Broadband and cable channel ABC News Now is using a lemon of a celebrity interview to make some promotional lemonade.
The botched interview between actress Holly Hunter and “What’s the Buzz?” host Merry Miller, could serve as a J-school textbook case of what not to do in a broadcast.
Miller commits every error imaginable, from garbling the phrase “Academy Award-winning actress” and doing awkward retakes to failing to listen to Hunter’s answers.
Miller, a former Miss Dallas and a producer for the late movie reviewer Joel Siegel, gives the wrong month for the premiere of Hunter’s new TV show and even mis-identifies her employer network, advising viewers to tune to NBCNews.com for more coverage.
Outtakes of the disaster, which never ran on the ABC news Now channel, were leaked to YouTube in July and have received more than 1.3 million hits to date, as well as numerous links in bookmarking networks such as Digg and extensive coverage on blogs such as Gawker.com.
So ABC News Now has opted to spin the bad publicity with a contest to find new hosts for the “What’s the Buzz?” segment.
“Millions of people have watched [Miller’s interview] and winced, and many have said, ‘I could have done much better!’” a statement from ABC News Internet Ventures said. “Well, ABC News Now heard you.”
The company challenged audience members to send in audition tapes to replace Miler as a “guest host” and has now mounted submissions from three finalists on its Web site, ABCNews.go.com/ABCNewsNow. Visitors can view the videos, then vote online for their favorite candidate to anchor the feature. Voting will end on Sept. 30.
ABC News Now producers have also done PR to try to explain what some blogs have referred to as Miller’s “Hindenburg of an interview.” In a story run on the channel on Aug. 1, a week after the outtakes took over YouTube, executive producer Jessica Stedman Guff explained that Miller’s audio earpiece had failed, preventing her from hearing Hunter’s satellite-relayed answers to her questions.
No official explanation was given for Miller’s mis-identification of the network. “It was just a blooper,” she was quoted as saying. “It happens. Why do football players stumble sometimes?”
News reports quote Stedman as saying that Miller will still conduct interviews for the channel, but not live.
ABC News Now offers hourly news updates and original lifestyle programming—including a third hour of “Good Morning America” produced for the channel, over cable, streaming video and on mobile phones. It was originally launched online as a subscription service in March 2003, charging $39.95 for an annual subscription or $4.95 for a month.
In January 2006, ABCNewsNow.com added an ad-supported “day pass” that lets viewers access all content for free for 24 hours in return for watching a single ad in its entirety.
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