For more than two decades, discussions of TV news have been dominated by a discourse of decline. No statistic has been quoted more often than that of network evening newscasts collectively losing 27 million viewers - roughly half their audience - across a 25-year span starting in 1980.
But for all the talk of dinosaurs and audience erosion, major TV news programs - such as PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Tim Russert's Meet the Press on NBC - have found new life on computer screens, iPods and cell phones during the past year.
Millions of additional viewers, many of them part of the young demographic most desired by advertisers, are now streaming video of CNN's Anderson Cooper, downloading podcasts of NBC's Brian Williams and watching ABC's Charles Gibson deliver World News on mobile devices. And those viewers have easy access on a variety of digital screens to the kind of in-depth analysis and rich context that television news has long been accused of lacking.
Some of the gains are eye-popping, such as CNN's increasing its online audience by almost 8 million page viewers from May 2006 to May 2007, the most recent figures available, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
NBC and MSNBC, meanwhile, added almost 4 million viewers to their shared Web site during the same 12-month period.
While those two cable news channels have set the pace in gains, all the big TV news operations grew online during the past 12 months. CBS.com went from 7.9 million to 8.6 million viewers, while ABC's Web audience rose from 9.8 million to 10.2 million year to year. Fox News showed the smallest increase - going from 7.5 million to 7.6 million.
"Those numbers tell a dramatic story of across-the-board growth for an industry that has heard almost nothing but gloom, doom and steep decline for years and years," says University of Maryland media economist Douglas Gomery, who observes a similar surge at newspaper Web sites.
"Furthermore, if you go inside those overall numbers, you'll find that the aggregate audiences in old and new media for some of the individual news programs are even more impressive - they are huge."
The gains have important economic consequences for broadcasters threatened by shrinking on-air audiences and advertising revenues. In recent weeks, Madison Avenue has agreed to pay the networks for some new media audiences when buying advertising time on fall schedules. As a result, the major TV networks for the first time in four years will show an increase in upfront sales revenue - instead of a projected take of $8.5 billion, the five networks have already passed $9 billion.
Old and new media
ABC's World News with Charles Gibson has amassed one of the largest audiences in old and new media. The highest-rated nightly network newscast is seen by an audience ranging from 7.5 million to 11 million viewers each weeknight, depending on the month of the year.
But those two numbers are only part of the World News story.
In January 2006, ABC News launched the World News Webcast, a half-hour newscast streamed live at 3 p.m. each weekday. Viewers can download it from either abcnews.com or iTunes, which offers a vast array of news programs.
During the last 18 months, there have been 76 million downloads of the Internet version of the ABC newscast - with steady growth month to month. In June, the World News Webcast was downloaded 5 million times.
New audiences
"There's no question that broadcast television faces a lot of challenges - both in entertainment and news," says Paul Slavin, ABC News senior vice president of worldwide newsgathering. "But we're now finding new and sometimes even larger audiences in the digital space."
NBC and MSNBC boast a similarly large audience for Meet the Press with Tim Russert, the highest-rated Sunday morning public affairs program on television.
For the week ending June 24, the program attracted 3.2 million viewers when it aired on NBC, and an additional 565,000 viewers during the week in rebroadcasts on MSNBC. And it was streamed 126,340 times during the week at msnbc.com.
"There is no question that television remains a hugely important part of the picture, but it isn't the only part of the picture anymore," says Mark Lukasiewicz, executive vice president for digital media at NBC News.
"Cable TV and the Web are also huge parts of the picture. Mobile telephones are a bigger and bigger part of the picture. Interaction with the audience - a whole new realm of communication that is two-way, not one-way - is another big trend that informs our work. All of that put together is a rapidly growing pie, not a shrinking pie."
Even smaller news organizations are taking bigger bites of the pie.
Public television's pbs.org is not on Nielsen's Top 20 online sites for global news and current events. Nevertheless, pbs.org/newshour/ - the PBS Web site for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer - boasts 1.2 million page views and 600,000 video streams a month.
Furthermore, 310,000 podcasts of the program are being downloaded monthly - with one of the hottest offerings on iTunes during 2006 being a weekly segment in which anchorman Jim Lehrer discusses politics with veteran journalists David Brooks and Mark Shields.
"It is the same for us as it is for newspapers. It's not that audiences are disappearing, they are just changing - and we have to change the way in which we engage and deliver quality news and information to them," says Lee Banville, editor in chief of the Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."
Baltimore news organizations are finding the same kind of online growth as their national counterparts. Page views at the WBFF-TV (Channel 45) Web site, foxbaltimore.com, are up 76 percent - from 258,594 in May 2006, to 455,499 this year, according to general manager William Fanshawe.
WBAL-TV (Channel 11), Baltimore's NBC affiliate and highest-rated news station, reports a 25 percent increase on its Web site, wbaltv.com, year to year - with as many as 1.5 million page views a week during times of breaking news.
"Our biggest boost comes from our affiliation with CNN, where we provide them with our local news," says Wanda Draper, director of programming and public affairs.
"When viewers click on our local news headline at cnn.com, they actually come to our site. A story that would get 10,000 hits in a day on our site alone, can get as many as 100,000 hits with the traffic from CNN."
More imagination
Such online success is transforming the very manner in which news is gathered - with producers and executives putting more effort and imagination into feeding new media as they go about doing their work in the old.
During a recent visit to Iraq by NBC anchorman Williams, producer Subrata De carried a mini-digital-video camera as she produced segments for the NBC Nightly News. The smaller digital camera allowed her to shoot and upload Web-exclusive video reports for msnbc.com.
"It has become routine for producers and reporters to carry digital still cameras, digital video cameras and a variety of mobile devices - and use them to add texture and context to the stories they are reporting," says Lukasiewicz, the NBC News digital chief.
"For NBC News and msnbc.com, the changing dynamic hit us all when Brian Williams used a cell phone from inside the Superdome to capture and transmit the first images of the roof being peeled back by Katrina's winds."
Keeping viewers
No newsgathering operation has enjoyed more growth this year than cnn.com, which had 29.1 million page views in May. (Yahoo! News had 30.5 million page views, but it is a portal to newsgathering operations, rather than a company with its own reporters, editors and news bureaus.)
Indicative of CNN's online power - particularly during major news events - the Anderson Cooper 360 Blog received 1.1 million page views during the 24 hours after the Virginia Tech massacre in April.
Analysts say, however, that it is not only the volume of traffic that makes cnn.com a success, but that it is also the amount of time visitors spend at the site. According to Nielsen Net, the average person spent 30 minutes and 30 seconds at cnn.com during visits in May - more than at such newspaper sites as nytimes.com or washingtonpost.com.
"From a business sense, advertisers don't want only volume, they also want engagement, or time spent with their ad. That's where we shine - in the combination of the two," says David Payne, senior vice president and general manager of cnn.com.
For networks and cable channels, the ultimate measure of success or failure will be their ability or inability to translate new media growth into advertising dollars - a process that Gomery, professor and scholar in residence at the University of Maryland's Library of American Broadcasting, says is well under way.
"The networks are not yet making enough in online or podcast advertising to offset what they've lost in recent years via declining broadcast revenue, but they are now on the road to doing that," Gomery says.
"The big ratings services are starting to measure the new media audiences, and Madison Avenue is starting to pay for those viewers. New viewers in new venues are starting to mean significant new revenue for TV news."
david.zurawik@baltsun.com