The tectonic plates are shifting. The NBC Nightly News, which has held the number one slot in U.S. network news for a decade, is being overhauled.
A little history. Once CBS News had the lead with Walter Cronkite. Then Dan Rather took the CBS chair and kept the lead, but Rather couldn’t keep Cronkite’s audience and the late Peter Jennings at ABC became frontrunner.
In 1993 NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw was third in the ratings. By 1997, it was first. Its audience had barely altered. It had merely held steady whilst ABC and CBS had lost viewers. Brokaw gave way to Brian Williams, and NBC stayed ahead.
Rather (whose show was dubbed by insiders the CBS Medical Evening News as it attempted to plumb the demographic depths) gave way to Katie Couric, recruited from NBC’s top-rated morning show Today. At ABC there were various plans made to succeed Jennings. None of them were supposed to feature 63 year old Charlie Gibson, from the network’s breakfast programme, Good Morning America.
But Gibson – re-labelled ‘Charles’ for evenings – ended up getting the World News slot. Now he’s overtaking Williams. Is it all Gibson? Analyst Andrew Tyndall in Variety:
…attributes Gibson’s surge in the younger demos to story selection that focused more on family-oriented themes, such as leading the broadcast with a report on the virus linked to cervical cancer, while NBC and CBS led with Afghanistan and Iraq.
“It isn’t that NBC is slipping; it has the most hard news of any newscast and is the most Washington-oriented,” Tyndall says. “ABC’s story selection was more family- and women-oriented and younger.”
In case you still think this has anything to do with winning, the NYT has the grim figures behind Gibson’s recent victory:
Mr. Williams has lost an average of a little more than 570,000 viewers over the last year; Mr. Gibson’s audience has grown by just under 60,000 viewers.
Couric is down 120,000 over the same period. So network news has lost 630,000 viewers on the year…and a lot of the rot is down to NBC. Can those viewers be won back? A fraction of them perhaps, and on such wins reputations are still to be made.