The New York Times reports that, for all the buzz generated by Katie Couric’s multiple interviews with Sarah Palin, the ratings for the CBS Evening News barely budged, and are down from last year.
For CBS, it’s an example of TV’s burning question, to which I don’t pretend to have an answer: In the multiplatform, multiscreen era, what is “success”?
The Couric interviews have been the talk of the media. They’ve been watched millions of times on YouTube; they inspired an equally buzzed-about SNL skit. They raised questions about Palin’s candidacy itself. They are certainly among the signal artifacts of the general election so far.
But: that and 50 cents, etc. From the standpoint of the network, not a lot of income generated from all those online viewings. And if there are more vague, long-term, ancillary benefits to all that free media, they are not yet showing up in the flagship newscast, i.e., the format that actually makes the money.
The benefits are less ambiguous for Katie: this has to make it harder for CBS to deep-six her after the election, if that was a serious consideration to begin with.
Anyway, since the Internet seems to love itself some Palin and Couric, here’s last night’s installment. Tonight, Couric poses questions to both Palin and Joe Biden: