A MULTIMEDIA VIEW FROM NORFOLK, VA

Having served as president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association during the tumultuous 1990s and now taking a turn as chairman of the trade association and as a director of Comcast, Decker Anstrom may forever be perceived as a cable guy.

But he is far more than that. As president and COO of Landmark Communications, a privately held company based in Norfolk, Va., he is also a broadcaster (Landmark owns two CBS affiliates, KLAS Las Vegas and WTVF Nashville); newspaper publisher (most notably the Virginian-Pilot of Roanoke, Va.); cable programmer (The Weather Channel) and, perhaps more important these days, an online operator.

With the popular weather.com, companion sites for the newspapers and TV stations and a growing portfolio of classified sites, Landmark’s online business now accounts for more than 20 percent of the company’s revenue.

Contributing Editor Marianne Paskowski caught up with him recently to discuss a panoply of issues, including why Landmark is not buying TV stations or selling the Weather Channel, as well as to get his latest take on government regulation and reform.

An edited transcript follows.

Let’s start with retransmission consent. Are your deals for the two TV stations done?

Yes they are.

Did you get money or, in-kind value?

I can’t really comment on that.

Do you sense that resistance from cable operators to paying retransmission fees is lessening? I don’t, because most of the action is likely to take place next year.

There’s still significant resistance to pay for otherwise free over-the-air signals and I would expect that they’ll continue to be tough negotiations going forward.

You are this year’s chairman of the NCTA. Do you expect the organization to try to change or amend or alter the retransmission laws?

We’re on record as indicating that we believe that the retransmission laws should be reformed and have specifically identified several lead areas, some potentially unfair practices. There’s a further review going on inside the NCTA, and I would expect that there will be more details to follow as we move into the next session of Congress.

It’s been 15 years since the ’92 act passed, so it’s an appropriate time to step back and look at retransmission consent. And, frankly, to look at it in conjunction with [must carry]—the heads-I-win, tails-I-win solution that the broadcasters convinced Congress to adopt in 1992.

Do you personally favor retransmission concept?

Retransmission consent is a fair policy. A copyright holder or a content owner who’s invested significantly in their product should have the right to determine how and if they’re going to distribute it. That is a sound policy. If it’s good for cable networks, it’s good for broadcasters and other content holders.

What’s appropriate to look at with respect to retransmission consent is, first of all, the double benefit of retransmission consent plus must carry that provides an unnatural and an unfair safety net for many broadcasters, and frankly, an unnecessary one.

Let’s take it one step further and talk about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Is he still pushing for digital must carry and can he possibly succeed?

Of course, the commission voted an order several weeks ago that largely followed the NCTA’s voluntary plan that would call for a three-year period of so-called rule must carry in which the cable operators carry both the analog and the digital signal. The industry generally has been agreeable to that as an interim step to manage the transition. It was what was going to happen anyway, and clearly the cable operators have a huge stake in making sure that their customers have access to either the digital or analog signal depending on what kind of set-top box they have.

So it’s tied in with the digital transition?

Absolutely, but our firm view is that it should sunset after three years or so and certainly the discussion at the meeting was very clear that this is a three-year period. It was a good step by the cable industry to work constructively with Chairman Martin, as well as with the other four commissioners, saying, Look, we’ll give a little here in terms of our historic opposition to must carry in order to make sure that our customers are really well served. But there should be an end point.

Switching gears, there are a lot of TV stations for sale and you haven’t been a buyer.

No. We like the broadcast television business. We have two great stations. They’re well run. We’ve got great executives running them. They’re profitable, they’re growing and, in a different world, we might be a buyer. But the reality is that the multiples are very high for what one would chart in a realistic growth of capital forward. So, going forward, we are not a buyer for stations.

Is that related to the fallout from the subprime consumer home loan mess?

No. We actually determined a few years ago that unless there were some really radical changes in the multiple, you simply couldn’t chart a return on investment.

The other thing, frankly, is that for the TV stations that you really want to buy, the stations that really have the opportunity to be the No. 1 news leader in good-sized growing markets, tend to be owned by the network companies. If they are for sale, they may not be stations that people would be very interested in buying right now.

Would you like to see the repeal of the broadcast-newspaper crossownership rules or the small market duopoly rule?

On the newspaper-broadcast crossownership rule, we don’t have a position on that. Again, I think you could argue that either way. We don’t think that it’s particularly relevant in terms of any real world business model. If you look at the results in cases where newspapers and TV stations have been owned in the same markets, the benefits of those cross ownerships have generally been overstated.

