MSNBC adds Olympic Trials; Cuts Live News…
Today MSNBC began airing the first of 13 consecutive Sundays of Olympic Trial broadcasts. However the way it has gone about doing it is unusual and interesting. The trial coverage airs at 12pm ET; the timeslot which Tim Russert’s show airs on Sundays. I had figured they would just pre-empt Russert’s program since it already airs on Saturdays in the same timeslot. But instead MSNBC shifted Russert’s show ahead an hour to 11 am, which chopped an hour off of MSNBC’s already meager weekend live newscasts.
It didn’t have to be this way. If MSNBC was hell bent on keeping Russert’s show on the air on Sundays, it could have had the Olympic trials air at 1pm instead. Or put Russert on after the trials (though from a programming standpoint, it would be better to have Russert follow live news rather than sports). That it instead chose to wipe out an hour of live news as part of the solution is noteworthy. I smell cost cutting at work. It’s cheaper to air two hours of tape instead of one hour of live news and one hour of tape.
And this wouldn’t be the first time MSNBC used the Olympics as an excuse to cut live programming costs. In 2006 NBC used the run-up to the Olympics as an excuse to unleash the much derided Friday Doc Block; over then GM Rick Kaplan’s strenuous objections I might add (though for appearances sake he tried to put the best face on it publicly I hear). It was billed as a temporary thing but nobody inside MSNBC I’ve talked to really believed that and neither did I. And we were right as the Friday Doc Block hung around for another two years before it was finally killed off a few weeks ago and live programming (Verdict) returned at 9pm.
I’m not saying that MSNBC Live Sunday has permanently lost an hour of live news as there’s no evidence to suggest so. But it would not surprise me at all if the dropping of an hour of live news on Sunday for the next thirteen weeks wasn’t a budgetary related move. Once again MSNBC’s brand as a news channel is undermined by non-news taped programming.
April 27, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Why even air Russert on Sunday when they got MTP on the affiliates?
April 27, 2008 at 9:30 pm
It’s a good branding move. Russert’s show was seen on CNBC for years and I’d been arguing for years that it belonged on MSNBC. But not at the expense of live news…
April 27, 2008 at 10:38 pm
I don’t think Msnbc sunday is very strong anyway so it’s not much of a loss. I think they should start a trial using reports from affilates around the country reporting the top story of their market. I think if they did it right, it would be an interesting national report unlike anything else on cable news. It could be done fairly cheaply as a promo type deal for the nbc stations and some national exposure for their reporters that I am sure they would enjoy. If it worked it could become an msnbc trademark, setting it apart from Cnn and fnc.