ABC News slashing
some 400 jobs
FNC leads cable viewership for Tiger's 'I'm sorry'
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Feb 24, 2010
ABC News slashing some 400 jobs
The stock market and retailers may be reporting more favorable results over recent months, but the recession is not over, and the advertising downturn has put a major squeeze on network news divisions, which have cut hundreds of staff members over the past three years. Now ABC News is making perhaps the most drastic cuts yet, laying off at least 20 percent of its employees in an effort to reduce its single largest expense, staffing. ABC News president David Westin confirmed yesterday that his division will eliminate 300 to 400 positions from its 1500-person staff, hoping to achieve the bulk of the reductions through voluntary layoffs. Some of the reductions will be achieved by combining the weekend and weekday staffs of ABC's morning and evening news operations, and some foreign news bureaus will be replaced by singular digital journalists, according to reports circulating this morning. ABC News expects to accomplish the cutbacks within the next two months. ABC, the longtime No. 2 morning and evening news network, has undergone a lot of change lately with the ascension of Diane Sawyer to "World News" anchor, replacing Charles Gibson, and George Stephanopoulos taking Sawyer's place on "Good Morning America," leaving "This Week" without a permanent host.
FNC leads cable viewership for Tiger's 'I'm sorry'
When it comes to professional golfers issuing apologies for cheating on their wife at ultra-controlled faux-press conferences, Fox News Channel is your cable leader. According to Nielsen, FNC averaged 2.06 million total viewers from 11 to 11:20 a.m. last Friday for its coverage of Tiger Woods’ apology, which some have referred to as a press conference even though there were very few reporters in the room and questions were not allowed. ESPN followed Fox News with 1.7 million total viewers, with CNN checking in at 833,000 viewers and Golf Channel at 745,000. If you extend the time period from 11 to 11:30 p.m., which included network analysis of Woods’ speech, Fox News averaged 1.87 million total viewers, followed by ESPN (1.55 million), CNN (911,000), Golf Channel (706,ooo), HLN (496,000), CNBC (469,000) and MSNBC (436,000). Woods, who has been mired in a sex scandal for months, offered his mea culpa to fans, sponsors and his family, though he did not set a date for his return to golf.
Dow Jones: We want SmartMoney to ourselves
SmartMoney was a smart idea 20 years ago, much of that in its name, which made it sound so much smarter than Money, the long-dominant personal finance title, and through the years it did well, but the joint venture between Dow Jones and Hearst may be coming to an end. Dow Jones wants to buy out Hearst's half interest, and after much talk a deal may be near. Dow Jones wants to merge the title's editorial staff with its own, presumably to cut costs and to reshape the title in its own image. The monthly title has a circulation of 800,000, less than half that of Money's 1.9 million, and as with all the personal finance titles, it has seen ad pages decline sharply over recent years as advertisers shifted dollars to other print titles and online. Of the four titles in the category, SmartMoney saw the least erosion of ad pages in 2009, but it was still a huge decline, 22.9 percent. Money was down 29.1 percent while Kiplinger's fell 34.1 percent and Barron's 27.8 percent. With little expectation that the category will revive, there's long been speculation that one or more of the titles will fold, and Kiplinger's heads the list, according to magazinedeathpool.com.
Tweet success: Fortune 500 companies jump on Twitter
Just as weblogs went from quaint personal diaries to the place for Wal-Mart to hawk its latest deal, social networking is gaining a corporate sheen. Thirty-five percent, or 173, of the 2009 Fortune 500 companies have active Twitter accounts, including 47 of the top 100 companies, according to a new study from Nora Ganim Barnes, senior fellow and research chair of the Society for New Communications Research, and Eric Mattson, chief executive officer of Financial Insite. In fact, 22 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a public blog, and 86 percent of those link to a Twitter account, a 300 percent increase over the same time a year earlier, making Twitter the social media channel of choice in 2009, according to the study. Four of the top five corporations -- Wal-Mart, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and General Electric – have active Twitter accounts, although the list’s No. 1 corporation, Exxon Mobil, does not. The insurance industry had the most Twitter accounts among 2009 Fortune 500 companies with 13.
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