News Maker Looks to Tell Its Stories in Silicon Beach

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Regional News Network has built a profitable business in New York producing news shows for clients. The question is whether the model can work in Los Angeles.

The company has set up an outpost in Beverly Hills and hired former Walt Disney Co. executive Jeffrey Thompson to run the local office. He’s in charge of finding partners to distribute RNN’s programming.

If all works out, the company could begin producing local news shows here as it makes distribution deals. The company wants to provide news programming for new media companies hungry for original content.

Thompson’s looking for deals with streaming services and even hardware manufacturers. He thinks Los Angeles is the place to score distribution deals with tech firms, due in part to the burgeoning Silicon Beach scene that is largely focused on media.

“Disruption is allowing for little guys like RNN – broadcasters with premium content – to do what it took millions and billions of dollars of capital to do previously,” said Thompson, the company’s senior vice president of business development.

RNN owns and operates local Kingston, N.Y., TV station WRNN (Channel 48), and also produces news programming for two Verizon FiOS news channels in that area. FiOS offers a package of channels and competes with cable providers. RNN’s shows include current-affairs talk show “Richard French Live.” Infomercials are also on heavy rotation on the local station.

The company offers so-called white label broadcasts – custom products branded with a client’s name – to partners such as FiOS. For example, RNN produces all of the local news programming for the FiOS channels, which are branded as Verizon FiOS 1 and available in New Jersey and on Long Island. RNN reaches about 7 million homes in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The network also produces news clips for partners such as ABC News.

Financially, the deals are structured in a number of ways but include sharing revenue from advertisements.

Thompson hinted that RNN might be expanding the FiOS deal, perhaps nationally, though he wouldn’t give details. He said the base in Los Angeles could build a news operation given the right distribution deals.

But he thinks that there is also a big opportunity to introduce more news channels, similar to its FiOS offerings, to new-media companies, which are trying harder than ever to distinguish their services from competitors, for example, by commissioning original series.

The thinking is that proprietary news channels could be next. For example, Netflix and other streaming services are in the market for original programming and Thompson thinks Internet-connected set-top boxes, such as Microsoft’s Xbox consoles, will want proprietary news channels, too.

The company’s current L.A. office is staffed by about 10 people. Thompson said the size of the company’s expansion in Los Angeles will be dictated by the deals it can reach.

News industry ambitions

RNN faces a number of hurdles in making new-media inroads, said Andy Schwartzman, an attorney and media consultant who teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., and is familiar with RNN’s New York broadcast.

People aren’t accustomed to getting news broadcasts from their Internet-connected set-top boxes, or “over-the-top” boxes, which are more often used to watch movies or play video games.

“Over-the-top has tremendous limitations at this point,” he said. “I’m not sure I see much of an over-the-top business for a small standalone news channel.”

But the company has proved before that it can find new ways to get into households.

RNN grew out of the news industry ambitions of Dick French Jr., an entrepreneur who made his money producing corporate annual reports. He and his family bought a small TV station in the New York suburbs in 1993. The host of RNN’s “Richard French Live” is Dick French Jr.’s son, who is also president of news and programming.

In the late 1990s, French mounted a battle to get cable carriage for RNN’s TV station in New York under a Federal Communications Commission law requiring cable systems to pick up local stations. A New York Times article covering the battle called him the “Ted Turner of the Hudson Valley.”

He lost that fight, but RNN found another way to expand its reach with the FiOS channels.

Now, Thompson said he’s optimistic about RNN’s chances to build its Internet distribution business as streaming services and set-top boxes look for original programming.

“Stay tuned,” he said.

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