The State of the TV NETWORK News Media -- An Annual Report on American Journalism

Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism ^ | Pew Research

[Zakeet]

Audience

The audience for network television news programs shrank again in 2008, continuing a quarter- century of decline.

To a greater degree than before, Americans turned instead to other outlets for news. On election night, for example, the total audience watching cable channels nearly equaled that watching the broadcast television networks for the first time.

For all that, however, nearly 23 million viewers still tune into the three nightly newscasts each day, several times the number that are tuned into the three cable news channels at any given moment during prime time.

Among major trends in 2008:

• The three commercial nightly newscasts over all lost viewers for the year, although the declines were about half of those of recent years. In the race among the networks, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams remained No. 1 and even had slight gains in audience. ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson remained second although it lost virtually all of the audience gains it enjoyed a year earlier. The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric fell farther behind.

• The audience for the morning news shows fell for the fourth year in a row. But those losses, too, were not evenly spread across the board. NBC’s Today Show, the longtime leader, gained viewers while the second-place ABC’s Good Morning America lost. The CBS Early Show posted a slight 1 percent loss in viewers for the year.

• NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Olympics in August was the second-most watched Olympic Games ever, and there is some evidence this translated into temporary viewership gains for NBC’s evening and morning news programs. Both NBC Nightly News and the Today Show enjoyed a bump of almost 1 million viewers each in August when NBC was broadcasting the games. The gains did not last.

• Two full years with a younger set of network anchors has done nothing to attract younger viewers to the evening newscasts. The viewership of the morning news shows also got older on average.

Nightly Newscasts

Even in a presidential election year, with intense interest in the campaign and the economy, the audience for network nightly news continued to shrink, though a slower rate than in the past. And there were signs late in the year of Americans turning back to the medium in hard times.

The audience jumped in September when Wall Street declined sharply and the major political parties nominated their candidates. And the audience numbers kept growing after that. By January 2009, nightly news viewership was higher than it had been a year earlier on the eve of the presidential primaries. (see the Cable Audience Section)

But in the end, the growth in fall and early winter was not enough to lift viewership for the year over 2007.

Much more HERE.

[Zakeet]

Evening News Viewership Over Time
1980-2008, November to November

Evening News Household Ratings Over Time
1980-2008, November to November

Median Age of Nightly News Viewers
2002, 2004 - 2008

[Izzy Dunne]

Looks like we'll hit zero about 2035:

[N. Theknow]

The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric fell farther behind.

CBS Evening News with Katie Couric is the road apple on the dusty trail of TV News.