Tuned In

An Hourlong Nightly News. Probably Won't Happen. Should It?

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Prominent media insiders–by which I mean “my editors”–are excited this morning over a brief passage in a New York Times article about the success of the NBC news division

NBC’s surge in the evening has been strong enough for the news division president, Steve Capus, to suggest that NBC is positioned to be the first network to expand to a full-hour newscast. (He did not set any timetable for that move.)

My entirely off-the cuff guess is that Capus did not set a timetable for the move because it is never going to happen. The speculation is titillating, of course: network anchors have long dreamed of having the kind of elbow room PBS grants Jim Lehrer, and dropping a hint about doubling Brian Williams’ show costs nothing, while underscoring the PR message that Williams is steamrolling the competition. 

But you may recall, to take one example, the talk about two decades ago about CBS expanding its broadcasting-legend CBS Evening News to an hour. Or rather, you may not recall it, because it didn’t happen. The reason being that it would take away too much lucrative airtime from the network affiliates, who collect money from airing syndicated entertainment magazines and the like.

That didn’t fly in 1987, when CBS had Dan Rather and the network evening newscasts were still mass-media-institutions, not steadily-declining relics. Good luck trying now. (The pie of which NBC now has the biggest piece shrank from 26.9 million to 25.5 million viewers—which the NYT cites as “relative stability,” but the trendline is not moving in the happy direction.) It’s one thing for a struggling network to appropriate time from itself—hello, Jay Leno!—but another to acquire it from someone already making money off said timeslot. 

But it’s fun to imagine, which I suppose is why prominent media insiders enjoy blog posts like this one. Would you want to see an hourlong NBC Nightly News, and what would you like to see on it? It could be a platform for longer investigations and interviews, or it could just open space for the extra happy news that Williams was recently soliciting

What it wouldn’t do is get more people to watch the news between the hours of 6 and 7 p.m. But an industry can dream.