The Morning News Audience | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 15, 2005

In the mornings, the audience picture is one of stability, but below the surface there appears to be some shifting.

Over the longer term, thanks to audience growth and lower overhead, morning news has become increasingly important in network news. Though the trend line is bumpy, at the end of 2003, 14.6 million people watched morning news programs, a million more than a decade earlier.¹⁶

In 2004, that number remained unchanged.

Morning News Viewership, All Networks

November 1993 to November 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research unpublished data, www.nielsenmedia.com

* Ratings taken in month of November.

Why is morning news holding its own while evening is not? The study outlined last year the factors that have made morning TV more stable than evening (see 2004 Network TV Audience) - more people at home in the mornings, a 20-minute commercial-free block at the top of the broadcasts, a flexibility of content and format, and a greater level of experimentation over the years. Even with that, the audience for the three nightly newscasts together is still almost double that for the morning newscasts at any given moment. But because they are on for at least two hours each day, they make more than twice as much money as the evening shows.

Beneath that stability, however, 2004 saw some changes at play. The perennial leader, NBC, is losing ground, and ABC is gaining. NBC's Today Show saw viewership drop 3% from November 2003 to November 2004, from 6.5 to 6.3 million.¹⁷

Some observers have wondered if Today might be losing momentum in its content. An article in the issue of Broadcasting & Cable magazine for February 23, 2004, noted that the program had stopped dominating the "get" - getting sought after individuals on-air ahead of the competition - as it once did. Mel Gibson went to Good Morning America when he launched his controversial blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ," as did Howard Dean after his "I Have A Scream" speech upon losing the Iowa Democratic primary. Andrew Tyndall believes that the decision to stretch the two-hour Today Show into a three-hour morning may have diluted the first two hours of the program, perhaps by stretching the staff's time and imagination thinner. That doesn't mean it might not pay off financially. It may be worth it to NBC to generate more revenue from a third hour, even if it pays a price in a slight erosion of its rating lead in the first two.¹⁸

ABC's number-two-rated Good Morning America, meanwhile, saw its audience increase by 4%, moving closer to the top-rated Today Show. In November 2004, 5.4 million people watched the program on average each weekday, compared with 5.2 million the year before.¹⁹

And CBS's Early Show, whose time slot has a long history of changing faces and program titles and running a distant third, had stable audience numbers with 2.9 million viewers in November 2004, the same as in November 2003. That is the highest viewership the Early Show has had since 1998, when the figure was also 2.9 million. That still leaves CBS even further behind in the morning than it is in the evening news race.

A New York Times article in May 2004 suggested that CBS, after many years of experimenting with its morning format - everything from running all hard news back in the 1970s to a show, in the late 1980s, that included the comedian Bob Saget - may have hit on a successful formula.

In part, that involves a larger cast than its rivals. And Tyndall's research notes other differences, including longer news blocks, fewer hard-news segments (specifically reduced coverage of Iraq and the campaign in 2004), more health, more lifestyle, more consumer news, more cooking, and more self-promotion of CBS's own prime-time programming.

Another ingredient involves tweaking the usual mold of two anchors, a newsreader and a jolly weatherman. The CBS program features four anchors, in addition to the weather reporter, which gives the show a slightly different feel and rhythm, more of a true ensemble resembling in some ways Barbara Walters's program The View. But some roles remain firmly defined. Harry Smith's role as the serious male anchor is still similar to Charlie Gibson's at Good Morning America (At NBC, Today adopts a more unisex, less gender-stereotypical share of the workload). The big difference is that the role of the female anchor has been split up among three women.

(Having several anchors also allows cast members to be absent without upsetting the look and rhythm of the broadcast. On the downside, it means CBS can't promote the program by showcasing a dominant celebrity anchor like Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer).