The Baltimore Sun has a fascinating article this morning (link) in the fact that women are increasingly finding tha using the Internet is a more efficient use of their precious time than watching morning shows on TV… Should come as no surprise but the change seems quantifiable now:
When her children were young, Jenny Lauck flipped on Today or Good Morning America as she brewed her morning coffee and tended her babies.
But several years ago, the 34-year-old mother of three stopped watching the morning shows. After getting TiVo, she had no patience to sit through multiple commercial breaks during a live newscast. On top of that, the segments seemed frivolous.
“Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist’s office,” said Lauck, who writes for Web sites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. “It seems like a lot of fluff. I feel like I can get information faster and cleaner on the Internet.”
Lauck is not alone in souring on network morning news programs. In particular, this season has seen a significant erosion of the shows’ demographic sweet spot: 25- to 54-year-old women.
Almost 450,000 of these women – coveted by advertisers because of their household purchasing power – have turned off the three broadcast morning programs this season, a decline of 10 percent compared with the same time last year, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. Male viewers the same age also fell by 9 percent, but they make up a smaller portion of the audience.
It’s difficult to trace the exact cause of the drop. It comes after two popular morning hosts, Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, left their shows to be evening news anchors. At the same time, the popularity of online news sites and the frantic press of daily life appear to have led many women to forgo morning TV. Women are also turning increasingly to “mommy blogs,” which now number 6,400, according to the blog search engine Technorati, to swap tales about modern motherhood.
Please check out the rest of this article, this really shows the impact that access to community and content is having on our lifestyles.