It's funny the things you remember from your childhood. For reasons I simply can't comprehend, I have a collection of bizarre and, at present, meaningless memories from times in my life when I was less than six feet tall. Maybe it will all make sense if I find myself the latest member of the cast of Lost, but until then, I can only mull over the time my first-grade class learned about whaling.
One particular memory that I've been thinking about recently was something that happened a little over 10 years ago. My grandparents were visiting from Florida for my first communion, and I remember coming after an early dinner into the family room where they were sitting. They happened to be watching the 6 p.m. news, and having never done so before, I decided to join them. I then proceeded to calmly watch the news for the next hour. This was the last time I ever watched the nightly news. That's not to say I've never watched informative television since, as I've watched coverage of major national events, elections, and the like, but the weekday nightly? No chance.
Of course, I'm not the only person who has eschewed the evening news in recent years for other programs. If the Nielsen ratings are any indicator, most working Americans would much rather watch Ugly Betty than listen to Katie Couric and her wildly underwhelming "freeSpeech" segments. ABC, CBS, and NBC are currently averaging about three million viewers a week for their respective news programs in the 25-54 "money" demographic. Considering that these programs are those most relevant to their lives, one would assume that the news would draw a much greater share of this demographic. As both the ratings and my personal experience verify, however, this is not the case. Both NBC's and ABC's nightly programs draw around 10 million viewers a week. Considering the state of the 25-54 demographic, it's fairly safe to assume that the other seven million viewers aren't the ones in high school and college. It's in 54-plus that the ratings fill in, which is certainly not how the networks would like to have their viewers proportioned. Ideally it would be to the professional and pre-professional breadwinners with the money to spend on potential advertisements, but there's a problem: those people no longer have any need for the evening news.
Take Boston College, for instance. By and large, we like to keep up with the times here. While we might not care about the Undergraduate Government of Boston College elections, I would say that we're fairly aware of current events, especially when compared to other colleges and universities. The daily deliveries of newspapers to dining halls are almost much gone by 10:30 a.m. and I think it's safe to say they aren't being snatched up to line the inside of piñatas.
Yet if you were to ask students who the three big nightly news anchors were, I bet most couldn't name all three (Brian Williams, Charles Gibson, and Katie Couric if you were curious). Local anchors? No chance. No, the current advances in technology along with the time constraints on our day (and that of the working American, I'm willing to bet) have turned us to use new and unique methods of acquiring our news.
The days of planning one free time around an evening broadcast are all but done for the younger generations. Instead, we can rely on an almost infinite variety of news Web sites from all around the world. Some sites even do all the legwork and compile news for their readers.
With the advent of the iPod as the most dominant piece of portable technology that doesn't make telephone calls (for the next four months at least), daily news podcasts allow people to take in the news while considering what they want on their omelet in the morning - not to mention all the other forms of downloadable content that allow people to personalize the what, when, and where of their news consumption. Evening news, on the other hand, has the flexibility of a pretzel rod. With technology advancing as quickly as it is, the days of news anchors ballasting the American population are over. The time of flexible media, however, is just beginning.
Dan Calanca is a Heights staff columnist. He welcomes comments at calancad@bcheights.com.
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