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2004 News Emmys Get Home on Discovery Times

Sep 1, 2003  •  Post A Comment

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has forged a partnership with The Discovery Times Channel to telecast portions of the News & Documentary Emmys ceremony in September 2004.
The awards ceremony was last broadcast on ABC in 1973 and 1974.
The deal will be announced on the eve of Wednesday’s 24th annual News Emmys gala at New York’s Marriott Marquis by NATAS President Peter Price and Vivian Schiller, senior VP and general manager of Discovery Times Channel. Discovery Times is a joint venture of Discovery Communications and The New York Times that launched in March and is available in 29 million U.S. homes.
The collaboration is similar to the deal between NATAS and Fox Sports Net to run portions of the Sports Emmys last April on TV for the first time in 12 years. The honors aired as a special edition of Fox Sports Net’s “The Best Damn Sports Show Period.”
However, unlike the Sports Emmycast, which ran six nights after the awards were handed out, the News Emmys will be handed out and telecast in edited form on the same night, Sept. 13, 2004. That will mean the ceremony itself has to be built for TV, and the participants in what is traditionally a long evening will need to help keep things moving efficiently.
“I suspect you’ll find more discipline,” Mr. Price said.
NATAS will continue to be responsible for judging the entries, while Ms. Schiller’s organization produces the event in consultation with NATAS.
“The event as it is right now is for those who are in the room,” said Ms. Schiller, who must edit the TV version with the general public in mind, focusing the telecast on categories of “general interest” and working with NATAS on the evening’s schedule to make it easier to whittle down the video.
NATAS and Discovery Times, which hope the partnership will extend beyond 2004, will share costs and commercial revenue.
With NATAS’ mandate to celebrate the best in TV journalism and Discovery Times’ focus on “contextual documentaries that go behind the scenes to connect the dots,” Ms. Schiller said, the program deal “is just a completely natural fit. We want to celebrate journalism. We want to celebrate quality.”