You’re almost brand new at Turner. What are your priorities? I have 3 longer term goals: I want our original and acquired programs to reflect today’s marketplace, both behind and in front of the camera. In marketing we want to market effectively to ethnic consumers and most importantly increase viewing. Finally I want to create ad sales opportunities for advertisers who want to address the very appealing Turner cable viewers in these groups. During Diversity Week, Mark Lazarus implied Turner’s schedule isn’t very multicultural. Fair statement? I think what he was referring to is that we already have a big following from ethnic groups even though we’ve not made an effort to cater to them. So our approach now is to make sure the [ethnic] populations watching us keep watching us; we’ll begin to program for them specifically, while continuing to program for the general audience. And we want to bring more [ethnic] viewers over. It’s popular to say ‘cable is far behind satellite’ on Hispanic programming. True? There’s no doubt satellite addressed this market earlier than cable. The good news is that in cable we are trying to quickly catch up. Was there a wakeup call that prompted the multicultural push? Absolutely. The census was a huge eye opener for our industry as well as other industries across the board. And the satellite companies carved niche markets and basically proved to us it was a good business proposition. Also the white population and probably to some degree the African American population the penetration has reached a plateau. You’ve just moved from Miami to Atlanta. Your impressions? I enjoy wherever I go, and both cities have beauty and are unique, but one thing that I’ve seen in Atlanta is the southern spirit; people here are incredibly nice and hospitable.

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