Ed Schultz settles in nicely on MSNBC weekends

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Back in March it was announced that Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show would move to the weekends, and almost immediately he was disappeared1 from the airwaves to be replaced by Chris Hayes’s All In show.  But something odd happened — his weekend reboot didn’t happen, and the timing of it became murkier and murkier.  Many of us wondered if there was going to be a re-launch at all.  But May 11th saw his return to TV at the 5pm weekend time slot.

The long absence led a lot of us to wonder: Would Ed’s audience return to him now? How would that time slot work? 

Good news: it looks like Ed is back in his groove and, judging by his Twitter engagement, he’s audience is with him.

A year of @EdShow

A year of @EdShow

The chart shows discussion of The Ed Show on Twitter over the past year, and you can see that the past two weekends have hit levels on a par with Ed’s engagement during the  span of his daily weekday show.

Even more interesting, if you compare Ed to the two other weekend “point of view”shows (MHP Show and Up with Steve Kornacki), you can see that he’s getting the roughly same engagement out of a one hour show that they are each getting out of two hour shows:

Buzz for MSNBC Weekend Shows

Buzz for MSNBC Weekend Shows

Glad to see Ed’s gotten back to work!

1: Strange gramatical form to imply the work of an unknown force…

Florida Governor’s Race on Twitter, March 2013

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March is in the history books.  How did Twitter treat our much talked about gubernatorial possibles? Here’s the frequency of Twitter mentions for each of them:

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Rick Scott still dominates Twitter — as the sitting governor, you’d expect that.  Charlie Crist is doing pretty well in mentions.  Perhaps rumors of his announcing a run at the Kennedy King dinner in May will drive his mentions higher in April?

The rest of them … only Will Weatherford is doing well (spoiler: on 4/2 Adam Putnam’s tweet about Florida’s 500 got a lot of play — we’ll see if that gives him a bump that lasts). The rest of the rest, not so well…

One thing that’s amazing — Rick Scott has this weird regular pulse to his mentions.  Here’s a longer term view of Scott’s mentions on Twitter:

Rick Scott's Heartbeat? Click to enlarge

Rick Scott’s Heartbeat? Click to enlarge

I ran this through a FFT (Fast-Fourier Transform) which shows the dominant frequencies in the Twitter activity:

2013-04-02_23-16-21

What we see is that Twitter activity for Rick Scott tends to be clustered on a 4-day and a 7-day cycle.  Eyeballing the (previous) chart, you can see the weekly cycle at work.  One has to wonder if this isn’t some strange way governor’s office works — do they just send out news on Tuesdays and Fridays?  I’m not sure — I’ll dig into this next month if this keeps up!

 

The Twitter Passion of Touré

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If Esquire ever puts Touré on the cover of its magazine, it’s going to need to re-stage its iconic 1968 cover photo of Muhammad Ali.  Not in the ironic sense that they’ve done it lately, but in a sincere sense that it’s appropriate.  For there are few people who suffer the volume of unrelenting criticism, insult, and anger that is leveled at him on Twitter.   That activity tells us a great deal about social media’s nasty side, and is a cautionary tale for anyone who views social media as merely a sort of chatty email.

To get a sense of that nasty side, it’s interesting to do some statistical analysis on the Tweets he receives.  Using the last week’s activity on Twitter as a sample, I discovered some interesting things.  

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