…A digital upstart has been trying to do something new within the confines of a decades-old news institution: Build an always-on news brand that doesn’t fall into the trappings of endless cable news shout-a-thons on one end and cheap, forgettable social news clips on the other…
…Traditional broadcast and cable news viewers are aging, said Jason Maltby, president and co-executive director of national broadcast for Mindshare North America. The median age for a Fox News TV viewer is 68 years old; for CNN’s prime-time viewership, the median age is 59 years old, according to Nielsen…
“Like most other linear products, CBS News is aging up. They’re not getting millennials, which is not a sustainable long-term and mid-term business proposition,” said Maltby.
CBSN’s approach seems to be working so far. Its median age is 38 years old, with 80 percent of viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 — but don’t call CBSN a “millennial news outlet.”
“We don’t want to be in the category of trying so hard that it’s painful to be a millennial news outlet,” said [Christy] Tanner [svp and gm of CBS News Digital for CBS Interactive]. “The conventional wisdom would have been at one point, ‘Oh, you’re starting to prepare for the evolution of the audience, so just hire a bunch of 25-year-olds to be on camera as your correspondents.’ We have found that our viewers respond to people who are knowledgeable.”
Read the full piece at Digiday
