Wow, The Don Lemon Show had the best engagement of any show last night — and only for a half-hour compared to the hour long slots most other shows have. If his show had been an hour long, and had the same rate of engagement throughout, his engagement would have been simply phenomenal.
Maybe Mr. Lemon is finding his footing?
Some buoyancy in The Melissa Harris-Perry show’s engagement as the show’s 11am numbers bounce back up into 4 digits. Nobody else topped 1K…
The Melissa Harris-Perry Show won best hour, barely, with a very light number of mentions. It’s score, 850 mentions for the 11am hour, wasn’t too far ahead of the 804 Up with Steve Kornacki got at 8 am or Disrupt with Karen Finney‘s 375 at the 4pm hour. Up through the beginning of February, the MHP show was regularly pulling in over 2000 mentions during the same hour, and sometimes far more.
Unfortunately for MSNBC and The MHP Show‘s ratings, two big things have affected the show. The first was the Winter Olympics, which took up most of the month of February and scrambled MSNBC’s weekend schedule by pre-empting shows with sporting events. Even when The MHP Show was unaffected, frequently Up with Steve Kornacki was replaced with a hockey game. The second is (still) the host’s maternity leave, which started mid-February. These two have acted like a slow leak on audience engagement over the past month and a half.
Even though the show has been ably served by a series of guest hosts, it is clear that the audience misses the sparkle of Ms. Harris-Perry. Let’s hope, for her and MSNBC’s sake, the audience doesn’t develop new habits for weekend mornings and her engagement levels are restored upon her return.
Caveat: I am not measuring the separate, personal engagement of the substitute hosts but only the show’s Twitter accounts and hashtags. I do not expect that this makes a large difference, but I could be wrong.
Given how well Anderson Cooper is doing with the Malaysia Airlines news (or lack of news), maybe he should rename his show AC370 — once again he won his hour (although he did not have the best hour of any show), topping the always active All In with Chris Hayes and the social-media-inert O’Reilly Factor.
The overall winners of the day were The Ed Show, which had the best hour, and Hannity, which had the best day (by covering the Malaysia Airlines story, naturally).
CNN’s Chicagoland won the best hour on Thursday, showing the power of special programming to help revive the networks’ flagging performance. More good news for CNN: The 9pm showing of AC 360 managed to win its slot, showing the benefit of breaking (or at least mystifying) world news to attract viewers to CNN.