• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, September 6, 2005

Broadcast television, newspapers, and middle-aged demographics don't sound like ingredients for an elixir in the competitive TiVo-iPod-Google media world.

But Tribune Co. and The WB are looking for a remedy to their troubles with just these old-world elements. This past weekend, Variety looked under the hood at Tribune, while The New York Times sought to answer for the WB.

Tribune has been struggling with local advertising revenue for its local TV stations and newspaper outlets. The newspaper has its own slowing advertising history revenue, growing just 1 percent last year. Recently, Tribune--which owns Newsday in New York--announced major layoffs, including a reduction of its New York City bureau.

For Tribune's TV stations, some ad decline is expected--TV stations typically get lower ad revenues following a big presidential election year and following a Summer Olympics.

Linking the two companies--Tribune owns 22 percent of The WB, and all its stations are WB affiliates. A partial contributor to the Tribune's fall has been The WB, which lost a significant amount of viewers last season versus the year before.

For its part, The WB is looking more like an old-line television network--not a new, spiffy, young viewer channel of a few years ago. It has now grown to a size where it says it can't rely on young female viewers to carry the network. New managers--including Garth Ancier, WB's chairman, and David Janollari, WB's president of entertainment--believe older-skewing shows such as "Just Legal," with the 55-year-old Don Johnson as a quirky lawyer, are a remedy.

Risky strategies, for sure. Still, you would be surprised to know that in all the stock market malaise of a few years ago, Tribune, since 2000, outperformed Walt Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and Comcast. And while The WB is heading older, the steady Jerry Bruckheimer is producing "Just Legal", and Marta Kaufman (formerly of "Friends") is in control of the network's new "Related."

What we have with both Tribune and The WB is a financial and strategic stubbornness that suggest, somewhat quaintly, that old-style media--broad-based TV entertainment and newspapers--never really goes away. They always have some medicinal healing properties in an unpredictable world of new media technologies.