Last week was Savannah Guthrie’s first official week as co-host of NBC’s “Today,” and the preliminary ratings indicate that the trend of “Good Morning America” catching up to “Today” has not slowed down. According to the preliminary Nielsen Fast Nationals (finals will be in Thursday) “GMA” topped “Today” by more than 350,00 total viewers, a new record for the show.
In the adults 25-54 demo, ABC was only 2,000 viewers behind NBC, the closest position yet for the program. ABC has not been able to top NBC in the demo since the program began its ratings surge earlier this year — in fact it hasn’t won a week in the demo for the last 16+ years.
On a conference call with reporters to talk about the new NBCNews.com, NBC News president Steve Capus dismissed a question about the show’s ratings, saying:
“We faced a question earlier about the “Today” show’s ratings; that is a small piece of this entire portfolio, any number of our different properties are going to have good days and not so good days, but because we are set up with such a diverse set of strong properties overall, we are in a much better position,” Capus said. “We are set up in a different way.”
The demo numbers are so close that they may change by the time the finals come in Thursday. Stay tuned.