Is Hard News A “Hard Sell” Online?

By Alissa Krinsky 

The Wall Street Journal‘s Rebecca Dana reports that ABC News is looking to revamp its two year-old World News Webcast.

“I have no interest in abandoning this,” ABC News President David Westin says. “I want to look at it and say, ‘What have we learned from it?’ ‘How can we reconfigure it?’ ‘What can we do better?'”

The 15-minute webcast airs in the afternoon, and ABC says last Monday’s figures show it got about 145,000 hits (out of 7.8 million ABCNews.com page views). “The broadcast networks’ news divisions,” Dana writes, “haven’t been able to convince many viewers or advertisers to move with them online, in part because their TV audience is older…

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“Another problem,” the article continues, “is the traditional newsy bent of these shows. Inside ABC’s Web division, the mantra is: ‘Hard news is a hard sell.'”

Dana also reports that CBS News is planning to alter its online news presentation, too, including a new portal for celebrity news.

> More: NBC News tells TVNewser the network is seeing success with its online videos. In May, more than 15.7 million Nightly News videos were streamed, a record. Nightly.msnbc.com has seen a 71% increase in its online video traffic, year-over-year.

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