KORY TENEYCKE AND PIERRE KARL PÉLADEAU launched some stinging attacks on the established Canadian news channels last week in Toronto when they made public Quebecor Media’s plans to launch a new national news channel.
CTV News Channel and CBC News Network were the primary targets when Teneycke (QMI’s new VP business development) called them “bland and boring and Canadians, as a result, have largely tuned them out.” Mainstream media outlets have labelled the channel “Fox News North” for its plans to tilt to the right and aim at both informing and entertaining.
(Teneycke did not at all embrace the Fox News parallel – he saw it as a pejorative – but did note that people will be able to get a sense of the channel’s editorial leanings by reading the Toronto Sun, a conservative newspaper, for example.)
Later in the press conference, Teneycke added it was a shame that the ratings leaders in Canada are CNN and CNN HLN. “Today CNN Headline News and CNN main network combined are the ratings leader in the Canadian market. It’s about a third of the marketplace right now,” he added.
Intrigued, we wanted to verify the ratings data he mentioned and find out if Canadians are abandoning home-grown news stations. Thanks to a few friends in the industry who helped us with some hard ratings data, we found that Canadians are not, in fact, tuning out from those specialties. The two CNNs, however, are about a third of the all-news market. We’re not sure how QMI broke down the ratings for its research, but here’s what we found:
Based on year-to-date BBM data (Aug 31 2009 to June 6, 2010) supplied to us by two sources who asked not be named, CNN, and its sister station now dubbed HLN News and Views boast an average weekly combined reach of 3.1 million Canadians (18+) with an average minute audience of 22,000.
CBC News Network and CTV News Channel count an average weekly audience of 3.3 million Canadians 18+ with an AMA of 21,000.
Counted together, the pairs of channels are virtually neck and neck.
However – and I did find this a little surprising, Toronto news net CP24 boasts a whopping average weekly reach of 3.5 million Canadians and an AMA of 22,000.
Add it all up and the two CNNs do have about a third of the all-generic-news market in Canada (not counting business or weather or sports news). And if I were Teneycke and Péladeau, I’d be worried about the Fox News North tag. The American channel’s ratings here after five years in the Canadian market (albeit on digital, compared to the CNNs’ analog carriage) are negligible with an AWR of 100,000 and AMA of 2,000 (Canadians 18+).
And if you want to compare prime time hours for the various news channels, market share stays about the same. For example, CBC News Channel pulls in 990,000 (AWR, 18+) at 10 p.m. CP24 draws 522,000 and CTV News Channel draws half a million in AWR at the same daypart. At the same time, however, CNN’s AWR from 10-10:30 is 660,000 and HN is 280,000.
Again, about a third of the market at 10 p.m.
However, the ratings killers in national Canadian news are still the daily national newscasts. CTV National News has an AWR of 6 million (AMA:1 million), Global National’s is 4.7 million (AMA: 831K), and CBC National News is 4.5 million (AMA: 477K).
Clearly, Canadians like CNN but to say they “have largely tuned out” Canadian news channels is disingenuous at best.
