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Megyn Kelly to Get Prime-Time Slot on Fox News

July 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The second quarter of 2013 cemented the recent ratings trends in cable news, with CNN rising and MSNBC falling, while Fox News continued its overall dominance.

But within those quarterly reports was the news that in June Fox News scored its lowest ratings since August 2001 among the viewers news advertisers most want to reach, the 25-to-54 age group. The network may be trying to address this issue with its decision to elevate one of its rising stars, Megyn Kelly, to a prime-time slot as soon as she returns from a planned maternity leave in the next few months. Fox made that expected promotion official on Tuesday.

Fox did not announce a specific show for Ms. Kelly or whose place she would be taking in the network’s prime-time lineup. However, speculation has centered on Greta Van Susteren, the 10 p.m. anchor. Ms. Van Susteren recently signed an extension of her Fox contract but her future role is not certain at this point.

Her husband, John Coale, said in an interview with The Times in May that she would be willing to move to an earlier hour. Several Web sites, including Mediaite, reported this week that Ms. Van Susteren had held talks with CNN, seeking a job at that network. A CNN executive confirmed Tuesday that those talks had taken place.

Fox News also announced on Tuesday that it had extended the contracts of all its evening and prime-time anchors: Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Bret Baier and Shepard Smith.

All those men continued to pile up huge advantages over their competitors in terms of total viewers in the second quarter, as did Fox News, which was up 12 percent in total day ratings and 3 percent in the Monday through Friday prime-time ratings.

But Fox News did show declines among viewers between 25 and 54, the group that accounts for the bulk of ad revenue for news networks. For the quarter, Fox was down 6 percent in total day ratings in that category and 12 percent in the prime-time hours.

The second quarter proved a boon to CNN, which capitalized on a spate of big news during the last three months — including the Boston Marathon bombings — to post sizable ratings increases across the board, even as MSNBC was suffering significant losses. CNN finished ahead of MSNBC for a full quarter in prime time in both total viewers and in the 25-54 group for the first time since 2009.

In total day numbers, CNN was up 49 percent in total viewers, to 475,000. That was ahead of MSNBC’s 360,000 (down 9 percent), though nowhere near Fox News, which averaged 1.2 million. However, in that advertiser-preferred group, CNN came much closer to the perennial leader, Fox News, with 161,000 viewers to Fox’s 238,000.

In the Monday-Friday prime-time competition, Fox News held a similar yawning advantage in total viewers with 2.2 million (up 3 percent) to CNN’s 733,000; CNN’s total represents a 56 percent increase from the previous year (when the network was setting records for low ratings). CNN easily topped MSNBC, which dropped to 660,000, down 19 percent.

Again, the prime-time gap between Fox News and CNN was much narrower in the 25-54 category — just 136,000 — as opposed to almost 1.5 million among total viewers. Fox News averaged 386,000 for the quarter in that advertiser-preferred group, down 12 percent, to CNN’s 250,000, up 76 percent. MSNBC dropped 14 percent to 196,000.

MSNBC’s biggest name, Rachel Maddow, suffered through her worst quarter among total viewers since coming on the air in 2008.

The last month of the quarter, June, seemed to be pointing to a slowdown in news, which affected all the networks. With no headline-grabbing events to drive the ratings, MSNBC regained second place over CNN for the month. Many of the individual news programs showed stark falloffs from last June, which was an intense month for political coverage in a presidential election year.

In June, Ms. Maddow, for example, was down 20 percent from a year ago in the 25-54 audience, to her worst performance ever; Mr. Hannity’s decline was even sharper, down 25 percent, reaching his lowest ratings in that category since August 2001. With an average prime-time audience in the 25-54 category of 317,000, Fox had reached its lowest monthly total since August 2001.

On CNN, Piers Morgan was about where he was a year ago, down 6 percent. That was the second-worst monthly performance for his show.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/business/media/megyn-kelly-to-get-prime-time-slot-on-fox-news.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Comcast Posts 17% Increase in Net Income

May 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The solid earnings announced on Wednesday were partly the result of higher cable bills for 72 percent of Comcast’s subscribers. The company reported $3.07 billion in operating income and $15.3 billion in revenue, increases of 11.2 percent and 2.9 percent from the same quarter last year.

Still, signs that Comcast may have reached saturation in its core cable and Internet subscription business were apparent. The company lost 60,000 cable subscribers, 62 percent more than it lost in the first quarter of 2012. New broadband subscriptions fell 1 percent to 433,000, and Comcast gained 211,000 phone service customers, a 28 percent increase from last year.

