Winners in Campaign '08 news coverage: Cable TV news, Politico.com, YouTube

NYT: Media Outlets Are Seeking a Campaign Bounce of Their Own
By BRIAN STELTER and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: August 4, 2008


(Charles Dharapak/AP)
Some magazines with the candidates had only a modest increase in sales.

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.

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....

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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....

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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....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/business/media/04ratings.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

We need to stop watching Cable and reading politico on line.

They will be our worst enemies during this general election season,
but we will have made them strong.