Fox News dominated the day on Monday, with The Kelly File getting the most mentions during an hour and Hannity the most mentions during the day.
An interesting twist in the statistics: the hashtag #NewDay, which is used by the CNN morning show of the same name, got mentioned in over 20,000 retweets of a picture of the sun rise. I kept the stats as is because it’s amusing, but you should pretty much assume that New Day really got its normal, languid pace of mentions.
Normally, having a short, easy to use hashtag is a great way for a show to build and track engagement. But some days, you get “hashtag leak” — tweets unrelated to your show are tagged with your hashtag because of some other meaning for it. Usually these leaks are minor, more just a bit of noise, and not really problematic. But Monday was not normal, because of this tweet:
Click to see original tweet
By using the hashtag #NewDay, this photo got flagged as a tweet about CNN’s cable news show “New Day“. The photo’s 25,000+ retweets just blows up the show’s statistics and dwarfs every other show as well.
Dear cable news, all your social media engagement pales in comparison to a photograph of the sun rise. Something to think about …
Obama and Bergdahl were the top topics on Sunday.
Sunday saw the Melissa Harris-Perry Show take best hour, while Sean Hannity’s show had the best day overall. This is fairly normal.
This weekend was the first weekend without MSNBC’s Disrupt, and it’s interesting to see what removing it from the schedule did to afternoon mentions for MSNBC:
| Date | 2pm (Melvin) | 3pm (Melvin) | 4pm (Disrupt) |
| Sun, 6/1 | 104 | 66 | 275 |
| Sun, 6/8 | 18 | 43 | – |
It’s not a large enough sample size to draw any conclusions from but, it does raise a question worth asking: Will the loss of a marquee show at 4pm cause the audience for the earlier shows to weaken? Did MSNBC knock over a domino at 4pm that will now start knocking over the dominos back to noon where, presumably, the Melissa Harris-Perry show can stand alone?
From my vantage point, MSNBC could have done far better to replace it with NBC news programming (Meet the Press on Sunday, for example) that would appeal to the news audience, provided a reason to hang on through the afternoon, and yet not required launching and staffing a new, live show.
Actor Tract Morgan’s injuries in an accident managed to drive a lot of conversation on Twitter Saturday. There’s still a lot of folks pushing news in Iran on Twitter, even though it’s getting virtually no news coverage.
This kind of Twitter campaigning is an interesting, and not infrequent, way people with special interests try to get their stories heard by main stream media. I don’t think it has much effect, however, but I do register it here. I appreciate that the people who take to social media to try to affect the agenda of news coverage have stories that are vitally important to them, and I want to acknowledge that, at the very least, their hashtags cannot be ignored. Good luck to all of you.