Cutting the Coaxial Cable

Brian Doherty | January 4, 2005

While the tsunami disaster has meant a temporary uptick in ratings for televised news of all sorts, it seems as if viewers everywhere are noticing what our own Jesse Walker has (celebratedly) noticed here (unless, alternately, they just didn't care about the news in an election year), that the Web is a far better, richer news source than TV. From a report in Variety's Dec. 29 issue, not freely available online, in the Nielsen year 2004 (which, unlike the rest of our years, ends on Dec. 26) CNN lost 22 percent of its primetime audience from 2003; MSNBC lost 16 percent; CNBC, 13 percent; CNN Headline, 11 percent, and even kingmakers Fox News were down 2 percent compared to 2003.

Comments

|1.4.05 @ 1:14PM|#

Don't cut that coax yet... I've got a cable modem.

TV is a corporate push to a passive audience; while the web is a individualized pull from unique discreet sources. It makes sense for this outcome to result. What I wonder is how the demographics are affected. If the engaged, interested, web-enabled are the ones leaving that tube for this one, what is left behind, and how will marketing change to reflect the remaining audience?

|1.4.05 @ 1:24PM|#

I have a news ticker on my computer desktop ( I'm at it most of the day). I can get almost all the feeds I want; Reuters, Xinhus, NYT, NPR, BBC, Yahoo, many more. And it was free, check it out.

|1.4.05 @ 2:15PM|#

The news biz core audience is the 40% (note: not a majority!) of women who like to relate and emote; the soap opera news audience. They stay tuned, they come every day, and they don't need actual news.

The news biz would like others, but can't draw them except for one-offs, like a war or a tsunami, and even then quickly drives them off with bimbo inanities.

Those not in the 40% (20% of the population) flee as soon as they can, and here they are.

James Thurber on soap operas (compare the news) :

``In many soap operas, a permanent question is either implied or actually posed every day by the serial narrators. These questions are usually expressed in terms of doubt, indecision, or inner struggle. Which is more important, a woman's heart or a mother's duty? Could a woman be happy with a man fifteen years older than herself? Should a mother tell her daughter that the father of the rich man she loves ruined the fortunes of the daughter's father? Should a mother tell her son that his father, long believed dead, is alive, well, and a criminal? Can a good, clean Iowa girl find happiness as the wife of New York's most famous matinee idol? Can a beautiful young stepmother, can a widow with two children, can a restless woman married to a preoccupied doctor, can a mountain girl in love with a millionaire, can a woman married to a hopeless cripple, can a girl who married an amnesia case - can they find soap-opera happiness and the good, soap-opera way of life?
No, they can't - not, at least, in your time and mine. The characters in Soapland and their unsolvable perplexities will be marking time on the air long after you and I are gone, for we must grow old and die, whereas the people of Soapland have a magic immunity to age, like Peter Pan and the Katzenjammer Kids. When you and I are in Heaven with the angels, the troubled people of Ivorytown, Rinsoville, Anacinburg, and Crisco Corners, forever young or forever middle-aged, will still be up to their ears in inner struggle, soul searching, and everlasting frustration.''

Women (40%) think that's interestin

|1.4.05 @ 5:09PM|#

At least soaps have a plot. Ever watch sports? What a waste of time.

|1.4.05 @ 10:11PM|#

Wrestling has a plot.

|1.4.05 @ 11:26PM|#

Women have soap operas. Guys have Spider-Man.

Kevin