From TV to digital sites, viewership taking big hit
Cable news networks suffer steepest drop after cashing in on drama of 2020
NEW YORK — The presidential election, pandemic and racial reckoning were stories that drove intense interest and engagement to news outlets in 2020. To a large degree, 2021 represented the inevitable hangover.
Various metrics illustrate the dwindling popularity of news content.
Cable news networks were the main form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News Channel and 25% at MSNBC, according to the Nielsen company.
The decline was less steep but still significant at broadcast television evening newscasts: 12% at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening News;” 14% at NBC’s “Nightly News,” Nielsen said.
The Trump era saw explosive subscriber growth for some digital news sites like The New York Times and Washington Post. Yet readers aren’t spending as much time there; Comscore said the number of unique visitors to the Post’s site was down 44% in November compared to November 2020, and down 34% at the Times.
While a Dec. 23 headline on the Los Angeles Times front page — “How Much More Can We Take?” — referred to COVID19, it could easily be applied to the news appetite in general.
For the most part, smart news executives knew the peaks of 2020 were not sustainable. “It was entirely predictable,” said news media analyst Ken Doctor.
Perhaps that was most obvious at the cable news networks. They built a primetime model almost entirely focused on political combat during the Trump years, which made it difficult for them to pivot to something different, said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “You become, to some extent, a prisoner of the audience you built,” he said.
Those networks remain focused on politics even as viewership interest wanes. The media monitoring company NewsWhip looked at 14 million political articles online last year and found they had an average of 924 engagements, or social media interactions. The 13.5 million articles NewsWhip has traced in 2021 had an average of 321 engagements.
To a certain extent, these outlets have turned elsewhere for revenue opportunities, Doctor said.
CNN is preparing to debut a new streaming service early this year, and recently poached Fox News’ Chris Wallace to join that effort. Fox News, while doubling down on conservative commentary following perceived threats from outlets like Newsmax and OANN, directed fans to its Fox Nation streaming service.
Some 100 to 120 local newspapers shut down in 2021, a number that is on pace with the declines of the past two decades, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a professor at Northwestern University.
Yet local news outlets are also expected to have their smallest number of job cuts in 14 years, according to the research firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. That comes after 2020 saw the biggest number of lost newsroom jobs since 2008.