There’s a couple of things which are interesting about Saturday. The first is how poorly MSNBC’s weekend morning shows, Up with Steve Kornacki and The Melissa Harris-Perry Show performed in terms of Twitter engagement. The second is the win for Don Lemon and his coverage of the Malaysia Airlines flight 370 — and how it could have been better had CNN not made a mistake.
Saturday saw guest hosts for both of MSNBC’s morning shows with Krystal Ball in for Steve Kornacki and Jonathan Capehart substituting for Melissa Harris-Perry. Unfortunately, both of these hosts only delivered somewhere between one-half and one-fourth of the normal engagement when their usual hosts are in the chair. If this were a one-off event, it might not matter, but the ongoing leave of The MHP Show‘s host has slowed Twitter engagement from the show; and, as Up provides a lead-in to The MHP Show, Up‘s weakness makes the situation worse. The management at MSNBC cannot be pleased with ongoing audience drain this represents; the Twitter engagement weakness is no doubt reflected in the overall ratings.
With MSNBC’s morning stars sidelined, this left the day open for CNN’s Don Lemon and his coverage of Malaysia Airlines flight to take top spot. And, indeed, his live coverage with a team of experts, which asked viewers to tweet in questions, won best engagement. However, CNN made a silly mistake in the process: they put the wrong Twitter user id on the screen for Don Lemon, @DonLemonCNN, which is not his account — @DonLemon is. It’s hard to measure the impact of this, but at least 100 people ended up tweeting to the non-existent Don Lemon account.