Category Archives: MSNBC

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…

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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We Don’t Got Ed (Schultz)

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The announcement over a week ago that Ed Schultz would be moving his show to weekends came as a bit of a shock, especially since he did one more show before departing the airwaves.  It seemed hasty and poorly planned, without a really good (or believable) explanation for what happened or an actual date of when the weekend show will start beyond “April” (for those of us in the software business, a mention of just a month for a target date instinctively produces the cynical response “of which year?”).

Needless to say, this news set off a shockwave on Twitter:

Click on image to make it as big as Ed's heart!

Click on image to make it as big as Ed’s heart!

On the day of the announcement, conversation to & about Ed reached levels not since since the fall election.  And while Michael Eric Dyson has been doing a good job keeping the Ed Show alive on MSNBC without Ed, its clear that enthusiasm has waned with Ed’s disappearance. It will be interesting to see how the next week plays out …

I wish Ed a speedy TV return in early April — of this year 🙂