The plan: All Bill, all the time
The nation is buzzing about Bill Clinton's My Life, thanks to a well-oiled rollout finely tuned by his agent and by publisher Knopf.
Somehow, most media outlets found away around the Bill Clinton book embargo. My Life was scheduled for release at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.
By Danny Johnston, AP
The publishing business has become "supercharged" in recent years, says Time managing editor Jim Kelly, whose magazine featured the first print interview with Clinton this week and devoted a dozen pages to the book.
"When I started doing book excerpts, it was such an easy business for an editor. You'd bid on it, you'd get an excerpt, you'd have a few days if not a week before the book. But in this case, a former president rules. All rules were off."
Clinton's handlers "forged new ground — to take a book and its author and spread it across the cream of the media empire," he says.
Funny, then, how well-laid media plans went awry when The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, which its chief reviewer savaged Sunday. The Associated Press also got a copy and together, amid legal threats from Knopf, both outfits played spoiler to Dan Rather's broadcast "exclusive" on Sunday's 60 Minutes.
Nonetheless, Rather's interview with Clinton scored, averaging 15.4 million viewers in preliminary numbers, up from an average 10 million. It added more than 3 million in the second half-hour, which averaged 17 million; 60 Minutes was Sunday's top-rated show among total viewers.
But with so much of the book — authorized and otherwise — already out there, some observers question whether sales of the 957-page tome, out today — 1.5 million advance copies have been printed — will match the hype. Will Americans want to read their 42nd president's story, or will they say it doesn't amount to a hill of beans?
"We know there's a lot of book," says Kathleen Hall Jameison, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. "Whether there's a lot of food for thought in it, well, his recent speech to the book publishers suggested it."
From here on in — including an interview airing today on Oprah, appearances Wednesday on NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America, and a spot Thursday night with Larry King on CNN, "the timing is not the greatest," says Fordham University professor Paul Levinson.
"The conventional wisdom is that he's going to receive an enormous amount of attention, but I think there are so many other events going on — the release of (Michael Moore's) Fahrenheit 9/11, the first private space launch, the continuing stories out of Iraq, the 9/11 Commission reporting — that it's going to be tougher than usual for Bill Clinton to achieve the attention that a former president achieves."
But Today chief Tom Touchet says the Clinton team's strategy is "right on the edge of the envelope. They have timed it very well, to precede the conventions, and the week before the handover (in Iraq), the NBA finals are over."
Despite all that has already been reported about the book, "it's all about trying to give our viewers the best interview, regardless of who they've talked to and whatever else they've done," he says.
Katie Couric talks to Clinton today, and the challenge, he says, is getting fresh material to chew on. "We will have the third (TV) interview, and I thought that with Katie's expertise — and with a couple of producers working on it who know Clinton — that it was worth it. But I wouldn't want to be the sixth or seventh interview."
Good Morning America chief Ben Sherwood says anchor Charles Gibson will "build on what has been done and go deeper into areas that everyone is talking about. Clinton's need to offer fresh material is just as great as our own."
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