Another independent cable network was folded into a big corporation. I’m talking about NBCU’s purchase of Oxygen. Do you see the Weather Channel being sold?

No I don’t. We’re very well positioned, not only in respect to the television universe, but new media. We think our independence gives us some entrepreneurial energy and an ability to work with lots of different platforms. We have the good fortune of having good relationships with our cable distributors, satellite distributors as well as with major portals and others. We’re quite optimistic about our future as an independent.

Let’s talk about the Web. Landmark has been very aggressive with the Weather Channel and I know you have a lot of things going on with your newspapers and TV stations. How much of the revenue in Landmark is actually Web generated?

More than 20%.

Is that within your expectations?

It is, and I think it benchmarks quite well against other media companies and obviously weather.com is one of our most valued media properties, a real leader in the online world. We’ve got some other quite sizable businesses with Q Interactive, which is the leader in online interactive marketing and a very significant business based in Chicago.

We have a number of sites through Dominion Enterprises, including classified advertising areas homes.com and specialized sites like yachtworld.com, forrent.com, traderonline.com, all quite significant online classified sites. Our newspapers and TV stations have a significant investment in online. So we expect that we will continue to grow quite significantly and it’s our major acquisition focus as well.

With regard to the Weather Channel, you’ve had some added competition as some of the TV stations have stepped into the weather business with local weather channels in the digital space. The NBC affiliates, for instance, are airing NBC Weather Plus. Do you see this as much of a threat?

It particularly is, and, apropos to our earlier conversation, as one of the last standing independents, we do live by the motto, “Only the paranoid survive.” We worry about all of our competition.

But, to date, I don’t think any of the digital 24-hour local weather services in the markets around the country have had really any impact. They’re not getting any ratings. They’re getting really very small amounts of revenue and, at the moment, the Weather Channel’s television competition really comes from the primary stations in the major marketplaces. Weather is the major driver of local news. So our principal competition is really the main primary station, not the 24-hour digital.

Are there any expansion plans for Landmark?

Yes, there are. Most of our focus in terms of acquisition is really in interactive markets. Q Interactive was a major acquisition we made several years ago. We made a number of online acquisitions in niche areas in which we’re bringing buyers and sellers together.

All of that is just amazing. It’s just a brief example of how the Internet’s changed everything. We identified four or five Web sites, we bought all of them, and we’re looking for other spaces like that.

So that was after the bubble? Do you worry about the bubble becoming deflated again?  I look at Google and I scratch my head.

Well, yeah. In terms of some of the valuations you’re looking at now, we’re really sort of approaching 1999, early 2000, again, which really makes it more difficult to find good businesses to buy. But we keep finding them. I don’t see the bubble bursting again, but you’ll get some sort of reset, it seems to me, in terms of the valuations.

Let’s talk about the election. It looks like the Democrats will be in charge and what implications, if any, are there for the FCC and regulation moving ahead?

I think it’s almost impossible to tell. I don’t say that just to duck the question.

Well they don’t like the cable business as they have demonstrated before.

One could certainly think that the Democrats are going to win, but I wouldn’t assume that. But, as we’ve learned over time with both the parties, so much of the communications industry depends on who’s the chairman of the FCC, particularly in a world in which we’re looking at a possible recession. And how the heck do we ever get out of Iraq?

The likelihood that any White House is going to spend much time on communications policy is probably just not very high. So a lot will depend on who becomes chairman of the FCC. Tell me the answer to that, and we can probably predict communications policy.

How you rate Chairman Martin’s tenure?

I’ve been disappointed. I think Kevin is a very bright lawyer and has raised a lot of really important questions. I say that quite genuinely about not only the cable industry, but a lot of other industries and I think industries need to be careful about not feeling that the government is picking on them because the government’s job is to raise issues.

But on issues like multicast must carry, some of the things that the commission is looking at right now are very broad extensions of federal regulation into what is a very competitive marketplace. I wish that the commission generally had more appreciation for how competitive this marketplace really is today.

You and I go back long enough in terms of looking at the world of the 1990s and the way it is now. That world called for some regulations, but the goal of the 1996 Act and a lot of what’s happened since then is to produce a competitive environment that would get the government out of the marketplace? Look at the choices that the consumers have. You have to sort of scratch your head and say, why is the government getting involved in some of these issues.

I’d rather be in a position in which we’re looking at what are some of the laws we can repeal, like must carry, rather than thinking what are new ways that we can regulate.

What are your personal plans? Are you going to stick around? When is your contract up?