I suppose this is as good a place as any to tell you about John Higgins, my friend and fallen comrade. Higgins (and that's what everyone called him; that's how he answered the phone) wrote for many years for the trade publication Multichannel News. Then he moved to Broadcasting & Cable, where he worked until he died last Thanksgiving week of a heart attack at — this is the hard part — 45 years of age.
His stock in trade was the scoop. Not the scooplet, the piddly little stuff you see on blogs and websites, or the mountain-out-of-molehill that certain national newspapers put out there from time to time. No, our man Higgins knew everybody in the cable business and knew how to read their balance sheets and SEC filings as well as they did. Things did not escape his attention. As Judy McGrath, the longtime MTV executive, mused after his death, when you got a phone call from Higgins, you never quite knew if he was calling to shoot the breeze, or if he had the goods on you.
That was Higgins' other specialty — the schmooze. You can't get the scoops without the schmooze, and Higgins did it so well. Higgins was my secret weapon when I went to New York for the upfronts. I stayed with him, saving my company buckets of money (although I would always take Higgins out at least once on Tony Ridder's dime) and gaining the companionship of one of the very few journos I opened up to completely.
Which is kind of funny, because Higgins — an aggressive reporter known by all for his gruff exterior and by most for his soft interior — was not exactly the guy you opened up to. If you were a little too vulnerable with him, he might laugh inappropriately in your face. And yet, you somehow knew that he cared. As I learned last December, a lot of journalists considered John Higgins to be their best friend. "In many ways," B&C editor Mark Robichaux said at his memorial, "he was my brother more than my own brother."
Higgins would introduce me to people at parties and I would make valuable contacts and overhear useful chatter. Since he was trade and I was consumer, he had nothing to fear from me. In fact, the first time we met he gave me a scoop. In 1994 I started writing a newsletter about late night television, pretty much on a lark. No business plan, no VC, just a desire to write and the revelation that I did a pretty good job working this little corner of the popular culture. Higgins found me. He prided himself on making new discoveries, whether it was an up-and-coming punk band or hip-hop artist or a restaurant that hadn't gotten written up yet in New York magazine or a website of interest. That was me (well, back then it was a mailing list of interest; same difference). He was in Chicago for a trade show and called me up. We had drinks downtown, and he told me Greg Kinnear wasn't coming back to the NBC "Later" show, having a movie career to tend to full-time. I didn't bother with a second source. After all, here was this pro telling me plausible truth, and he spoke with such casual authority, nonchalance even, how could he making this up?
I suspect a lot of folks were intimidated by Higgins just because of the confident vibe he gave off. You wouldn't know it to look at him. He was my height but much bigger. He wore black suits that hung off his big body like drapes. One time he and a friend, also dressed in black suit and white shirt and necktie, strolled into a restaurant on a sunny day. Their sunglasses were still on when the clerk looked them up and down and said, "And what would the Blues Brothers like today?" And without missing a beat Higgins shot back, "Four fried chickens and a coke, ma'am." That was Higgins, a man of character who was a character.
After he died, hundreds of people packed into the MTV Lodge overlooking Times Square to pay tribute to him. CEOs sat next to journalists and marketers. (Here's a photo gallery I put together of pictures taken by myself and B&C's photographer. That's me in the photo at left, talking to B&C's Jim Benson and Forest Evashevski.) Many kind and even more hilarious things were said about Higgins that night. I think it's the first time I've been to a memorial with that many speakers and they all had something original to say. "The qualities that made him a great researcher also made him a great friend," said Marc Rosenthal. Afterwards, many a glass was raised in his memory.
You probably didn't know Higgins, who was well known in the trade but unknown even to most of my colleagues in TV criticism. I still think about him a surprising number of times every week. WWHD, I sometimes ask myself, much like I did when he was still just a phone call away. I'm thinking about his especially this week. He and I lived the upfronts all week together, and now I get to do it by myself. The big cable industry show is earlier in May, in Las Vegas. I got an email after this year's show from Paul Rodriguez, who runs the online division at the National Cable & Telecom Association. "The first cable show Higgins misses and there's a murder next door and a battery charge," Paul wrote. He would've loved getting the scoop on those as well. Above all, I miss his generosity and his love of life that he modeled for so many of us. He died of a known heart condition and on his own terms, no doubt about that. But to echo what someone else said: I thought we were going to grow old together.
Well, back to the show. Sorry, I've been meaning to write that for months.
CBS streamed its upfront presentation over the Internet this year for journalists who couldn't make it to Carnegie Hall or the L.A. and Chicago closed-circuit simulcasts. As short as they made the show, next year they could give it out on a flash drive.
Start to finish, the CBS upfront clocked in at 1 hour 8 minutes, beating Kevin Reilly's time on the NBC upfront by a cool 17 minutes. The head of Midwest sales for CBS said afterwards, "That's gotta be a modern record for a CBS presentation." Oh, so that's it. Now suddenly the guys are having a contest to see whose is the shortest?
It’s useful to be reminded once a year that networks don’t sell shows to audiences; they sell audiences to media buyers.
This week on KMOX, Paul Harris and I talked about the ABC show "Traveler," which may go down as the last serial-drama casualty of the 2006-07 season. We also talked about this week's "Lost" announcement and reviewed several "bubble" shows that may not return
in the fall, including "Friday Night Lights" (pictured); "Law &
Order," "Veronica Mars," "Shark," "The Unit," and others.
