Tsunami coverage boosts CNN

Jonathan Klein didn’t get much time to learn on the job.

In just his third week overseeing CNN’s domestic news network, the former CBS News executive who was brought in to try to close the gap with No. 1-ranked Fox News Channel, has rushed to scramble schedules, reporters and anchors to deliver round-the-clock coverage of the South Asian tsunami.

While some of Klein’s newsgathering solutions have been unorthodox -- a New York weatherman pinch-hit for CNN’s talk show host Larry King, while a conservative political pundit subbed for news anchor Aaron Brown -- the results have been significant. While Fox remains the cable news ratings leader, CNN’s audience has surged with prime-time viewing up 26% on Sunday, 69% on Monday and 89% on Tuesday. In the initial tsunami reporting, Fox says it was on the air first with the news and attracted substantially more viewers -- 400,000 more than CNN on Sunday morning, and 300,000 more than CNN on Sunday night.

Fox began tsunami coverage at 9:30 p.m. Pacific time Saturday with reports from freelancers Tim Johnston in Thailand and Andrew Chant in Indonesia, according to the network. CNN says its disaster coverage began airing at 1 a.m. Sunday, 3 1/2 hours later.

When CNN did move to blanket tsunami coverage, it was Klein, who is president of CNN/U.S., who made the decision to preempt regular programming, call in substitute hosts, recall people from vacation and deploy an additional 50 people to the region. (In events such as this, CNN International does the bulk of the fieldwork and provides the feed for late-night coverage.)

While Fox juggled reruns with tsunami-related programming, CNN’s international news force was able to provide more live coverage. By early in the week, the benefit of that global reach was apparent.

Minutes into Tuesday’s 6 p.m. broadcast of Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes,” the focus was not wholly on the latest news from the ravaged region. In addition to a studio argument over whether U.S. relief efforts could be more generous, the show offered a discussion of the Democratic Party’s future and a debate about whether Hollywood was snubbing “The Passion of the Christ” because of Mel Gibson’s politics.

Over on MSNBC, Deborah Norville was featuring Dr. Andrew Weil and his “integrated medicine movement” approach to obesity. Meanwhile, CNN had a live phone interview with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan about the devastation.

At other times Tuesday evening, when CNN was doing little else but covering the tsunami, Fox was rerunning a Bill O’Reilly interview from April with actress-fitness author Suzanne Somers, while MSNBC was reporting on Iraq elections and over-the-top Christmas lawn displays.

“One of the reasons we are the only ones covering it 24/7 is because we are the only ones who can cover it 24/7,” Klein said Wednesday. “We are the only ones with an international operation that is always up and running and can turn on a dime.”

Klein, who is coordinating CNN’s coverage with his international counterpart, Chris Cramer, decided to focus all of CNN’s attentions on the story by Sunday night. As part of the move, CNN is replacing nightly reruns of its domestic news programs with fresh reports prepared by CNN International.

The bump in viewers suggests that Klein’s strategy is paying off for CNN. In addition to its day-to-day increases, ratings among adults ages 25 to 54 topped Fox on Tuesday night, the first time CNN had done so in prime time since July 8, the third night of the Democratic National Convention. MSNBC was a distant third in every day and time. Nevertheless, CNN’s gains are still significantly below Fox, according to Nielsen Media Research, with Fox averaging 1 million-plus viewers Sunday through Wednesday of this week, more than CNN and MSNBC combined. After breaking news of the tsunami Saturday night, Fox continued with news updates twice each hour. By 4 a.m. Sunday local time, Fox’s three-hour “Fox & Friends” show was devoted entirely to tsunami coverage. Each program that followed aired reports from freelancers in the disaster areas until Fox correspondent Jennifer Griffin arrived in Thailand on Sunday afternoon. Los Angeles-based Adam Housley arrived in Thailand soon after. Fox also aired reports from Sky News, a sister network.

Rather than preempting, Fox stayed with its regular programming schedule.

“Our programming stays the same so you’ll see the same faces and they cover the news as it’s happening,” said Fox News Channel’s spokesman, Paul Schur. “We don’t change our programming.”

Fox began strategizing its coverage when the first images of the disaster started surfacing Christmas night. “Ever since the Monday morning show, we’ve used those people at least twice an hour,” says David Rhodes, Fox’s director of newsgathering. Additionally, on Sunday Greta Van Susteren will be back on the air with a tsunami special.

For MSNBC, it was a case of trying to stretch limited resources.

“We really work very much in tandem with NBC News,” said Mark Effron, MSNBC’s vice president of daytime programming. “Here, the decision-making is dispersed. People are sent for ‘Nightly News,’ ‘Dateline’ and MSNBC. It’s a different bureaucratic situation.” MSNBC sent two NBC News reporters, chief Asia correspondent Ned Colt and San Francisco correspondent James Hattori, to Sri Lanka on Sunday and Monday. By Wednesday, MSNBC put together an hourlong special called “Tsunami: Relief and Recovery,” anchored by Alex Witt, which preempted a planned rerun of “Hardball With Chris Matthews” at 6 p.m.

Since countless people are on holiday vacations, many of the cable news channels did not have their full complement of anchors and talk show hosts. Every one of Fox’s prime-time anchors was on vacation. “The Big Story” host John Gibson was substituting for O’Reilly, and the network used Uma Pemmaraju to replace Greta Van Susteren on “On the Record.”

CNN employed New York TV weatherman Sam Champion to fill in for King on Monday and Tuesday (King returned Wednesday), and “Crossfire” co-host Tucker Carlson replaced the vacationing Brown on “NewsNight.”

In the wake of the tsunami, CNN reworked its schedule. On Tuesday night, “Anderson Cooper 360” expanded into a two-hour tsunami special, preempting “Paula Zahn Now,” whose host is on vacation. CNN furthermore began broadcasting its international feed at 9 p.m., rather than rerun evening programming.

Klein started Dec. 13. A former executive vice president of CBS News, Klein most recently had been the founder and chief executive of the FeedRoom, a broadband video network and video streamer.

He said his Internet experience taught him that fresh facts and global reports helped drive Web traffic, and he is trying to mimic that approach on CNN. “New information and new stories are of prime interest,” Klein said. “And international stories have grown in interest.”

Among the 50 CNN employees dispatched to the region are correspondents Matthew Chance in Phuket, Mike Chinoy in Indonesia, Hugh Riminton in Sri Lanka, Mallika Kapur in the Andaman Islands and Dr. Sanjay Gupta in Sri Lanka.

CNN still has a lot of work ahead. Led by “The O’Reilly Factor” and with all five of the top-rated daily news shows, Fox was the most-watched news network for the third straight year, with nearly double CNN’s average audience during prime time.

For all the cable news coverage, some critics worry that much of the story is not being covered. As Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, who has watched nothing but CBS News, puts it: “You would think that cable’s main advantage over broadcast television is that it will give you the immediacy of the event. But in point of fact what cable does is create soap operas of any event. So they can keep it going.”