TV Networks' On-Air Losses Offset on Web

by David Zurawik, TV Critic - Baltimore Sun, http://www.baltimoresun.com

In a July 8, 2007 article on the Baltimore Sun website, TV critic David Zurawik writes about the growth of TV networks' audiences on non-broadcast media, and the implications of that growth for the industry and advertisers.

Zurawik writes:

For more than two decades, discussions of TV news have been dominated by a discourse of decline. No statistic has been quoted more often than that of network evening newscasts collectively losing 27 million viewers - roughly half their audience - across a 25-year span starting in 1980. But for all the talk of dinosaurs and audience erosion, major TV news programs - such as PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Tim Russert's Meet the Press on NBC - have found new life on computer screens, iPods and cell phones during the past year. Millions of additional viewers, many of them part of the young demographic most desired by advertisers, are now streaming video of CNN's Anderson Cooper, downloading podcasts of NBC's Brian Williams and watching ABC's Charles Gibson deliver World News on mobile devices. And those viewers have easy access on a variety of digital screens to the kind of in-depth analysis and rich context that television news has long been accused of lacking. Some of the gains are eye-popping, such as CNN's increasing its online audience by almost 8 million page viewers from May 2006 to May 2007, the most recent figures available, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. NBC and MSNBC, meanwhile, added almost 4 million viewers to their shared Web site during the same 12-month period. While those two cable news channels have set the pace in gains, all the big TV news operations grew online during the past 12 months. CBS.com went from 7.9 million to 8.6 million viewers, while ABC's Web audience rose from 9.8 million to 10.2 million year to year. Fox News showed the smallest increase - going from 7.5 million to 7.6 million. "Those numbers tell a dramatic story of across-the-board growth for an industry that has heard almost nothing but gloom, doom and steep decline for years and years," says University of Maryland media economist Douglas Gomery, who observes a similar surge at newspaper Web sites. "Furthermore, if you go inside those overall numbers, you'll find that the aggregate audiences in old and new media for some of the individual news programs are even more impressive - they are huge..."

Click here for Zurawik's article in its entirety on the Baltimore Sun website.