Alex Reid

The recent late night television fiasco that became of NBC’s scheduling screw up has enthralled media industry insiders and TV watchers alike.

On September 27, 2004, on the 50^th anniversary of The Tonight Show, host Jay Leno announced on the show that he would be stepping down in 2009 and that Conan O’Brien would succeed him as the host of the “dynasty”.

In 2009, NBC announced it would give Leno a new one hour long show to be aired at the 10 PM timeslot, literally a prime time move. At the end of May, Leno passed the torch as promised to O’Brien.

Months after the premiere of Leno’s new show in Fall 2009, it was consistently obvious that the ratings for Leno’s show had fallen, by as much as 53% (49% in the Los Angeles market alone). This caused a considerable negative domino effect upon the affiliates’ 11 PM late-night news timeslot ratings. This in turn impacted O’Brien’s The Tonight Show as well as the show he left that followed him, now hosted by Jimmy Fallon.

In January, under considerable pressure from the local affiliates, NBC admitted defeat and announced that Leno would be given back his old timeslot at 11:35 PM but his hour long show would be reduced to 30 minutes and that O’Brien’s The Tonight Show would air at 12:05 AM. It was reported in the media that O’Brien was not consulted by the move and soon issued a press release stating that he would not move and that this was damaging the integrity of the show itself.

While O’Brien made a correct assertion that a show aired at 12:05 AM technically would not be The Tonight Show (competing talk show host David Letterman suggested it would be called “The Tomorrow Show”), O’Brien’s contract with NBC did stipulate that his show could be aired at 12:05 AM without penalty, presumably to allow overruns for sports events.

Legally speaking, at the time, Conan had two options: do the show or quit.

Instead he stayed quiet – a smart strategy no doubt advised by his super agent Ari Emmanuel – on the issue. Sure, he made jokes about it. He had to, that’s his job. But outside the show and in public, he simply said he wouldn’t budge. This forced all eyes to be cast upon NBC for a response. Another thing that helped was the sheer velocity of public support for the underdog, fuelled by the masses online. Facebook groups, physical rallies and other online campaigns called for “Coco” to keep his show with the original timeslot.

Days later NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker threatened to simply take Conan off TV for not only the two and half years left on his contract, but for another year, citing a non-compete clause which was not accurately true.

After two weeks of punishing jokes from everyone in late night TV about NBC, the network agreed to buy out O’Brien from his contract by paying him $33 million (what he would have earned had he stayed) and $12 million to go to his staff (approximately 200 people) some of whom had re-located their families for the show. Sidekick Andy Richter and bandleader Max Weinberg still have to negotiate their own settlements.

The terms of the settlement also bench O’Brien from television until September 1st, 2010. He also cannot make disparaging comments about NBC, appear on other talk shows or do interviews until September. And of course NBC owns all Intellectual Property of the comedy bits that O’Brien performed as part of the show.

Where O’Brien will go is anyone’s guess right now: HBO, Fox, TBS or FX?

Kevin Reilly, the President of Entertainment for Fox, was one of the first to enter the fray last week, suggesting that O’Brien would be “a perfect match” for Fox as they had no late night show offering. It should be noted that Reilly was also “shoved out” of NBC in 2007, after having served the same role within NBC.

Ultimately, however, Fox would have to win over the local affiliates if they want O’Brien to take on Leno and Letterman. As it is, most of them are running reruns that make a substantial amount of money for those stations.

If you’re interested in corporate treachery and the behind-the-scenes story that happened recently with Leno and O’Brien, I highly recommend watching The Late Shift, which chronicles the previous conflict involving The Tonight Show (the one Leno said he wanted to avoid a repeat of). In both cases, then and now, NBC wanted to keep both hosts but ultimately favoured Leno as the breadwinner.

What I found interesting in the movie wasn’t that Leno reportedly hid in a closet to overhear an executive conference call that may or may not have cemented his job; it was the legal tactics involved. Treat Williams wonderfully plays Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz whom Letterman had gone to after finding out that he was being passed over for Leno.

Letterman has a "Godfather" moment with Mike Ovitz in The Late Shift

Letterman was also afflicted with a variety of clauses in favour of NBC (most likely because he didn’t have an agent representing him and simply wanted the job as host in 1982). One of the terms was that Letterman could not approach any other network for 18 months. So Ovitz simply put the word out to have the networks approach him. Letterman couldn’t reach out but he could listen.

Another clause was that NBC had the right to winningly match any offer another network made, so CBS offered a $15 million penalty if they could not give him the a timeslot before midnight, something that NBC obviously couldn’t do without simply giving Letterman The Tonight Show.

Ovitz was indeed on top of the game.

But I think what we witnessed here was more than legal and media wrangling, it was (yet again) the awesome power of the Internet. Sure, other talk show hosts made jokes but only because the TV audience expected it, and journalists wrote article after article every hour on the hour, but again because readers expected it.

People massed together for the underdog, just as they would have for Letterman if the social technology had existed then. And while this may seem like a great embarrassment for NBC, just as it seemed in the 1990s, all this attention may just have more people tuning in. To NBC’s credit, they’ve openly made available most of the parting shots by O’Brien on their web site.

As it is said: all publicity is good publicity, even bad publicity.

Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer introduced a motion this week (PDF) endorsed by Mayor Gregor Robertson that will have the city develop open standards for city documents, maps and other data, to be released online.

It’s a big step for civic transparency.

It’s also a vert smart move for Vancouver because they know that “software companies” will aggregate that data for public usage just like Google Transit did when Vancouver made their bus schedules available in open standard in late 2007. By making the information that already exists (and paid for) available to the public for free, the City is allowing open source developers to connect the dots; effectively crowd sourcing the bulk of the programming work, for free.

EveryBlock is a perfect example of what could come of this. Using data from eleven major American cities, volunteers gather whatever city data is available (definitely not open format) and relate that information (crime incidents, bike rack installations, building permits, restaurant inspections, graffiti clean-ups, etc.) to maps of those cities.

For example, the San Francisco Police Department releases daily information about its daily calls and EveryBlock lists that information “whether they’re made by citizens or police officers and whether they involve criminal or non-criminal activity. Each report says where the incident was reported, when police were called and when the report was entered into the system. Also included is the incident’s type (homicide, noise nuisance, fight without weapons, etc.).

Finally, each report includes the incident’s result, which essentially tells you what responding officers found or did in response to the call. This might be an arrest, the issuance of a citation or a report’s cancellation while the officer was en route.”

But what Vancouver is doing will really expand what EveryBlock has already illustrated with limited and sparse information. Vancouver’s City Manager has already been charged with digitizing archival records, indexing, publishing and syndicating all data using “prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats” – all to be unlicensed.

Reimer suggested that City Council meeting videos will be on YouTube within months.

“They’re tiny little things, but they have so much ripple effect in the community,” she said. “There’s probably a few more thousand people that we could be talking to out there if we could send them videos [instead of written material.]“

A Wikipedia community vote is now underway on migrating to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as the main content license for Wikimedia Foundation projects.

This would remove a legal barrier to reusing Wikipedia content with other free culture projects and vice versa. Wikipedia is currently using the Free Documentation License because Wikipedia was started before Creative Commons existed.

To qualify to vote, you must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15, 2009, using your login profile.

The issue of whether the police have the right to seize your camera is an increasing concern. Canadians were reminded of this last week when a camera belonging to a photographer for The Province was confiscated by Vancouver police.

Jason Payne said that police kept his camera for more than an hour before returning it.

“The gist of it is they were going to seize my camera as evidence in this situation, and that if I didn’t give it up I would be arrested and charged with obstructing justice,” Payne told CBC News.

Mack Pettigrew, a sergeant with the Ontario Provincial Police Department, runs a blog called “A Cop’s View”. In this recent post, he says that the police do not have the right to take your camera equipment or film.

In most cases if you ask someone for their help and request the camera or memory card they will hand it over but it does have to be returned. If the person refuses and does not give their name and starts taking off down the street then it is thought that this is evidence and can be legally taken before a judge with the explanation that there was no time to get a search warrant.

The rationale is simply if the police officers know who you are and where to find you, they can get the necessary paperwork (and approval) from the courts to seize the film (or data). Vancouver police spokeswoman Jana McGuinness echoed this viewpoint, that they do not make it a practice of taking reporters’ cameras because they know where to find them later.

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association’s executive director David Eby said his group will file a complaint against the department following the incident in Vancouver.

“In our opinion, there are only three circumstances where police can seize a camera: One is if a person consents to the seizure; one is if they have an order from a judge; and one is if they are taking the camera in a search incidental to an arrest — if they are arresting someone with a camera, and they are taking that camera from a person during the arrest process.”

Pettigrew agrees, and puts it quite reasonably and I encourage you to check out his blog.

Officers must be sure of their powers, you can not just go and take a camera from someone because they are going to put the video on youtube or sell it to the media.

I was listening to the so called experts on the radio show and found it interesting how they talked about how officers are uncomfortable with the knowledge that their actions are being video taped or pictures taken of them. I for one have no problem with this as it works both ways. We use video tape evidence all the time and as long as you doing your job professionally out on the streets then officers have nothing to fear.

Unfortunately we are human and have lapses in judgement at times and these seem to get caught on video and plastered all over the internet and media. One bad action can paint a bad picture for all of us. So be aware be professional and as a police officer know your powers when it comes to photos and video.

Both sides need to understand their respective powers. There are people – in all professions, on all sides – who go about dealing with situations like this in a very heavy handed way which only creates a greater division in the relationship of co-operation and trust.

I have many friends who work in media and unfortunately because enough police officers have tried to deal with them in a heavy handed way, often with a vague explanation that “it’s against the law” (it isn’t) that many of these people in the media don’t trust the police and that bias is obvious in their reporting, which in turn affects the image of the police to the public at large.

It’s not just a worrisome trend, it’s a cycle that can be prevented if photographers respect a crime scene just as police officers know the limitations of their duty.

Co-operation is a two way street.

A Judge in New Jersey has ruled that the Communications Decency Act exempts the Wikimedia Foundation from liability in a defamation suit filed by a literary agent.

The agent had found her name on a web site dedicated to bad agents and then from there anonymous bloggers had magnified the slander about her which had then spread to a Wikipedia article.

Section 230 of the act states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

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