Exclusive: Studio City Looking to Break Talk Mold

Studio City is shopping a one-hour weekly talk show, starring Millennial sensation Chelsea Krost, for a fall 2014 premiere.

The North Holllywood-based production company is best known for its marketing prowess, but its also expanding into syndication, having launched Dish Nation, in partnership with Twentieth and the Fox Television Stations, in September 2012.

While talk is nothing new in syndication, talk hosted by a social-media-steeped Millennial is. Krost is only 22 years old, but she's already a pro. She caught the media bug early, after turning a category 5 hurricane in her home state of Florida into an opportunity to create a documentary before she even got to high school. The production values on that downtime project were high enough to catch the attention of the CBS and Fox affiliates in South Florida, who aired the project.

When she got to high school, she enrolled in television production. She took to it quickly: by the time she was a sophomore, she had created her own radio talk show, Teen Talk Live, which she pitched to Clear Channel's local AM station, WBZT at the tender age of 16. It took some convincing, but soon she had her own weekly hour, which FM stations in the area also picked up.

Two years later, Krost headed off to college in Manhattan, and from there, her media career has only blossomed. She still hosts her radio show, but it's now called The Chelsea Krost Show and it airs on Web platform BlogTalkRadio, where it earns 20,000 to 30,000 impressions each week.

Prior to going to college, Krost met a refugee from Rwanda who told her that the simple lack of feminine hygiene products in Africa were hindering women in major ways: causing them to miss school each month while menstruating, which ultimately forced them to prematurely end their education and kept them from pursuing real careers. Ever proactive, Krost decided to do something about that.

With the help of her mother, a former PR executive, Krost got Kotex and Delta to sign on as sponsors and headed off to Nairobi, Kenya, to deliver thousands and thousands of products, she says. She also brought along a camera, loaned to her by CBS' WFOR/WBFS Miami, which earlier had aired her hurricane documentary.

That trip spawned some important opportunities for Krost. She created a four-part docu-series that CBS again aired. She also became the Millennial spokesperson for Kotex, which was the first time Krost had heard that word. The idea clicked.

Today, Krost is something of a Millennial spokesperson for her entire generation, appearing frequently on such programs as NBC's The Today Show, Warner Bros.' Anderson Cooper and Debmar-Mercury's Wendy Williams as well as on local news programs to talk about Millennial issues. She boasts more than 50,000 Twitter followers and her weekly Twitter parties grab 13 to 15 million impressions.

Her latest opportunity came when Lenfest's independent WMCN Philadelphia was looking for a young host to test a new local program. They called Krost's publicist, Robin Stevens, and asked if she knew anyone. Of course, she did.

When I went in next week they were pitching me why I need to have a show on their station, and I thought this is an amazing opportunity,' Krost said.

Krost was given a producer to work with, but when that producer said, we don't need to worry about social media, Krost thought, oh no, this is not going to work.

She had met Brianna Campbell, vice president of Studio City, through mutual friends and she started calling the 28-year-old for help.

She was just putting together what the show was going to be. I was calling her every couple hours every day just to bounce ideas off of her, says Campbell.

The show, which aired Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. over eight weeks last spring, did well for the station, premiering at a 1.2 household average and averaging a 0.5 over its run. During the test, Self Magazine sponsored an episode, Pretty Little Liars Shay Mitchell came by for an interview, and the editor-in-chief of Seventeen Magazine invited Krost into her office to talk about teen bullying. It also built an active and interactive social media audience.

For Millennials, everything has to be shareable so everything I do is shareable, says Krost.

LINK:	http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/syndication-and-distribution/exc...
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