The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 82

82 THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE MARCH 24, 1991 Church enters cable with missionary zeal MONITOR Continued from page 73 penses run as high as $50 million a year. The big question: Will the church be able or willing to fund these projects until they break even if they ever do? Already there are signs of finan the Discovery cable channel began airing the church's flagship news program, the nightly "World Monitor," anchored by former NBC correspondent John Hart. Like the church's other television ventures, Hoagland has said "World Monitor" must ultimately turn a profit to survive. Meanwhile, Hoagland reversed plans to bolster Monitor newspaper circulation and beef up the staff. The move, which some employees said violated earlier promises, prompted departure of more than 60 people, including editor Katherine W.

Fanning and, by many accounts, most of the respected editors and reporters. The number of pages was circulation plummeted to the current 130,000 and, when color printing was introduced, the deadline was set back to 10 a.m. for the following day's paper. it 1- i iinmaum i A 1 Rentals Sales Support Delivery Setup for Meetings Presentations Large Screen Projectors for Computers VIDEO 1 9" 35" Monitors LCD Panels BONTRONCSI NEXT TIME, CALL 1-800-322-5039 FAX: 617-623-5039 Craft Your Own Suiccss Baby Boomers Have Grown Up, Fueling A Craze For Crafts. launch, far below the 7 million that most cable networks require before) they debut When and if it does get into peo-; pie's homes, viewers have to turn it' on.

And Monitor Channel may lack the sharp focus that is necessary to distinguish it from competitors Hoagland says that, in this era of. niche marketing, the aim of the. Monitor Channel will be to put the" news in depth and in context, much' the way the Christian Science Monitor has traditionally done. In fact the network is meant to be a video i version of a combined daily and Suns day newspaper, a complement to the. "wire service" style of Cable News-Network.

But analysts say this is a fairly broad "niche" and one already covered by programs such as the "McNeilLehrer News Hour" even ing show on PBS and "Nightline" ore ABC. The Monitor Channel's dis-; tinct identity may be lost on cable operators, who will decide whether; to buy the show. "Some of what they're doing sounds like CNNy some sounds like the Discovery; Channel and some sounds like what PBS does," says Richard Aureliop president of New York City Cable, a unit of Time Warner. "They'll have to make a compelling case theyYa not duplicating services already! available." '2 Another problem: the flagship "World Monitor" nightly news' program won't be available on the network because of a multiyear coni tract with Discovery Channel. i Hoagland says that despite the! obstacles, the channel hopes to achieve 20 million subsribers by 1995, the level at which advertisers' begin to become interested.

(Advern tising revenue will be limited, howevv er, by the church's restrictions ori commercials for alcohol and pharma- ceutical products such as Based upon proposed subscriber fees, the channel would receive an-i nual revenue of about $10 million at this level, still far below estimated television production costs. "World Monitor" alone costs an estimated $30 million a year to produce. i) Although Hoagland says mem- bers' long-term support of the news-t paper over the years shows 'the" church's staying power, they may be less willing to support an undertake ing where potential outside investors receive financial information denied them. One group of dissident church members is planning to sue the church to learn how funds are being spent Douglass sharply states that under church doctrine, "members are out of order if they ask for more information" an interpretation corn-tested by dissidents. Still, Hoagland's sense of mission Ben Franklin Crafts and serious investors are taking advantage of this opportunity.

Now, for the first time ever, the nation's most aggressive franchisor of craft retail stores is offering exclusive rights to own and operate multiple Ben Franklin Crafts Stores. Ben Franklin Crafts Stores feature hard and soft crafts and supplies, including framing, florals, yarns, fabrics and artist supplies. GLOBE RLE PHOTO Critics say John Hoagland's sense of mission may be getting the better of his business sense. easy at all. Although local cable operators reach more than half of America's 93 million television-equipped homes, most don't have the capacity to offer any more programs because channel capacity has been reached.

And because of the credit crunch and uncertainty about whether their rates will be regulated, most operators aren't investing to increase capacity. Although fiber-optic and other technologies are expected to boost the number of available channels into the hundreds, the bottleneck won't' ease for at least two to three years, analysts say. This means that even if cable operators want to buy the Monitor Channel they probably don't have room for it unless they remove other programs. And although the Monitor Channel "seems to be a pretty class act, it's not the kind of program that youH take something else off to put on," says Larry Carlton, head of cable operations for Denver-based Telecommunications the nation's largest cable operator. Besides existing programs, the Monitor network is competing with more than a dozen proposed or recently launched programs for the available spots.

These include proposed science fiction and cowboy networks, which will offer television show reruns and movies. Even more formidable competitors are a comedy network and a real-life courtroom network, both the product of marriages between two competing networks that couldn't make it on their own because of the tight market, despite backing from cable giants such as Time Warner Inc. Given this environment, the Monitor Channel is shooting for 2 million subscribers by its May cial strain. Top church officials have been barnstorming the country nearly every weekend, urging members to double their contributions. And Monitor Television is seeking outside investors, a move that dissi dent members say runs counter to church founder Mary Baker Eddy's mandate that the Monitor's aim be essentially if indirectly religious.

