NEW YORK — A recent job promotion came with what seems to be a counterintuitive mandate for NBC News senior vice president Libby Leist: Drum up interest in the “Today” show anytime other than the mornings.
It’s a survival strategy for “Today,” which celebrates the 70th anniversary of its first broadcast in January. Along with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning,” the pandemic has been rough on the traditional morning shows.
For generations of Americans, the shows have been habitual places to turn to for some news and a check of the traffic and weather as they got ready for work and hustled the kids off to school.
Yet who cares about the traffic and weather if you’re not leaving the house?
Viewership is down at all three programs, although to be fair, it is for television in general. But for the morning shows, the loss hits hardest among viewers aged 25 to 54 — working people. In that age group, viewing dropped 22 percent between the first three months of 2020 and this year at “Today,” 24 percent at “Good Morning America” and 16 percent at “CBS This Morning,” the Nielsen company said.
There’s more than a passing interest in whether or not those viewers resume their morning habit when it’s time to return to the office. That 25-to-54 age group is also the demographic used to set advertising rates, and the revenue from these shows is the engine that powers network news divisions.
“Today” is subtly reaching out, reminding people who may be sleeping later at 8 a.m. each day that they can set their DVRs so they don’t miss anything. The show is more aggressively hawking material planned for upcoming days to give viewers an incentive for tuning in.
Leist is also spearheading an aggressive effort to make content available on a 24-hour “Today” streaming service that was launched in 2020 primarily for archived material. The show’s personalities are involved with podcasts, digital series, newsletters, even TikTok features.
Savannah Guthrie’s YouTube show boils interviews down to six minutes, Craig Melvin’s series “Dad’s Got This” spotlights fathers making a difference, Carson Daly’s “Mind Matters” talks about mental health issues. Jenna Bush has her own book club.
The morning shows still have news potency, as witnessed by Guthrie’s interviews with Liz Cheney and Ellen DeGeneres last week. Yet the assignment given to Leist, who used to produce “Today” each morning, speaks to the initiative’s importance to NBC News.
Rivals are trying their own approaches. Two podcasts are attached to “CBS This Morning,” and the CBSN streaming service runs an abbreviated version of the show. The show is adding a new wrinkle this week: With anchor Tony Dokoupil out for maternity leave, Drew Barrymore and LeVar Burton will fill in as celebrity guest hosts during the 8 a.m. hour.
Not all, perhaps not even most, of viewership erosion is due to the pandemic. In 2000, during the height of the Katie Couric-Matt Lauer dynasty, the “Today” show was being seen by 7.2 million viewers a day, and less than half (3.3 million) were watching during the first three months of this year. “Good Morning America” is down 29 percent during the same period.
Where people once turned on their TVs to get a sense of what happened in the world overnight, now they can grab the smartphone on their bedside table. Podcasts like “The Daily” have established themselves, and cable television offers opinionated alternatives.
