Television

How did the news media fare on Nov. 7? A PEJ study of 32 different media outlets on Election Day offers “five lessons” about the coverage of major breaking- news events in the multi-media era, and a “sector-by-sector” breakdown. While some outlets struggled to find their role, those that combined both speed and interactivity seemed the most useful destinations.

Nielsen Media Research, the gold standard in the TV ratings industry, has announced that it will release numbers in December that show how many people actually sit through commercials on TV. That new yardstick will affect how much advertisers will pay to air those ads and will very possibly alter the economics of the TV marketplace. And not everyone in the TV business is happy about this.

Baseball's Fall Classic has not been a hit with TV viewers in recent years. In the last 20 years World Series ratings have fallen by more than 50% so that it now only averages one quarter of the audience of the Super Bowl. And through two games, the 2006 Series is the lowest-rated ever.

The long-stable world of evening network news looks a bit jostled just three week's into Katie Couric's tenure in the CBS Evening News anchor chair. She may not be in first place anymore but compared to other anchor debuts, Couric has at least temporarily disrupted the long-consistent one, two, three finish among NBC, ABC, and CBS. Is it a long-term change or just a ripple?

When the planes struck New York and Washington 5 years ago today, they altered the course of the news people get as well. According to new numbers from ADT Research, viewers of network evening newscasts have gotten a beefed up diet of war and terror since then while seeing big decreases in coverage of domestic issues, from crime to technology.

Now that the hype and the waiting is finally over, how did Katie Couric do on her historic opening night at the CBS anchor desk? Not so great, according to dozens of TV critics and commentators who offered up mostly mixed or negative reviews of her inaugural broadcast and snide remarks about her wardrobe.

Officials of Al Jazeera International discuss their plans for launching the English-language version of the controversial Arab news channel. Why the long delays? Is the network anti-American? That, plus, a chronology of the rocky relationship between Al Jazeera and the US government.

A Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism roundtable brings together a panel of cable news industry leaders. Some predict the medium will adapt to the changing news consumer while others believe dramatic innovations are necessary.

In the sixth of our roundtable discussions on the future of the news media, our expert panelists say that cable TV news has rapidly become a mature platform that faces serious challenges from fresher technologies and information-saturated viewers.

in our fifth roundtable discussion on the future of the news media, industry analysts discuss how local TV news can remain relevant and whether it needs to reinvest more profit back into the product.