Frenemies: Network News and YouTube

Abstract

Ever since Google’s web spiders began crawling the Internet, people who care about the news have been trying to figure out how to save journalism. Most of the focus has been on the newspaper industry, but the broadcast television news business is also in trouble. The news divisions of ABC, CBS and NBC deliver news in programming formats younger viewers rejected long ago — at set times of the day, limited to stories someone else has decided are newsworthy. In 2008, for the first time in PEW Research’s analysis, more Americans said they went online for news than watched one of the three network evening newscasts. The evening news audience has not only been shrinking for three decades — losing, on average, one million viewers a year — it has also been aging. Consider the audience of one of CBS’s most popular shows, the news program 60 Minutes. The median age of its audience is 61 years old. The next generation of news consumers is online. And when they go online for news, they aren’t thinking of the three networks as a source for news. Young people may have grown up watching ABC, CBS and NBC for entertainment, but the networks’ evening and morning newscasts are shows only their grandparents watch.