#100: CNN Reaches Historic Low In Prime Time Demo

 

 

CNN has reached a historic ratings low during prime time in the A25-54 demographic, finishing as the fourth place cable news network in that category now 100 times during 2009. This means CNN finished behind Fox News, MSNBC and sister network HLN.

While CNN’s daytime line-up has seen far more success – generally finishing in 2nd place behind just FNC – their prime time line-up has not yet turned around.
This is by far the most times this has ever happened for CNN. The network has now finished in 4th place in that category 41% of 2009 weeknights. It’s a dramatic fall from 2008, when Anderson Cooper’s 10pmET hour actually won the prime time demo, even topping his FNC competition. 2008 of course was a very big year for CNN, as the presidential election dominated coverage. But while CNN’s prime time ratings have not dropped off significantly from 2007 and before, the competition is growing enormously, and leaving CNN behind in the category.
The 100th occurrence was Thursday night. As the year ends, CNN is finishing fourth more and more often. The network was 4th in the prime time demo 13 nights during November – more times than any other month.
Prime time demo is just one of the many categories CNN and other networks use to sell against, and CNN continues to push the fact that it is performing strongly during the day. And it should be noted that while CNN drops in prime time, their sister network HLN is doing well – which benefits CNN’s parent company as a whole. Still, as CNN pushes the line, “More people turn to CNN because journalism matters,” (have you seen that anywhere today?) it appears more and more clear that people are turning to opinion during prime time.

The Usual Merger Suspects

The Comcast-NBC deal and familiar cries of doom.

Every media merger seems to generate grand denunciations from liberal watchdogs and pro-regulatory policy makers. And sure enough, last week's long-expected announcement that Comcast is buying NBC Universal from General Electric prompted dire predications from all the usual suspects.
"This kind of massive media consolidation will lead to higher prices and fewer independent sources of information," said the apparently clairvoyant Joel Kelsey of Consumers Union. "This merger's potential to foreclose competition and stifle innovation is significant and real," added Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America.
Under the deal, cable giant Comcast takes control of several cable channels and the Universal film studio, in addition to the NBC broadcast network. GE—whose credit unit has suffered in the financial meltdown—gets to unload an entertainment unit that's been struggling and can focus instead on its core manufacturing business. Whether this is wise for either party beats us. But it's a determination best made by the marketplace, not by anticorporate activists.
As for the media analysts at Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, Free Press and similar outfits, an examination of their track record is instructive. In the past decade, such advocacy groups have warned against deals involving AT&T and SBC, AOL and Time Warner, Verizon and MCI, and Sirius and XM—on the grounds that such mergers would result in higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
Some of these business combinations have worked out and others haven't. But it's hard to detect any consumer harm. Whether the market is phone service, Internet access or cable programing, competition and innovation abound. In 1990, cable subscribers had some 70 channels to choose from. Today that number is closer to 600, and TV content can be viewed on a laptop, smart phone or iPod, take your pick.
In addition to being the nation's largest cable company, Comcast is also a leading Internet service provider. And some skeptics worry that Comcast could withhold programming from non-Comcast customers or charge rival cable companies more to carry NBC Universal content. But Comcast has little incentive to restrict choice in a media marketplace full of alternatives. Federal regulations already in place require cable operators to offer programming to competitors at reasonable rates. If Comcast breaks these rules, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division can address it on a case-by-case basis.
The Federal Communications Commission and Justice are expected to take a hard look at this deal. Let's hope they tune out the "consumer protection" alarmists who have a perfect record of error.

 

How Google Can Help Newspapers

Video didn't kill the radio star, and the Internet won't destroy news organizations. It will foster a new, digital business model.

By ERIC SCHMIDT

It's the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.
Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt's Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right.
Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I'd never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.
This is a long way from where we are today. The current technology—in this case the distinguished newspaper you are now reading—may be relatively old, but it is a model of simplicity and speed compared with the online news experience today. I can flip through pages much faster in the physical edition of the Journal than I can on the Web. And every time I return to a site, I am treated as a stranger.
So when I think about the current crisis in the print industry, this is where I begin—a traditional technology struggling to adapt to a new, disruptive world. It is a familiar story: It was the arrival of radio and television that started the decline of newspaper circulation. Afternoon newspapers were the first casualties. Then the advent of 24-hour news transformed what was in the morning papers literally into old news.
Now the Internet has broken down the entire news package with articles read individually, reached from a blog or search engine, and abandoned if there is no good reason to hang around once the story is finished. It's what we have come to call internally the atomic unit of consumption.

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Chad Crowe 

 

Painful as this is to newspapers and magazines, the pressures on their ad revenue from the Internet is causing even greater damage. The choice facing advertisers targeting consumers in San Francisco was once between an ad in the Chronicle or Examiner. Then came Craigslist, making it possible to get local classifieds for free, followed by Ebay and specialist Web sites. Now search engines like Google connect advertisers directly with consumers looking for what they sell.

With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper's Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.
The claim that we're making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.
It's understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.
We recognize, however, that a crisis for news-gathering is not just a crisis for the newspaper industry. The flow of accurate information, diverse views and proper analysis is critical for a functioning democracy. We also acknowledge that it has been difficult for newspapers to make money from their online content. But just as there is no single cause of the industry's current problems, there is no single solution. We want to work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers, and make more money.
Meeting that challenge will mean using technology to develop new ways to reach readers and keep them engaged for longer, as well as new ways to raise revenue combining free and paid access. I believe it also requires a change of tone in the debate, a recognition that we all have to work together to fulfill the promise of journalism in the digital age.
Google is serious about playing its part. We are already testing, with more than three dozen major partners from the news industry, a service called Google Fast Flip. The theory—which seems to work in practice—is that if we make it easier to read articles, people will read more of them. Our news partners will receive the majority of the revenue generated by the display ads shown beside stories.
Nor is there a choice, as some newspapers seem to think, between charging for access to their online content or keeping links to their articles in Google News and Google Search. They can do both.
This is a start. But together we can go much further toward that fantasy news gadget I outlined at the start. The acceleration in mobile phone sophistication and ownership offers tremendous potential. As more of these phones become connected to the Internet, they are becoming reading devices, delivering stories, business reviews and ads. These phones know where you are and can provide geographically relevant information. There will be more news, more comment, more opportunities for debate in the future, not less.
The best newspapers have always held up a mirror to their communities. Now they can offer a digital place for their readers to congregate and talk. And just as we have seen different models of payment for TV as choice has increased and new providers have become involved, I believe we will see the same with news. We could easily see free access for mass-market content funded from advertising alongside the equivalent of subscription and pay-for-view for material with a niche readership.
I certainly don't believe that the Internet will mean the death of news. Through innovation and technology, it can endure with newfound profitability and vitality. Video didn't kill the radio star. It created a whole new additional industry.
Mr. Schmidt is chairman and CEO of Google Inc.

 

Obama: FOX News Channel's friend

Nearly one year in with Obama, FOX is up, CNN and MSNBC are down

Lou Dobbs, who suddenly resigned at CNN, spoke about his move with FOX News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, on "The O'Reilly Factor," one of the top-rated programs on cable news. (Photo by Kathy Willens / AP)

by Mark Silva
Who says FOX News doesn't like Barack Obama?
The first year of the Democratic president has been good for the nation's leading cable news channel - its viewership up 7 percent in prime-time hours so far in 2009, compared to the same time last year.
Make that 10 percent among the 25-54-year-olds whom advertisers love to court.
As opposed to both rivals CNN, suffering an apparent post-Dobbs slump as well, and MSNBC - down by double-digits from year to year.
So say the Nielsen ratings in this year of living Democratically, when President Barack Obama's White House has taken on FOX for being something other than a traditional news network - "an arm of the Republican Party,'' according to the outgoing White House communications director. It could be, perhaps, that all the vitriol which commentator Glenn Beck and company have stirred up for Obama and crew has been box-office for the network that the press office loves to hate.
Beck's own audience - 2.67 million viewers in November - includes a 101 percent gain among the 25-54 year-olds since last year.
It's both FOX's standard news fare - Brett Baier's report - and its commentary - Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity - that have fared well during the first 10 months of the Obama administration.
FOX News, of course, has been dominant in the cable ratings for some time - No. 1 in total viewers for 95 consecutive months (since January of 2002), by Nielsen Media Research's count.
But Baier's Special Report and The O'Reilly Factor scored their best month of the year in November, both in total viewership and in the 25-54 cohort.
Both CNN and MSMBC were suffering their worst months of the year, by comparison - with CNN's Anderson Cooper down 70 percent from last year among the 25-54s, Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room off 63 percent among the same crowd.
And CNN's viewership was off 25 percent in the weeks following Lou Dobbs' surprise on-air resignation, comparing the pre-Dobbs and post-Dobbs segments of November's ratings.
Bill O'Reilly's audience of 3.669 million in November included a 12 percent gain in the 24-54 audience, compared with November of last year.
CNN's Campbell Brown's audience of 696,000 was down 62 percent in the same cohort. MSNBC's Countdown with Olbermann, with 1 million viewers, also was down 62 percent among the same audience, year to year.
Even Larry King's 853,000 was off 59 percent.
And Chris Matthews, playing Hardball over at MSNBC, pulled 672,000 viewers, including 184,000 in the 25-54 bracket, off 63 percent from the previous November. It could be all that interrupting of guests that the host does.

