When cable was high tech.
My friend and former colleague, media professor Jay Newell, sent me this picture and article from The New York Times (July 1982) to remind me how skinny I once was. It’s about youth in the then new media of cable television at the company we worked at (now called MTV Networks), and one line in particular struck me as relevant to today’s new media. MTV executive producer Julian Goldberg says,
”Look at those faces,” he said, pointing to a group in jeans and T-shirts. ”At the networks, some of them would be ‘gofers.’ Here they’re directors, producers, they’re in charge.”
It’s true again today, only now it’s also true in cable TV too. Or, as my friend Mississippi Fred McDowell once said, “Here we are again, doin’ that same ole thing.”
Look around Next New Networks, and everywhere else in the internets too.
You can read the whole article here, here, or below.
(By the way, some of the people I recognize in the photo –not only is the repro bad, my memory’s bad– include Debby Beece, Marcy Brafman, Ken Ceizler, Stuart Cohen, Joe Davola, Ann Foley (Plunkett), Rene Garcia, Julian Goldberg, Alan Goodman, Brown Johnson, Jay Newell, Nancy Palladino, Fred Seibert, Gail Sparrow, Ann Sweeney, John Sykes.)
The New York Times
July 19, 1982
Room At The Top For Youth In High Tech
By GEORGIA DULLEA
It was lunchtime in the studio of MTV, a cable channel with music programs that appeal primarily to an 18-to 24-year-old audience, and the staff, which is roughly the same age, was variously engaged in eating fast foods, playing video games and hanging out on the set.
Julian Goldberg was sitting on his favorite prop - a rattan sofa unearthed in a Greenwich Village basement and upholstered in a busy burst of frangipani. It was the focal point of a set designed with care and kitsch to project a college freshman’s fantasy room. This, he said, was where the video jockeys held forth: ”It says rock ‘n’ roll.”
At 29, Mr. Goldberg is the executive producer of the one-year-old music television channel. He is trim, tanned, well-tailored and bearded. He affected the beard, he said, while working for one of the major networks, as a badge of maturity. Now, as his 30th birthday looms, a hoary age in cableland, he is wondering if it is not time for a shave.
”Look at those faces,” he said, pointing to a group in jeans and T-shirts. ”At the networks, some of them would be ‘gofers.’ Here they’re directors, producers, they’re in charge.”
For the young, the burgeoning telecommunications industry is an electronic sandbox. Fields such as cable television, microcomputers and video games are magnets to a generation reared in the age of ”high-tech rec.” It is here that many of the so-called Baby Boomers - 76 million of them born between 1946 and 1964 - are getting their first taste of the world of work. Different Set of Values
While the impact of hordes of young workers is most dramatic in these emerging fields, it is felt as well in some more traditional areas of the communications business, such as public relations and publishing. Here and there it is possible to find departments within a company or even companies themselves where virtually everyone - from the boss to the porter - is under age 30 or 35.
How do their values differ from those of their parents? Markedly, according to Yankelovitch Skelly and White and other researchers who are watching the baby boom generation as it climbs the career ladder. Among the trends they cite are these:
* Less corporate loyalty and more willingness to move to other companies and other careers as new fields open up.
* More resistance to job transfers, especially among two-income couples for whom a move would mean the loss of one partner’s job.
* A sense that the paycheck is not the only reward for work, others being fringe benefits such as time off and, more important, self fulfillment.
* A need to know exactly where they stand both in their own jobs and in relation to the many peers competing with them for promotions.
* An addiction to the fast track. Baby boomers are used to instant gratification, according to Landon Y. Jones who profiled them in his book, ”Great Expectations.” ”The work ethic of previous generations, the idea of keeping the nose to the grindstone and at 40 you make partner and clean up isn’t there,” he said. ”They’re fighting hard to get it right now.”
Growing up with technology and prosperity has given this group a sense of increased options. ”There’s not this lifelong commitment to a Procter & Gamble,” Mr. Jones said. At the same time, he has observed ‘’some disillusionment” both because of the competition and the economy.
”What you see now,” Mr. Jones said, ”is a lot of 30- to 35-yearolds who were hoping to be on the fast track and maybe they were for a while, but now there’s a bottleneck. Too many Indians and not enough chief jobs. There’s a lack of upward mobility so they settle for a lateral move.”
In traditional fields, this may be a problem. Not so in young cable companies such as Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, whose corporate parents are American Express and Warner Communications and whose fortunes rest in the hands of some even younger than the bearded Julian Goldberg.
A Senior Vice President
For example, Robert Pittman, 28, who broke into broadcasting at 15, as a radio disk jockey in Mississippi. He wasn’t thinking about a career at the time, but trying to make some money for flying lessons. He then moved on to stations in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, attending college in each state, never getting a diploma. He joined Warner Amex three years ago and today, as senior vice president for programming, he runs its movie and music television channels.
Like many of cable’s wunderkinder, Mr. Pittman works 12-hour days and many weekends and talks about ”being in a business where nobody’s right because they’ve been here 50 years, because everybody started yesterday.” Concepts such as corporate loyalty or job security strike him as relics of the Depression. ”I didn’t grow up in bad times so I don’t understand job security,” he said flatly. ”I think I’m real good so I never worry about getting fired. All I worry about is winning.”
Despite such professions of independence, there is evidence that baby boomers need a certain amount of hand-holding. Ann Clurman of Yankelovich Skelly and White, which does annual surveys on values and attitudes toward jobs, said: ”Managers are having to listen to a lot more from young workers. It’s not only, ‘I can’t stand the person in the next office,’ or ‘I want a promotion,’ it’s ‘I’m having trouble at home.’ ”
Miss Clurman sees this need as part of a larger one to be viewed as individuals. ”Workers have always needed feedback, but this generation needs more,” she said. ”They’re so anxious to know how they’re doing that even telling them something negative is better than not telling them.”
This comes as no surprise to Robert Dorf, 33-year-old owner of Dorf M.J.H., a public relations agency he founded at the age of 23. In addition to its Manhattan office, Dorf now has branches in Los Angeles and Toronto and a staff of 45, only five of whom are over age 35.
So eager are they to know their place in the pecking order, Mr. Dorf said, that performance reviews are given every eight months instead of once a year. Offices and desks are measured with an eye toward comparative sizes. Business cards are crucial.
Importance of Business Cards
”It sounds silly, but it matters,” he said. ”The minute somebody gets a new title, they rush to the office manager to order new business cards. One account executive even paid to have her own cards printed when she heard our printer was shut down for 10 days.”
It does not sound silly to Mara Bovsun, 26, an industrial editorial director at Dorf. She started there two years ago, fresh out of graduate school, wearing jeans, and has since acquired a closetful of ‘’success suits” and a habit of working overtime. ”They told me this would happen as I got older,” Miss Bovsun said, adding that the next rite of passage would be her 30th birthday. ”Like everyone else here, Big 30 depresses me.”
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