Audiences Fleeing Nightly Broadcast News

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Washington Examiner:

Audiences fleeing nightly broadcast news
By: MARK TAPSCOTT
Editorial Page Editor
06/30/10 11:40 AM EDT

Employee layoffs and publication closings among daily newspapers gets most of the coverage as the legacy media continues its decline, but the same trend is evident in the numbers for the three broadcast network evening news programs.

TVNEwser reports that more than a million former viewers stopped watching NBC News Brian Williams, ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, and CBS News Katie Couric during the second quarter of 2010, compared to the same quarter last year. The total losses by network were 440,000 for NBC, 260,000 for ABC, and 340,000 for CBS.

TVNewser’s Chris Ariens further notes that the first quarter of the year “was not kind to the evening newscasts either. World News and Evening News saw their lowest averages ever for the first three months of 2010. And it was ’round about this time last year those two broadcasts hit all-time ratings lows. It should be noted the anchors, CBS’ Couric and ABC’s Gibson, were off that week.”

Instead of having only three broadcast network news operations which often share common political, cultural and economic narratives in their reporting, viewers today have Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MXNBC, CNBC and other cable-based televised news sources, plus the Internet is steadily growing what could well prove to be the ultimate replacement for Brian, Diane and Katie, net-based news operations like Pajamas TV.

You can read the balance of the Ariens report here.