 

Anderson Cooper's Ratings Plummet

Anderson Cooper is fading in the ratings.
The respected CNN anchor has seen his numbers slip significantly through the past year. His 10 p.m. show, "Anderson Cooper 360," has declined 62% in total viewers and 70% in adults 25-54 from November 2008, according to Nielsen figures.
Last month, in Cooper's time slot, Fox News' "On the Record" attracted an average viewership of 1.9 million while "360" averaged 672,000; repeats of MSNBC's "Countdown" and HLN's Nancy Grace show averaged 655,000 and 458,000, respectively.
But in the ad-friendly 25-54 demo, those same repeats won out over Cooper with 224,000 (MSNBC) and 214,000 (HLN).
Cooper -- who became an overnight sensation during his Hurricane Katrina coverage -- surely deserves better ratings. From the start of 2009, he began losing a huge chunk of his nightly audience.
So what happened? Let's see: There's no presidential election to ramp up ratings; there's heavy competition from centrist CNN's noisier rivals (see: Fox News, the No. 1 cable news channel); there's people catching up on DVR-ed TV shows in the late evening; then there's the loss of Lou Dobbs in the 7 p.m. anchor chair, among other possible factors.
Work those blue eyes, Coop!

FTC to Examine Possible Support of News Organizations

By BRENT KENDALL And THOMAS CATAN

WASHINGTON –The head of the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday the agency will study whether government should aid struggling news organizations, which are suffering from a collapse in advertising revenues as the internet upends their centuries-old business model.
FTC Chairman Jon Liebowitz's comments came during day one of a two-day "workshop" sponsored by the agency that became a forum for arguments among the heads of a diverse array of news organizations over the future of journalism.
Mr. Leibowitz said his agency will examine whether government should change the way the industry is regulated, from making news-gathering companies exempt from antitrust laws to granting them special tax treatment to making changes to copyright laws.
The Federal Communications Commission is already reconsidering rules that prevent a company from owning newspapers and TV stations in a single market.
Mr. Leibowitz said other ideas include extending government subsidies to commercial news organizations, granting them special tax treatment or an exemption from antitrust regulations
While cautioning that changes in the news business must be much better understood before any policy changes are made, Mr. Leibowitz said: "We should be able to take action if necessary to preserve the news that is vital to democracy."
Mr. Leibowitz's wife, Ruth Marcus, is a columnist for the Washington Post, a fact he disclosed during the meeting.
Media executives said they might welcome some relaxation of antitrust and tax rules, but they also expressed wariness of government intervention in the news business.
"I think the message from today is be very, very cautious before you do anything," Mr. Leibowitz said in an interview.
News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said at the FTC workshop that media companies need to do a better job of convincing consumers that high-quality journalism isn't free. "Good journalism is an expensive commodity," he said.
Mr. Murdoch created a buzz last month by saying that News Corp. may block Google Inc. from searching its news sites. He didn't mention the company by name Tuesday, but criticized Internet sites that profit from reusing news articles published by others without bearing the costs.
"To be impolite, it's theft," he said. News Corp. owns the Wall Street Journal.
Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, followed Mr. Murdoch and blasted his criticism of Internet sites like hers that collect and link to news content from other providers. Ms. Huffington said her popular Web site drives a great deal of online traffic to The Wall Street Journal.
"It's time for traditional media companies to stop whining," she said.
Google and other Web companies say they help news organizations by referring Web users to their sites. "The reality is that the vast majority of publishers want to be discovered," Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google News, said at the FTC event. Mr. Cohen said it was technologically very simple for a publisher to instruct Google's Web crawler not to index its news site.
Federal and state officials this year have explored how the government might play a role in helping ease the financial travails of news organizations. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D., Md.) this spring proposed a bill that would allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt institutions. Congress has held several hearings about the financial challenges facing the industry.
Previous government salves for the news industry have had limited success. The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 paved the way for ailing newspapers in the same city to share costs. Critics of these "joint operating agreements" say the law helped preserve multiple newspapers in cities that no longer were able to support them, reducing both papers' chances for survival. JOAs in cities such as Denver and Seattle have been among the first casualties in the newspaper industry's recent woes.
—Shira Ovide contributed to this article

