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Date Posted: 16:48:41 07/07/05 Thu
Subject: SOME FORMERMISS AMERICA'S WAY-IN ON THE SUBJECT
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By: Tom Dorsey - The Courier-Journal
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Date Posted: Wednesday, June 29, 01:53:35pm
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After eight months of searching, the Miss America Pageant announced yesterday that it had found a new home. The 2006 contest will move to Country Music Television and be held in January instead of the traditional September slot. ABC dumped the pageant after the audience slipped under 10 million last year, a record low. The move to a smaller cable channel -- CMT averages 308,000 viewers in prime time -- didn't sit well with some past Miss Americas. "I feel like they're going to alienate a whole segment of their viewership because not everybody knows about CMT, or would even watch CMT," Nicole Johnson Baker, Miss America 1999, told USA Today. "It sounds so ridiculous: We go from ABC to CMT and there's nothing in between?" But Kentucky's Heather French Henry, Miss America 2000, put a positive spin on the move. "Maybe we have finally hit our target audience," she said in an interview yesterday. She said the deal calls for CMT sister channels VH1 and MTV to give the pageant millions of dollars in promotion. "We'll have to see if the ratings match up," Henry said, noting that the Miss America Pageant gets better Nielsen numbers than Donald Trump's much-publicized "Miss USA Contest." TV Guide online joked that the pageant will probably move from its signature Atlantic City, N.J., Boardwalk site to the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Nashville. Henry said that while some changes may be in order, the pageant's board is committed to Atlantic City for now. Some past pageant winners have proposed moving the organization's headquarters to Dallas and putting the pageant up for annual bid like the Super Bowl to raise more money for the group, she said. Money has been a contentious issue. "I think we will have a better relationship with our sponsors (and CMT) than with ABC, (which) took such a huge chunk of our money," Henry said. Advertisers may have been getting a little restless with falling ratings. The pageant drew more than three times as many viewers in 1988 -- 33.1 million -- than it did last year, when it drew 9.8 million. Some have suggested the pageant be spread over several weeks like a reality show, with contestants pictured at different stages, trying to reach the crowning glory through various challenges. "I don't think there's an audience for squeaky-clean," Shari Anne Brill, director of programming for advertising firm Carat, told USA Today earlier this year. She said the pageant needed updating in the age of reality television. "You need to see the tears, the drama, the makeup, the mascara and the crisis of finding out you have a zit." But French countered, "If they want that, they can go to 'America's Next Top Model.' The public would be disappointed that we didn't have backbiting (and) dress-tearing with the tears and mascara running. That's just not the kind of contest we have. "I understand media needs," she continued, "but Miss America has survived 80-plus years with the tradition that these are well-educated, beautiful young ladies who come from average towns … where community is important."
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