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Meanwhile, a study emerged Wednesday illustrating just how damaging Leno's prime-time show was to NBC's local stations.
The research firm Harmelin Media said local NBC stations saw their late news audience drop by an average of 25 percent in November compared with the previous year among 25- to 54-year-old viewers. That's the demographic upon which news advertising rates are based.
The decline was particularly steep in some of the largest markets: 48 percent in New York, 43 percent in Los Angeles and 47 percent in Philadelphia.
NBC cited concerns among its 210 local stations in ditching the weeknight experiment of "The Jay Leno Show" at 10 p.m. The network wants to move Leno back to 11:35 for a half-hour show.
The local stations blame Leno for their news ratings going down because he provide a lousy "lead-in," which is television terminology for people keeping their TV set on one station because they were watching something there previously.
Plenty of factors can go into a ratings decline. But Bernie Shimkus, Harmelin's vice president of research, said the decline coincided with the launch of Leno's show last fall. He said he was surprised that the declines were so uniform across the country.
"We all knew it was going to go down," Shimkus said. "But I don't think anyone forecast anything in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 percent."
Harmelin used data on the number of ads run in late local news programs and their cost to calculate that over a three-month period, the Leno experiment would cost these stations collectively $22 million. The 10 stations that NBC owns and operates would lose something like $570,000 per week, the report said.
The bolder parts reinforced why this is happening. Pressure from NBC affiliates that are losing money because Leno is killing their ratings, and thusly their advertising revenue.
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