Anchors Fade as Audience Shifts
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Yesterday, FTVLive was talking to an agent and we were discussing the state of main TV Anchors in this business.
It wasn’t that long ago that a number of local news anchors were making well over half a million bucks. Now, you can count on one hand the number of anchors pulling in that kind of money.
The Boston Herald writes that long gone are the days when marquee anchors dominated the local TV newscasts — and the network evening shows are following suit.
Former WHDH (Boston) newsman Jeff Glor is the latest casualty, ousted from anchoring the ratings-troubled “CBS Evening News” after a mere 18 month-run. Glor is being replaced by morning co-anchor Norah O’Donnell and the evening news operation is moving to Washington, D.C.
“The anchors at the network level are suffering the same problem as anchors on the local level, which is a media fragmentation,” said Susan Walker, a veteran TV news producer and professor at Boston University’s journalism department.
“The role of the anchor might become legacy because their ratings have been going down consistently and their demographic is going scarily up,” Walker told me Monday. “The audiences are getting older and older and older for network news.”
CBS’s anchor desk has been helmed by the likes of the legendary Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, who were household names at a time when watching the local and national evening newscasts was as routine as dinner.
But times have changed. Fewer people are tuning into the evening network news and young people aren’t aren’t watching it, let alone know the names of the network anchors, Walker said. Young people are getting their news from social media posts, Walker said, and independent videos that aren’t introduced by an anchor.
“What is a 20-something doing at 6:30 p.m.? They’re not sitting down with their pipe and partner making dinner, they’re watching their news on their time and they don’t really care about an anchor introducing news packages,” Walker said.
The era of the anchor’s personality being the centerpiece of the network evening newscast has passed, said Janet Kolodzy, chair of Emerson College’s journalism department. The anchor isn’t the only reason people tune in, Kolodzy said, but “you can’t have somebody you don’t like.”
“What is most important is that the anchors are promoting the strengths of the journalism,” Kolodzy said.
This is what FTVLive has been preaching for years. It is now about Journalism and no longer about personality. Sure, you need someone that viewers want to watch, but very few people are watching TV news for the anchor delivering it.
Viewers are watching for the information and you need to tell the story that compels them to watch.
The high priced Anchor is a dinosaur in this business, let’s just hope the business doesn’t become extinct as well.
