Sunday, July 08, 2007
TV News Viewing Moving to Web
The Baltimore Sun has an article on how the cable news nets, network news ops and local stations are making the push to put news on the web. Below is an excerpt from the article:
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.
A local station in Baltimore is seeing a surge in web visits thanks to CNN:
Baltimore news organizations are finding the same kind of online growth as their national counterparts. Page views at the WBFF-TV (Channel 45) Web site, foxbaltimore.com, are up 76 percent - from 258,594 in May 2006, to 455,499 this year, according to general manager William Fanshawe.
WBAL-TV (Channel 11), Baltimore's NBC affiliate and highest-rated news station, reports a 25 percent increase on its Web site, wbaltv.com, year to year - with as many as 1.5 million page views a week during times of breaking news.
"Our biggest boost comes from our affiliation with CNN, where we provide them with our local news," says Wanda Draper, director of programming and public affairs.
"When viewers click on our local news headline at cnn.com, they actually come to our site. A story that would get 10,000 hits in a day on our site alone, can get as many as 100,000 hits with the traffic from CNN."
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.
A local station in Baltimore is seeing a surge in web visits thanks to CNN:
Baltimore news organizations are finding the same kind of online growth as their national counterparts. Page views at the WBFF-TV (Channel 45) Web site, foxbaltimore.com, are up 76 percent - from 258,594 in May 2006, to 455,499 this year, according to general manager William Fanshawe.
WBAL-TV (Channel 11), Baltimore's NBC affiliate and highest-rated news station, reports a 25 percent increase on its Web site, wbaltv.com, year to year - with as many as 1.5 million page views a week during times of breaking news.
"Our biggest boost comes from our affiliation with CNN, where we provide them with our local news," says Wanda Draper, director of programming and public affairs.
"When viewers click on our local news headline at cnn.com, they actually come to our site. A story that would get 10,000 hits in a day on our site alone, can get as many as 100,000 hits with the traffic from CNN."
# posted by ATN @ 10:58 AM 
