NBCUniversal's flagship broadcast channel and cable news network both saw declining revenue in 2014 even as their competitors saw growth according to the latest annual Pew Research report on the State of the Media.
The report which arrives amid NBC's ongoing Brian Williams controversy and MSNBC's ongoing ratings struggles is yet another blow to a media company that just a few years ago could rightly claim to have the most popular morning evening and Sunday broadcasts as well as an ascendant cable channel with significant political influence.
But 2014 was a year of instability at both networks At NBC the Today show continued to fall farther behind ABC's Good Morning America Nightly News saw its margin over ABC's World News Tonight narrow and Meet the Press underwent a publicly humiliating shakeup that saw the departure of former moderator David Gregory.
Those troubles had a financial cost Today suffered an estimated revenue decline of 12 percent from 2013 according to the Pew Report. Though it remains the revenue leader with an estimated $435 million it is losing ground to ABC's Good Morning America where revenue was up 4 percent year over year and CBS This Morning which was up 11 percent year over year. Nightly similarly suffered an estimated revenue decline of 4 percent to $148 million while revenue at ABC's World News Tonight and CBS' Evening News grew by 11 percent and 1 percent respectively.
Meanwhile MSNBC suffered catastrophic ratings declines as its programming drew increasingly stale and irrelevant. Its total viewership was down 14 percent from 2013 to a daily median of just 334 000 viewers. Those losses resulted in a 5 percent decline in ad revenue which brought total revenue down 1 percent from 2013. Meanwhile CNN s revenue was projected to rise by 3 percent while Fox News' revenue was projected to rise 6 percent.
In early March NBCUniversal hired television news executive Andrew Lack to serve as chairman of the NBC News Group overseeing both NBC News and MSNBC. The hope is that Lack will be able to stem NBC's losses and perhaps even return some of its shows to No. 1 just as he did for Today Nightly and Meet as NBC News president in the 1990s.
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