'Overexposed' Obama begins to duck the WH press corps

By Joseph Curl

After months of what some critics called overexposure, President Obama has of late avoided questions from the White House press corps at large, closing the Oval Office to traditionally informal question-and-answer sessions with reporters and pulling back from the fast pace of news conferences he established when taking office.
The president, whose job-approval ratings have been on a steady slide, hasn't held a formal news conference in 19 weeks, since July 22. That one ended badly, when Mr. Obama waded into a racial controversy by saying a white police officer "acted stupidly" when he arrested a black Harvard professor.
"It can't be a total coincidence that the last time he faced the press corps, we ended with beers in the Rose Garden with Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley, when the focus was supposed to be health care," said Julie Mason, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner who also covered the Bush administration for the Houston Chronicle.
"It does seem like they are responding to the overexposure argument and trying to exert more control over his appearances," she said.
Veteran White House reporters have been grumbling about the lack of access to the president, who as a candidate vowed an unprecedented level of transparency.
On his recent trip to Asia, Mr. Obama took few questions - and none during a session with Chinese President Hu Jintao that the White House dubbed "joint press statements."
Mr. Obama has taken to limiting questions during press conferences with foreign leaders to one question each fromU.S. reporters and foreign correspondents, as he did last week when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was in Washington. He did the same "one-and-one" with the Japanese prime minister and the South Korean president while in Asia.
In a more unusual move, the president has altered the practice of allowing reporters into the Oval Office for what is called a "pool spray" - a few informal questions after a presidential meeting, often with a foreign leader. Mr. Obama's meeting Monday with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was closed to the press, even photographers, the White House said.
"It's surprising and quite unusual that President Obama meets with an allied leader like the prime minister of Australia and there's no photo op at the beginning or end of the session," said Mark Knoller, a longtime White House reporter for CBS Radio.
Mr. Obama on Tuesday will announce his new policy on the war in Afghanistan at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He won't be taking questions immediately afterward.
A White House spokesman bristled when asked Monday about the situation.
"I think the last time we got a question about the president answering questions, if I'm not mistaken, it was - wasn't it couched in the - in the notion that he was overexposed?" press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
"Hard for me to imagine that the president would submit himself to so many questions that the punditocracy would say he was overexposed, but the new thing happens to be that he's not answering enough questions," he said.
Still, the spokesman added: "The president enjoys taking your questions and questions from reporters throughout this process. And I am - assume he'll continue to do so."
The president did sit down one-on-one with reporters from all TV network and cable news outlets during his recent trip to Asia, including Fox News' Major Garrett, whom he skipped at his last White House news conference. Mr. Obama has conducted at least 139 press interviews with reporters, Mr. Knoller said.
The pace is on par with his predecessor's. By Mr. Knoller's count, Mr. Obama has held five formal news conferences at the White House during his first 10 months in office, not much different from President George W. Bush, who held four over the same period.
Bill Plante, another White House veteran for CBS News, said presidents prefer to duck the press from time to time, at least for a while.
"At the moment, Obama's silence has more to do with the coming Afghanistan announcement," he said in an e-mail. "Bush (both of them), Clinton, Reagan - all had periods where they preferred not to answer questions for reasons ranging from the economy to Iran Contra or Monica Lewinsky."
But the Obama White House is intent on controlling the flow.
"I get the strong impression this president just doesn't relish the spontaneous question," Miss Mason said.