Networks Bleeding Viewers; Scrambling For New Shows

That (the subject line above) was the WSJ tweet about the death spiral the four major networks find themselves in:

With the 2012-13 season nearly over, all of the major English-language networks have so far lost prime-time viewers in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic that advertisers covet. Only top-rated CBS—which had the benefit of the Super Bowl this year—managed to add total viewers, and only by 1.5%.

A good tie-in to this article is James Gleick's book The Information. He defines "information" as a surprise.

For example, there will be no (new) information in this number sequence:

010101010101010101010101.... 

Everyone knows the next digit will be a "0." (Of course, if it isn't, that will be news.)

However, in this number sequence:

01110101000100010000100...

the next number will be information for the mathematician trying to determine the algorithm that defines the sequence.

Guess which letter comes next in the series of letters:

He was the bigges_

No surprise, no news, no information. I assume everyone guessed the next letter would be a "t."

James Gleick also notes that language is redundant. That's one of the tools code-breakers use to break codes. The following phrase is the quickest way to demonstrate what is meant by redundancy in language:

f u cn rd ths

The full sentence would be 20 digits, including the spaces, but the message could be sent with 13 digits, including spaces.

And that takes us to Twitter. 140 digits per message. Jam packed with infomation. Very little redundancy and unlikely if a few letters were removed folks could guess the next letter in many of the messages.

And that's the information world we live in. It's hard for television to compete with that. I don't have television right now, and have not had television since April 25 when I began this current bit of traveling. However, I do have a radio and I do have the internet. Yesterday I listened to the Spurs basketball game on the radio and watched Tiger Woods win the golf tournament on the internet. (The crispness/clarity of the computer monitor was incredible, and it was not even retinal quality.)

Throw in what I wrote earlier about about spinning the news and The Death of the American Dream and folks in Los Angeles and New York wonder why they are losing their television audience:

• the way we receive information is changing
• people don't need television to be entertained
• the honesty and integrity (real or not) of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite have been replaced by the spin of talking heads who report what Art Carney tells them

One piece of trivia that I don't think the media will talk about: how long it takes for a news story one sees on the internet to be reported on the evening news of one of the three major networks. I am sure everyone is aware that when they watch the evening news, they've read most of the stories two or three days earlier on the internet. I'm talking about the fluff that makes up 75% of the half hour news, not necessarily the headline news or breaking news. But for the rest of the fluff, before a story is reported on network television it is vetted, confirmed, passed through various editors, fact-checked, and re-written several times. I find nothing unusual about the fact that the Susan-Rice-Benghazi-story was re-written twelve times (it was the lies that were concerning)). I would assume most federal government policy statements and talking points are edited and re-written dozens of times before they are released.

The point is this: the all-important 18- to 49-year-old demographic is getting his/her information from a 140-digit tweet that has not been vetted: simply a piece of information. Entertainment is not sitting in front of a non-interactive monitor.

It will be interesting to see how much information the next generation will be able to send in 140 digits. I have some thoughts, but I doubt if anyone has read this far. So, time to quit.