Fox News anchor and “Outnumbered” co-host Harris Faulkner talks to Adweek about the afternoon news talk program and her thoughts on how digital and social media are impacting TV news viewership.
On whether the explosion of web content and social media makes watching TV news harder, Faulkner thinks her industry offers the viewer something those other mediums can’t.
You’d think that, but no. First of all, people want you to sort and compartmentalize things so they know what’s most important. Social media doesn’t do that. The other thing is that when times get tough, people need to connect with one person, and they need that person to look them in the eye and tell them this is what’s happening and it’s going to be OK. I don’t think that social media jeopardizes in any way what we do. In fact, it puts an exclamation point on it.
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Faulkner spoke with our sister site Lost Remote earlier this year about the rise of social TV and how she leverages it in her anchoring.
“It’s how I watch television now,” Faulkner said about her knack for live-tweeting with viewers from the Fox News “deck” during the week. “I find to make it interesting to even myself, I like to kind of multi-platform things.” She also told us about learning about an Aspen plane crash from a celebrity on social media.
“I can say boldly this was one of those times where you see something come up in your Twitter stream and you’re like: ‘Wait a minute did that say Kevin Nealon…is he reporting now? It was succinct, just the facts, and a photo. It was like a Reuters clip.”