What’s Hot/What’s Not: 12/20/09

Start thinking about the 2009 What’s Hot/What’s Not stories because I’m going to put out a request for submissions next weekend. But for last week…

What’s Hot:

Ratigan to 4pm, Todd and Guthrie to debut at 9am – MSNBC announced that Dylan Ratigan’s program would be cut by an hour and move to 4pm. Regardless of the motivation, I think this is a good move and, honestly, Ratigan’s program should have debuted in the afternoons in the first place. At 9am a new politics show for Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie well debut. Increasingly, NBC Washington is playing a bigger role in MSNBC dayside’s programming. But what about those of us who aren’t glued to the TV looking for political stories?

MSNBC beats out CNN in 2009 Primetime demo – This was a milestone event for the network.

Tiger Woods Mania – This story just won’t go away…

Beck and Gold – This one hasn’t gone away either, despite FNC’s attempts to put this one to bed…

Health Care Reform – This story probably won’t go away but will probably throttle back once the bill passes…

What’s Not:

CNN winds up in 3rd in the 2009 primetime Demo – Despite having higher ratings than in 2007 (2008 was an election year and therefore an outlier), CNN prime wound up in 3rd behind MSNBC in the Demo for the first time ever. MSNBC gets to crow while CNN continues to stress its “more news” in prime mantra, which in a way is related to…

MSNBC’s dayside woes – The numbers for 2009 are in for MSNBC dayside and the picture is grim. The network came in 4th behind HLN in the Demo from 9am-5pm. Worse, during several hours of the day the network came in 5th behind CNBC for 2009. Which leads a lot of kibitzers to think that MSNBC’s moving of Dylan Ratigan’s 9am show to 4pm was ratings related, the network’s assurances to the contrary non-withstanding. This storyline, and ICN’s leading edge coverage thereof leads to…

The sleeping giant stirs, but isn’t awake just yet – Last week I singled out the vast majority of the MSM media beat writers and bloggers for being asleep at the switch while ICN owned the coverage of MSNBC’s dayside problems. Well this week, with the news of Ratigan’s show moving to 4pm, elements of this group started paying attention. TVNewser noted ICN’s MSNBC numbers (finally) and the New York Times’ Bill Carter put out some numbers for certain MSNBC dayside programs that were even worse, which leads me to believe that Carter was fed those numbers by a network because they were so bad they were substantially lower than their program’s 2009 Demo averages. But the rest of the media writers are still not paying attention to this story. What are you being paid for?

Go Team! – The Ed Show having Kos on to take pot shots at Chris Matthews for Matthews’ comments about the blue blogosphere was the wrong way to address the matter. Matthews created this controversy. Hardball should have been the place to deal with it. As it was, this looked like one MSNBC program going rogue to take on another MSNBC program. That’s a programming no-no.

CNN 4th in primetime Demo last week – To further rub salt in a gaping wound, the Huffington Post reported that for the first time ever CNN wound up in 4th place in the primetime Demo Total Viewers last week.