America’s love-affair with Today anchors Katie Couric and Matt Laurer may be coming to an end if the latest ratings are any indication.
NBC’s Today show, the venerable cash-cow, prestige morning show that has dominated the network ratings for most of its half-century existance is now beating ABC’s Good Morning America by a hair as thick as the hair underneath William Shatner’s toupee.
The New York Times reports:
The “Today” show’s lead over “Good Morning America” dwindled to perhaps 70,000 viewers last week, according to early estimates provided yesterday to NBC and ABC by Nielsen Media Research.
If those figures hold – the final numbers will be released by Nielsen on Thursday – then “Good Morning America” will have been its closest to “Today” at least in a given week, since December 1995. That is the last time that “Good Morning America,” on ABC, beat “Today,” on NBC, in the weekly ratings.
This is big news in the TV news/entertainment biz:
In recent years, the lead by “Today” over “Good Morning America” has been as much as two million viewers. Thus far, for the season that began in September, “Today” (average audience about 6 million viewers) has led “Good Morning America” (about 5.4 million) by more than 600,000 viewers.
But in recent weeks, the lead has become so narrow (about 300,000, during the week of May 2) that NBC replaced the program’s executive producer last month.
So what’s going on? Could it be that Couric and Laurer have started to become old hat for viewers? Is it the mix of stories on their show? One of the ironies is that ABC’s formidable morning anchors Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer were only supposed to be doing their jobs on that show a temporary basis, to stem ABC ratings bleeding in the morning (reports at the time suggested neither was too smitten with the idea of getting up at an ungodly hour of the morning and doing the show). Then ABC bigwigs found they had a potent team on their hands and (wisely) followed the old adage “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Couric has been one of the most appealing TV news personalities for years, although in recent years she has come under fire from conservatives who feel she displays a liberal bias (but, then, the 21st century’s new mantra seems to be to find the liberal or conservative bias in most personalities you see on TV, even someone wh rip-reads the news).
A LOT is at stake. BIG BUCKS are generated by the morning news shows. Journalism.org notes:
Despite having less than half as many viewers, morning shows greatly outshine nightly news as moneymakers, in large part because they are on two hours a day rather than 30 minutes and pack in more commercial time. The “Today” show and “Good Morning America” bring in nearly three times the revenue of their evening news counterparts.
Also, the evening news shows are becoming dinosaurs. They’re constantly outmanuevered by the 24 hour cable news cycle and the Internet…including weblogs.
But the morning shows still retain a freshness in concept, with their often spectacular big “get” interviews with major newsmakers (on serious and non-serious questions), often sensationalistic, tabloid-style questioning, blatant attempts to get interview subjects to break down and cry, and their often-satisfying mix of the hard-news oriented first hour with the subsequent “softer” following hours.
In the end, ratings dominance boils down to personalities, news mix, branding and prevelant network loyalties. The ratings suggest something is seriously amiss at NBC…and if it keeps up more heads could roll. But at ABC, Charles and Diane must be smiling.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.