Susan D. Whiting, the executive vice president of the Nielsen Company and chairman of Nielsen Media Research, wrote a small piece for the opinion page of the San Francisco Chronicle with the dynamic, original title “The Changing Media Landscape.” You can read it here.

In it, she naturally talks about television. It’s not dead, apparently. There’s more kinds of television coming all the time. There’s this Internet thing, people watch TV there too. And DVRs and On-Demand cable, they’re a sort of TV as well.

It’s one of the most curiously flat reads I’ve ever seen on any Op-Ed page: Opinion-free, no editorial viewpoint, just a series of vaguely boosterish, dispassionate observations. Stuff like this:

This season, one place to watch some of the most talked about shows is online, where much of the buzz is happening as well. Each of the major broadcast networks is making select episodes available on their Web sites, alongside forums, messages boards and blogs. Independent social networks like Hey! Nielsen.com also let viewers trade opinions in virtual earshot of key decision makers.

Consumer as critic is but one trend attracting the attention of industry insiders. Consumer as producer and programmer presents even more intriguing possibilities. With more than 100 million video clips viewed daily - and an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours - YouTube has set the standard for consumer-generated, Web-based content. It is a fashion that is gradually working its way through advertising, journalism and the creation of video games.

And so on. Insightful, huh? I was baffled by it. I even suspected Ms. Whiting let her 15-year old kid write the piece for her. But it came to me: She is a Nielsen executive, which actually explains her robotic tone. They have a professional obligation to be invisible, to not interfere, to tally eyeballs as scientifically as possible. Her mission is her message.

Her tone is a tantalizing sample of the Nielsen worldview (everything must be tallied, weighed and measured: trends must be quantified; all of commercial television depends on us!). I wouldn’t be all that bullish on Nielsen ratings these days, for precisely the reasons Ms. Whiting listed: There are so many ways to watch content now, the delivery of accurate eyeball counts to advertisers and programmers must be granulating to meaninglessness.

However, if we take Ms. Whiting as the voice of Nielsen there’s another read available. It may just be a laundry list of all the TV outlets Nielsen doesn’t report on– Well, not yet. Mooo-ha-ha.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Digital Wonderland, General, Internet, News, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.