This year’s presidential campaign has drawn more voter interest than any other race in generations. For mainstream news media, however, capitalizing on that interest has been hit or miss, though not for lack of trying.
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Senator Barack Obama was asked about Senator John McCain during a taping of “The Situation Room” on CNN in May.
Charles Dharapak/Associated Press
Some magazines with the candidates had only a modest increase in sales.
Cable news ratings have risen sharply, with record viewership for debates and growing numbers for
Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Sites including MSNBC.com and
CNN.com have set new records for views of online videos. A trade association for newspapers has placed advertisements telling campaign managers that “newspapers deliver voters.”
But many media companies are struggling to translate campaign coverage into repeat readers and viewers — or revenue. The presidential primary debates had little lasting impact on TV ratings, and some magazines say that issues with candidates on the cover show only a modest bump in newsstand sales.
More noticeably, the broadcast networks’ evening newscasts — the traditional standard-bearers of television news — have been unable to stop their long-term ratings declines, even during the hotly contested primaries. The newscasts on NBC, ABC and
CBS had an average combined audience of 23.7 million viewers from January to June, down 2 percent from the same time period in 2007.
That decline came despite expensive efforts to remain competitive. The networks have produced special series about the candidates and kept reporters on the campaign trail. Most recently,
Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News,” Charles Gibson of “World News” on ABC and
Katie Couric of the “CBS Evening News” all traveled with Senator
Barack Obama as he toured the Middle East and Europe, yet household ratings for each of those three newscasts were flat compared with the previous week.
Jon Banner, the executive producer of “World News,” suggested that the ratings, especially during the slow summer months, might have slid further were it not an election year. He added that the heightened interest in the election can benefit many media entities without taking away from others.
“It’s not a zero-sum game,” he said.
It is true that the amount of news Americans consume has grown over the last few years, as has the number of news sources. The lineup of Web sites, newscasts and publications that jockey for attention and advertising dollars continues to expand.
Three months before the election, one clear winner of the cycle so far is The Politico, an upstart news organization founded in January 2007. The Politico, with nearly 70 editorial employees, publishes a 26,000-circulation newspaper three days a week in Washington, D.C.
But it is Politico’s round-the-clock online news reporting and analysis that have made it a must-read for a large audience outside the Beltway.
Politico.com averaged 2.5 million unique visitors a month in the first half of 2008, more than all but 13 American newspapers, according to Nielsen Online.
The Politico has benefited from profound changes in the way people get news, according to Jim VandeHei, the executive editor and co-founder. People look for news far more often during the day, they are far more likely to seek multiple sources as well as favorite bloggers and writers, and they are far more interested in watching video online.
“The difference between ’04 and ’08 is like walking into a different century,” he said. “Virtually everybody who comes to us also goes to The Post or The Times or Drudge or
Yahoo or
Google. Having a sole source of news — those days are over.”
A spring poll by the
Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 17 percent of Americans learn about the campaign via the Internet on a typical day, more than double the number that did in the spring of 2004. But traffic on Internet news sites has grown steadily for years, making it hard to say how much of this year’s rise is attributable to the election.
(Nor does it mean that online publications are translating page views into dollars. Politico still gets most of its revenue from ads in its printed newspaper, placed by interest groups hoping to influence the paper’s powerful readers.)
Charlie Tillinghast, the president of MSNBC.com, said he believed that at least part of his site’s success is election-related. In December, weeks before the first primaries, MSNBC.com’s traffic surpassed the 30 million visitor mark. It has held up since then, attracting 37.6 million visitors in June, when the final nominating contests were held.
For news Web sites, the most significant change from 2004 is the amount of video being consumed. Compared with previous election years, “the video players are better, the video quality is much better, and the overall user experience is vastly improved,” Mr. Tillinghast said. “It’s actually a pleasant experience, whereas before, users suffered a little pain to watch online video.”
On
YouTube, the Internet’s most popular video site, political commercials are far more popular than news reports.
John McCain’s recent ad tying celebrities like
Britney Spears to Senator Obama has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times.
Cable news has been a huge beneficiary of the campaign cycle. An analysis of Nielsen ratings by Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of CNN, shows cable with a 58 percent share of all news-viewing on television, up from 50 percent in 2004.
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As the nominating contests played out in the first half of 2008 and the cable networks showed two dozen candidate debates, CNN had, on average, 32 percent more 25- to 54-year-old viewers than during the same period in 2004, while MSNBC (starting from a much smaller base) averaged 73 percent more. The Fox News Channel showed a 17 percent decline compared with the same time period, but still had more viewers than the other news channels.
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Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
The Politico, a news organization started by John Harris, above left, and Jim VandeHei, has benefited from the campaign.
MSNBC.com is offering interactive graphics.
Record-breaking spending on political ads has helped local TV stations, though it only partly offsets a slump in the general ad market. Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, the likely nominees, are each spending about $6 million a week on television ads, mostly on local TV in battleground states, particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida.
During the prolonged primary season, many more local markets enjoyed a taste of campaign advertising dollars. “Local stations were seeing primary money late into the season that had never seen a dime before — states like South Dakota, Montana, North Carolina,” said Jack Poor, the vice president for marketing at the Television Bureau of Advertising.
Among magazines, Newsweek, where the campaign is a bread-and-butter topic, reports that issues with Senator McCain or Senator Obama on the cover have been among its best sellers, but that is not saying much, because its sales do not vary greatly based on cover photos. Rolling Stone and Us Weekly also had moderately higher-than-average sales with their Obama covers.
The audience for newspaper Web sites rose sharply this year, even as the printed papers continued to lose circulation. Nielsen figures compiled for the Newspaper Association of America show that in an average month in the first half of 2008, 66.3 million Americans visited a newspaper Web site, a 12.2 percent increase from the first half of 2007.
Again, how much of that growth stems from the campaign, and how much from factors like better video on those sites, is unclear. Newspapers still get less than 10 percent of their ad revenue from the Internet, so vast online audiences do not mean financial success.
With so many outlets covering the campaign, standing out is hard, but some are still trying. The British Broadcasting Corporation is renting a bus and intends to drive across the country between the conventions and the election.
Other outlets that do not regularly feature political news are trying to cash in on the election interest. In the July week that “Access Hollywood” showed a four-part interview with Mr. Obama’s family, the entertainment show had a 20 percent increase in viewers. Senator Obama’s family has also been featured in Us Weekly and People magazines.
Attention like that has led to accusations from the McCain campaign that Senator Obama has become the media darling of the election, raising the question of whether mainstream media outlets risk longer-term declines if they are seen to favor one candidate.
For instance, ratings for MSNBC, which has been singled out by the McCain campaign as being pro-Obama, have risen, largely because of Mr. Olbermann’s program. “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” has had its audience of 25- to 54-year-olds double in the last two years. The audience of “Hardball With Chris Matthews” has also jumped significantly. Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, said that the election is emblematic of a larger shift away from broadcast news and toward cable, a trend that he expects will keep viewers tuning in after Election Day. “More and more, the news game is being played out on cable,” he said.
Single broadcasts, however, do not seem to have any aftereffects. After Mr. Gibson and
George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s Sunday morning show, moderated an April debate between Senators Obama and
Hillary Rodham Clinton, they were widely criticized for emphasizing scandal over substance.
But neither the debate nor the harsh criticism that ensued seemed to affect ABC’s ratings. The numbers for “World News” edged up in the days after the debate, but soon returned to normal.
