televised beauty pageant will be held here in the spring for the second year
in a row, competition officials said yesterday.
Tourism officials cheered the decision, which was to be announced at a news
conference today, saying pageant guests spent $2 million to $3 million in the
state this year and that the broadcast provided about $6.5 million in free
advertising as the contestants were shown frolicking at the Inner Harbor,
Annapolis and elsewhere.
“We thought, `Gosh, now that we’ve done it once, think how much better
we’ll do it this time,'” said Paula Shugart, president of the Miss Universe
Organization, the pageant’s parent company. Shugart was to join city and state
officials this morning at 1st Mariner Arena to announce that the contest will
be broadcast from there April 21.
Pageant officials were undeterred by the rating for this year’s broadcast,
which plunged lower than some contestants’ necklines.
The pageant – which is co-owned by NBC and Donald Trump – typically changes
location each year, and next year was open to bids from other cities. But
Baltimore was so thoroughly wowed by its first rendezvous with Miss USA that
the wooing began minutes after the 2005 competition ended, at the VIP
coronation ball.
Dennis Castleman, the state’s assistant secretary of tourism, film and the
arts, handed Shugart a letter stating the city’s intentions to win Miss USA
back.
Now, Castleman said, “We’re really excited.”
So, reportedly, is NBC, which Shugart said praised the city’s
“metropolitan, cosmopolitan look.”
Next year, the competition is moving to the arena from this year’s spot at
the Hippodrome, which organizers said wasn’t big enough. The broadcast will
showcase different parts of Maryland, and – for three weeks leading up to the
competition – the beauties will be installed at the Wyndham Baltimore-Inner
Harbor hotel. This year, they stayed at a Sheraton in Columbia because the
city was unable to find housing.
The timing will be different, too. The show will air on a Friday night,
which means a smaller available audience but possibly weaker competition from
other shows. On a Monday evening this year, it was pitted against the hit
program CSI: Miami.
It’s also being broadcast about a week and a half later than this year’s
pageant, a delay that Shugart hopes will translate into warmer weather. Gray
skies and a cold snap had wreaked havoc on filming this year, she said.
The Baltimore 2005 pageant attracted about 8.1 million viewers, compared
with 13 million the previous year, NBC said. That number approached the
55-year-old pageant’s 7.6 million low in 2002, which led its former network,
CBS, to drop the show.
In Baltimore, though, the 2005 show did quite well, snagging about 14
percent of households, a 71 percent increase over 2004.
And the show returned the compliment, airing about 10 1/2 minutes of
locally shot footage of beauty queens in locations such as Fort McHenry and
the Ocean City boardwalk – exposure worth an estimated $6.5 million, Castleman
said.
Whether the ratings fell or not, “I gotta tell you that 8 million viewers
is a good number,” said Castleman. And he said that number doesn’t count the
people in about 100 other countries who watch the show. Maryland will get a
minimum of nine minutes of airtime this year.
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This year’s pageant cost the region $575,000, which covered rights to the
competition, insurance, and coronation ball costs. The state and the city each
put up $100,000, and the rest was generated through private fundraising.
Castleman said he expects a similar arrangement next year.
Miss USA’s Baltimore double-take comes at a difficult moment in the pageant
industry. Last week, the show’s beleaguered rival, the Miss America
competition, announced that it would be relocating to Las Vegas, after 84
years in Atlantic City, N.J.
ABC dropped its Miss America coverage in 2004, and now the pageant airs on
cable-only Country Music Television.
Shugart won’t comment on the possibility of making Maryland – home to
CoverGirl, the Hunt Valley cosmetics company that is one of the pageant’s
major sponsors – the pageant’s permanent location.
“We take everything one year at a time,” she said.
But in the lobby of the Wyndham hotel yesterday, the reigning Miss USA did
look pretty comfortable. Chelsea Cooley, 22, in town for the news conference
and charity work, said she was looking forward to another extended tour of
Baltimore.