|
|
of late late news
Audience increases for post-midnight shows
By Kevin Downey
With network television ratings well into a two-decade decline, any sign of growth among the broadcasters, however small, tends to stands out.
That’s now the case with the often overlooked overnight hours, where a relatively tiny but growing audience is tuning in to the network news shows that air around 2 a.m.
The leaders in the overnight pack are ABC’s "World News Now" and CBS’s "Up to the Minute."
ABC has posted a 3 percent increase since last season, to 600,000 viewers, and has an adult 25-54 audience of 360,000.
CBS has had an overall increase of 4 percent, to 450,000 viewers, while its adult 25-54 audience is 260,000.
One reason for the growing audience is a renewed interest in the news since Sept. 11.
"People have a heightened awareness of the news, in general, and I think they’re in a pattern of consuming news whenever they can," says Stacey Lynn Koerner, senior vice president and director of broadcast research at Initiative Media North America.
"While people are watching more entertainment than they were in September and October, they are still keeping their finger on what’s going on."
Initiative Media, in fact, found as recently as January that 24 percent of people say they are watching more network TV news since the terrorist attacks.
Viewer interest in the sometimes wildly fluctuating stock market and the unrest in the Middle East might be contributing to the increases as well.
But it seems a good portion of the audience is of the insomniac variety. CBS describes its audience for "Up to the Minute" as including late-night workers and parents of infants.
The programming on the two shows, in fact, reflects an audience not necessarily searching for hard news.
"World News" and "Up to the Minute," both of which premiered in 1992, follow similar formats, which include news, feature stories and a few antics that might not sit well with audiences in other dayparts.
"World News Now," for example, has accordion playing Barry Mitchell, who sings about the news, as he did recently for the show’s tenth anniversary.
Although the audience for overnight news is inching upwards, it’s still a fraction the size of other network news programs.
ABC’s "World News Now" has an audience about one-seventh the size of "Good Morning America’s," which airs from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. And it has about half the viewers of ABC’s "World News This Morning," a show that typically airs before "GMA" and competes with programs like NBC’s "Early Today" and a slew of local morning news shows.
The overall audience for those early morning news shows has gone up, though, by about 28 percent since 1999 to 12 million, according to American Demographics magazine.
News shows also tend to be attractive to advertisers, regardless of when they air.
"A news environment tends to be serious and there’s a certain amount of prestige," says Shari Anne Brill, vice president and director of programming services at Carat.
"A lot of people who plan and buy media seem to think everybody works in the daytime. But there are a lot of people who work at night; their primetime becomes maybe 1 a.m. to 3 a.m."
While ratings are up for overnight programs, that growth has not translated into increased advertising revenue, at least not in 2001, a year in which ad dollars declined across all media types.
ABC’s "World News Now" pulled in $472,000 last December, according to CMR, which was a decline of 43 percent from December 2000.
April 19, 2002 © 20
02 Media Life-
Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.
Printer-Friendly
Version | Send
to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact
Us