Meanwhile, the Monitor network will be launched into a market glut ted with other new specialized networks offering such popular fare as science fiction shows, comedy and real-life courtroom drama. These networks will compete for distribution on the few open channels avail able on cable systems across the country. The current bottleneck won't be relieved until new cable lines are laid or technology increases the number of programs that can be distributed on one line advances that are several years away. "This is the roughest time there ever been for new cable services," says Peggy Ziegler, executive editor of Cable World, a trade publication. Hoagland admits that the next several years will be rough going.

But he says critics of the church's television ventures are essentially doomsayers who lack vision. "The same arguments 'How can you do could have been made in 1908," when 88-year-old Mrs. Eddy stunned church officials by ordering them to immediately start a daily newspaper, he says. "You don't sit around and debate this kind of thing forever. Either you do it or you don't" The Christian Science Monitor -and its balanced, reflective news re porting unaffected by religious doctrine for years has defined the First Church of Christ, Scientist for the outside world.

In fact, news reporting arguably has become the primary mission for a church that doesn't proselytize or undertake major charitable projects. "One of humanity's needs is self-knowledge," says Netty Douglass, who heads up the church's media activities. Though widely respected, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Monitor wasn't widely read circulation rarely topped 200,000 and has been called the newspaper of record for school libraries. For years it has lost money, more than $250 million since 1960, according to church officials. So Hoagland, when he arrived at the Monitor in 1983, began to look at ways to broaden the Monitor's outreach and capitalize on its well- known name through television and radio.

"It's a mistake to confine the idea of the Christian Science Monitor within a daily newspaper," says Douglass, whom Hoagland brought on as his deputy. "It needs wings. It needs legs." First tentatively, then more ag gressively, the church moved into electronic media. It launched a short-wave radio network to broadcast around the world. It bought WQTV, Channel 68, a local television station, and began producing first a monthly, then a weekly, and then a daily news program.

Then, against the advice of sever al consultants concerned about the costs, Hoagland decided to produce in house a full range of public affairs programs for Channel 68. In 1988 (EgS Welcome the the cut, of of is -Bi To obtain further information about this first time opportunity, please contact Wayne Pyrant, Vke President of Sales at (800)669-6413. As the church became more involved in broadcasting, questions were raised about the qualifications Hoagland and Douglass, neither whom had experience in the broadcast industry. Hoagland, whose father had once run the church's publishing activities, is a former Central Intelligence Agency employee who ran his own international consulting firm before assuming his father's former post. Douglass, who like Hoagland is a Christian Scientist, had held various positions at the Monitor's publishing arm since 1968.

To counter their lack of experience, they have hired numerous outside consultants, Hoagland says. Some of these say they were fired for trying to curb and channel Hoag-land's ambitious plans. One of those Bob Klein, of Los Angeles-based Klein a marketing and promotion consultant for electronic media. "Seldom have two people who knew less about the electronic media made more far-reaching decisions about product and finance than these people did," he fumes. Critics both within and outside the church charge in particular that they made unrealistic or possibly even misleading cost and revenue projections to justify the broadcast ventures.

Richard O'Regan, the former executive producer of the award-winning weekly program, "The Christian Science Monitor Reports," says the church's decisions to go to a nightly news show and, more recently, to launch the cable network were "wishful thinking made electronic." But others, noting that the church needn't generate the immediate returns required by investors in commercial ventures, says Hoagland has taken a broader view of the church's media mission. "He really is a visionary guy," says Jim Lawrence, of the Boston consulting firm LEK Partnership, one of those who advised the church against producing its own range of programs for Channel 68. "He was seeing down the road and around the corner where the rest of us were seeing the edge of the building." His most ambitious vision was unveiled last May, when the church announced plans to launch Monitor Channel, a 24-hour news-oriented cable network. Although the nightly "World Monitor" program reaches 350,000 to 500,000 viewers on the Discovery network, Hoagland says a round-the-clock network was the natural culmination of the church's broadcast plans. Now all that's needed is to get the network into people's homes and onto their screens.

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In "50 Years Ago Today," for instance, host Lincoln Bloomfield flips through a big library volume of 50-year-old Monitors reviewing the news of the day, his perusal occasionally interrupted by old newsreel footage. Occasionally a paragraph from an article will be highlighted on the screen, reminiscent of overhead projector presentations in elementary school A recent program examined British-Greek relations during World War II and how a US Supreme Court decision affected civil liberties in the 1940s. "Today's Monitor" provides a walk-through of the day's Christian Science Monitor newspaper. In a re cent program, host Delores Handy Whether You Need 4, 8, or 17 PPM Printing, Copley Has the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Solution For You as Low as $839 on the HP LaserJet IIP. The New HP LaserJet IIISI i.j 17 ppm LaserJet printing 23 Two 500 sheet paper tray tor htgti volume printing fmJ 80,000 page per month capacity Mm loc networking Epson LQ-510 24-pin dot matrix printer with true LQ output and three resident fonts this 800 number and the book "How To Sell Your House in a Buyer's Market" Local ratings for Channel 68 indicate that the in-depth news coverage of the Monitor Channel may not be an immediate hit nationwide.

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