Television

The weeks-long battle between Time Warner Cable and CBS that is keeping the network’s programming from being shown in major markets comes down to the all-important question of retransmission fees.

NBC News purchased a digital start-up company that allows anyone with a smartphone to stream live video to the network from the scene of breaking news, a move that could lead to increased use of user-generated content.

The latest data on local television economics offers mixed messages: increasing revenue from news programming but cuts in newsroom budgets.

While the economics of local television are stronger than those of the newspaper industry, a new Pew Research Center report analyzes why some trends in local television news may be worrisome.

Spanish-language television reached a new milestone in America. Univision finished first among broadcast networks during July sweeps in two highly sought-after demographics: 18- to 49-year-olds and 18- to 34-year-olds. According to Nielsen, between June 27, 2013, and July 24, 2013, Univision averaged 1.8 million viewers ages 18 to 49 nightly, beating out English-language networks FOX, […]

In recent years, natural disasters around the world have been chronicled by a new kind of visual journalism, often produced by citizen eyewitnesses and posted to the video sharing site YouTube. These videos represent a way of “crowdsourcing” a dramatic breaking news event, frequently before professional journalists can arrive on the scene.

In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.

After an unusual uptick in the overall audience for evening news in 2011, the trend line returned to its normal in 2012. The combined viewership for the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts dropped 2%, to 22.1 million, resuming the downward trajectory of nearly three decades. It now appears that 2011 may have been an outlier, with the bigger audience attributable to an unusual number of major news events that year, including the Arab Spring, the Japanese earthquake and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Even a presidential election couldn’t keep some viewers from deserting network news in 2012.

Cable news continues to operate with more stability than most other news sectors today. But financial growth tapered off in 2012, and audience figures started to show signs of languishing—at least raising the question of whether there is a ceiling for this niche news genre.

The long slow decline in viewership of local television news resumed in 2012 after a brief respite the previous year. While stations devoted more of their available air time to local news, that wasn’t sufficient to halt the decline in viewership. Early-morning newscasts continued to gain viewers, but that increase was more than offset by losses in most other time slots.