne Marketing & Public Relations and a former TV news producer for WDIV.

It will be about two weeks before Dana Hahn, WJBK's vice president of news, knows how much her station spent on the unexpected production costs, she says. She did say Greater Grace Temple's feed for all the stations from its own production department cut down costs for her station and the others.

The funeral itself was expected to last four hours, but an hour's late start and a grocery list of last-minute speakers extended the service three hours, forcing the stations into a journalistic and economical conundrum: Keep rolling or pull out?

Ultimately, WDIV and WXYZ stayed on the funeral and later the procession to the cemetery until 8 p.m., when they cut away because of obligations to air network primetime programming. WJBK pulled out after the service ended at Greater Grace because it was required by Fox, its parent network, to show "Geraldo At Large." All three stations kept crews at the cemetery, however, to record the final moments of the burial ceremony -- such as release of the doves -- and aired them during their final nightly newscasts.

Local coverage of Wednesday's funeral doubled the time TV stations spent covering former Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young's 1997 service.

Local TV pundits believe this occasion was worthy of the stations' commitment to the community over the dollar.

"If ever there were someone deserving this type of ceremony and coverage, then it was Rosa Parks," says Mort Meisner, president of Mort Meisner Associates, a talent placement firm based in Huntington Woods. Meisner also was a news director at WJBK for eight years.

He questions, however, whether the stations would have covered the whole ceremony had the managers known in advance how many hours full coverage would demand.

"After the stations decided to have wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral, how could they pull out?" Meisner asks.

Grace Gilchrist, WXYZ's vice president and general manager, says "It would have been disrespectful to break in the middle of her funeral with a commercial break."

Some WXYZ viewers wished the station had taken a programming break. The station received a handful of calls from faithful viewers of the "Oprah Winfrey Show" wondering when their favorite talk show and its omnipresent host would return.

"It was a highly anticipated sweeps episode where Oprah was focusing on children in poverty all over the world," Gilchrist says. "We'll air it another day, but right now, we're trying to figure out when."

But most of the public probably appreciated the three stations' coverage, WJBK's Hahn says.

"Viewers weren't watching thinking cost. They were watching and they will remember," she says.

You can reach Mekeisha Madden Toby at (313) 222-2501 or mmad den@detnews.com.