TV Newser has many strengths, but one of its weaknesses is that it is so eager to put up lots of content on its busy website that quality control--the editorial judgment that distinguishes a valuable news operation from a forgettable press-release operation--sometimes slips.
A case in point is this post from Wednesday, in which eager-beaver flacksters at CNN, who obviously majored in creative accounting, attempted to sell the world on new metrics for CNN ratingzzz.
Cable Gamers know that it is absurd for CNN to brag about its "cume/reach" (that is, the cumulative number of viewers, aggregated, over a length of time). Cume/reach might be a good metric for marketers trying to build overall brand awareness and institutional identity--think McDonald's and its Golden Arches--but TV advertisers don't care about such long-term notions: advertisers care about eyeballs in front of the tube in immediate here and now.
There are no ad dollars tied to cume, so the statistic is pointless, a way for losers to feel like winners--even if they are still, in fact, losers.
Yet TV Newser curiously highlighted CNN's "cume" numbers from the network's ratings press release. Nice going TVN; maybe you all need an editor!
Highlighting this Loch Ness Monster of a notional number has been CNN's talking point for years now since they've become a dinosaur that's constantly being trampled on by its competitors. Since they're a #2--sometimes #3--network and no longer a Nielsen favorite, cume is the only thing they have to highlight. But TVN's, um, friends at MSNBC shouldn't be happy about excessive shilling and spinning for CNN.
And feeds into a pet theory of The Cable Gamer: that the proliferation of ratings metrics over the years was a scheme by the ratings outfits, plus their customers, to make everyone a winner. Sort of like in summer camp; when I was just a little Cable Gamerette, I was awkward and uncoordinated; yet at summer camp, I still managed to win trophies--the fix was in, if my parents paid good money for me to go camp, I was going to win something! Similarly, in the old days, in sports, it was obvious who won and who lost--somebody won the AL pennant, and somebody won the NL pennant. But that wasn't good enough for MLB: there was more money to be made in division playoffs, and "wild cards" and all the rest. Now the seasons in pro sports go on a lot longer, and half the teams, it would appear, are somehow still in competition, even after losing in the final season. And so it is with ratings: with all the numbers chopped up and served up in so many different ways, everybody can be a winner, kind of, in some intellectual hothouse of a number crunching derby. OK, end of rant on that!
In the meantime, CNN should be embarrassed to tout the cume because what it really means is that people are surfing by CNN but then surfing away so quickly that Nielsen doesn't even calculate people's nano-viewing of CNN programming.
Once again, I am mostly a fan of TV Newser. But if TVN wants to preserve its status as a must-read for the Cable Game, let alone the overall News Game, then it will have to serve its readers better by pointing out the real inside story, not just repackaging a CNN press release.
