MSNBC's Baldwin Debut Drops 7% in Target Demographic

[mystery-ak]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/10/14/Baldwin-demo-down

 by Breitbart News 14 Oct 2013, 12:13 PM PDT

On Friday night, Alec Baldwin’s new MSNBC show, Up Late with Alec Baldwin, fell down out of the gate, dropping 7% in the target news demographic, even though the viewership was 654,000, up 53% over the timeslot a week earlier. Fox News Channel blew out Baldwin across the board, with Hannity grabbing 1.5 million viewers, and 338,000 in the target demographic. CNN’s Anderson Cooper dropped serious audience, losing 52% week-to-week and 58% in the demographic.

Deadline Hollywood speculated that Baldwin’s show bored people: “For the entire premiere episode, the two men talked amicably about NYC issues, including taxes, job creation, the city’s controversial stop-and-frisk cop strategy — a conversation that, conventional wisdom would argue, probably sent even some Baldwin fans outside the five boroughs diving for their remotes.”

[jmyrlefuller]

This is bad, bad news for MSNBC. Typically, when a new high-profile show shows up, people watch for at least the first couple of shows, which causes a ratings spike. Then things settle down, and if it's a hit, people keep watching and the ratings hold steady or rise. If it's a dud, the ratings fall.

If the ratings you have for the first show are lower than the ones before it, people have already written it off.

Take for instance a little TV station up here in Buffalo. It's been several years since this station has been competitive in the ratings, and a fight with unions that has lasted several years, along with serious financial problems and gross mismanagement, pushed the once-vaunted Channel 7 Eyewitness News into a distant third place. Now, channel 7 still has a decent news product (compared to channel 2, a channel bloviating in its own self-importance and channel 4, whose stories are written by the daughter of the local Democratic Party chairman-- I'm not kidding). Yet the new general manager they hired decided to make a big splash: they hired two out-of-town news anchors for a new morning show. They then decided to advertise heavily during a Buffalo Bills game: the problem is, those ads featured the new anchor team mangling every town name in Western New York.

Now, at this time, channel 2 has about a 6 share, channel 4 has about a 5, and channel 7 is hovering a little over a 2 share. The new anchor team got a 1.9 their first day, indeed dropping even with the new ad push. A month later, it had plummeted to a 1 share.

So, yeah, if Baldwin's ratings went down on the first day, that is a bad, bad sign.