Taken collectively, the country’s largest cable provider still had a 3.2 percent gain in new customers in the quarter, or 583,000 total subscribers, mostly because of the popularity of Comcast’s bundled offer, which includes Internet, phone and cable service at a reduced price.

In February, Comcast said it would pay $16.7 billion to acquire General Electric’s remaining 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal. The deal signaled Comcast’s confidence in the entertainment company. But at least in the first quarter of 2013, that investment did not show signs of paying off.

Revenue at NBCUniversal fell 2.4 percent to $5.34 billion, mostly because of a tough comparison to the same quarter in 2012. That quarter, NBC broadcast the Super Bowl, the most-watched live sports event, and took in the advertising revenue that came along with it.

NBC had a particularly rough quarter without its popular singing competition, “The Voice,” or the Super Bowl to prop up its prime-time earnings. Overall revenue at the network fell 18.5 percent and advertising revenue fell 25 percent. In May, NBC will hold its annual upfront presentation in New York to pitch its prime-time lineup to advertisers for the fall television season.

Universal Studios theme parks were a bright spot for its parent company with a 12.2 percent increase in revenue, largely tied to popular new attractions like “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.” The holiday season hit “Les Misérables” helped the Universal movie division, which had a 2 percent increase in revenue and 10.3 percent increase in operating cash flow.

Cable networks including USA, MSNBC and Bravo continued to stand out, with $2.2 billion in total revenue and $859 million in operating cash flow, increases of 4.6 percent and 6.2 percent.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/business/media/comcast-posts-17-rise-in-net-income-despite-a-dip-in-revenue-at-nbcuniversal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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A Struggling CNN Casts Its Eyes on Jeffrey Zucker

November 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Though CNN over all is on track to have its most profitable year ever, its flagship channel in the United States is seemingly rudderless, run by layers of producers and executives — many with competing visions. Its low prime-time ratings are the stuff of punch lines and a journalism school case study in the damage wrought by the digital age.

Then again, CNN also has tremendous potential, an enviably popular Web site and countless people rooting for it to succeed.

Throughout a four-month search for the person to succeed Jim Walton, the departing president, attention has centered on Jeffrey Zucker, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, who was replaced when Comcast took over the company last year. Mr. Zucker produces Katie Couric’s syndicated daytime talk show.

Several news executives close to Mr. Zucker said this week that they believed he had been chosen to run CNN, and they expected the appointment to be announced soon. People close to the Time Warner chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, also identified Mr. Zucker. A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment.

In considering candidates to run one of the world’s best-known, but beleaguered, news organizations, Mr. Bewkes and his deputy Phil Kent have also been considering their own legacies. They are cautious about not undermining CNN’s journalistic heart and soul, even as they strive to resuscitate the channel’s prime-time lineup, according to people who have met with them about the search. That means the channel’s programming will remain nonpartisan in nature.

“They want someone who has programming and management and cable expertise; someone who can be credible to the staff and to the business community,” one person said. “They know that this is a pretty tall order.”

Mr. Zucker could check off all those boxes. As a young NBC News producer, he helped start what became a 16-year winning streak for the “Today” show. He had mixed results as he moved up the rungs of NBC, but he can point to cable programming successes even as the NBC broadcast network struggled. He did not respond to requests for comment, and people with knowledge of the search insisted on anonymity to preserve friendships and business relationships.

But many others in and around CNN spoke on the record about the challenges ahead. Getting the top-heavy 4,000-person company — spread among New York, Washington, Atlanta and bureaus around the world — to row in the same direction will be one of the toughest tasks, many said.

CNN’s many channels and sites net roughly $600 million in annual profits, through advertising revenue and subscriber fees. But the channel is leaving ad dollars on the table, as one executive put it, because its prime-time ratings are lagging, and it is putting future fee increases at risk by appearing irrelevant in the eyes of some cable subscribers.

One problem dates back to CNN’s creation in 1980: when there is a lack of news, there is a lack of viewers. Kiran Chetry, a CNN morning anchor from 2007 to 2011, said her time there was like being on a news treadmill: “We were running, sweating, doing the work, but never getting anywhere ratings-wise,” she said. This stemmed, she said, from uncertainty about “what we were, who our audience was and how we best served them.”

As Fox News and, later, MSNBC put on confrontational political programs with partisan points of view, CNN sold itself as proudly nonpartisan, but it fell from first to second to third place in the cable news wars along the way. This should have been an “up” year for the channel, thanks to the presidential election; but through mid-November the channel had drawn 412,000 viewers at any given time, down 16 percent from the previous 12 months.

Bill Carter contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/business/media/jeffrey-zucker-expected-to-be-next-president-of-cnn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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