Last night Anderson Cooper took up the trend of in-show anchor blogging, giving his 10pm cable competitor a run for her digital money.
Greta Van Susteren‘s GretaWire blog often opens a thread for viewers to comment while On The Record is on the air. Van Susteren responds during commercial breaks. Greta has also been known to add blog posts during her show. The experiment on AC360 gives an indication the shows are not just competing for TV viewers, but for page view(er)s as well.
Cooper made seven comments in the thread, six during the show. A few were responses to those who questioned the decision to spend time talking about Britney Spears.
Cooper’s final comment included an accompanying icon…
In his final comment of the night at 12:50amET (almost two hours after he went off the air), Cooper wrote, “Yay folks, its so great to be doing this. I am so excited,” followed by a smiley-face icon.
A CNN spokesperson tells TVNewser that the page had more than 12,000 views from 10-Midnight last night, and that the live blogging will continue, “occasionally with the goal of making it a nightly event.” Gretawire averaged 21,500 page views during those hours last night.
So here’s a question: Will Anderson comment on GretaWire? Will Greta, comment on the AC360 live blog? And would they do it, while they’re both on live? We’ll be watching… and viewing.
> Update: Apparently that late night comment was not from Cooper, but from an impostor whose comment on the first night of the live blog somehow slipped through. Cooper tells TVNewser, “I was amused to see someone posted a note using my name during our inaugural live blogging last night. For the record, I stopped using smiley faces and bubble hearts in second grade.”