One of the first things Bill Shaw did after taking over as president and general manager of Superstation WGN was to assemble a SWOT meeting. "It's a Harvard Business School practice," he explains, "You allow everyone in the organization to submit anonymously what they think are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and then managers meet and take a look at each area." Shaw, who spent 23 years in spot TV sales prior to assuming the top spot at the superstation about two years ago, gathered department heads at a country club in Connecticut for a day, and the group outlined several strategies. "The first thing we decided was that we needed younger demos," Shaw recalls. The superstation had traditionally attracted an audience with a pronounced skew toward adults 18-34, but some recent program acquisitions were pushing the numbers into older terrain, particularly in late fringe, where the network was airing off-network episodes of the dramas, Heat of the Night and Mattock. Shaw's first step was to shift those shows to a less important daypart and replace them with Becker and The Sharon Osbourne Show.
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