To glance at the local audience for late-night television, you would think Chicagoans are more engaged, sophisticated and urbane than the country at large — just look at how consistently Ted Koppel’s thoughtful “Nightline” has beaten the lighter fare offered by David Letterman and Jay Leno. But there’s more to the story.
For 10 years, “Nightline” has bested the dueling talk show hosts in ratings points (each one of which represents roughly 33,000 area homes) and beaten or tied No. 2-ranked “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” in audience share. Ratings points measure the percentage of all homes with televisions tuned into a specific show. Audience share is the percentage tuned in among those households with their TV sets on at the time.
In 2003, “Nightline” averaged a 6.5 rating, 16 percent more than Leno’s 5.6 average. (That’s for the length of the entire shows — 30 minutes for “Nightline” vs. an hour for “The Tonight Show,” which loses audience over the course of the show. Last year, Leno tied “Nightline” during his first half-hour, and he has beaten the show during the first 30 minutes in five of the past 10 years.)
Letterman trailed locally at 3.2 ratings points in 2003, losing to reruns of “That ’70s Show” and “Seinfeld” that air opposite him on WFLD-Ch. 32 (5.6 and 4.6 ratings points, respectively).
Nationally, “Nightline” trailed well behind “The Tonight Show” last year with 3 ratings points (in national ratings, each point represents 1.1 million homes), 46 percent less than Leno and tied with Letterman. ABC News declined to provide ratings data for “Nightline” prior to 2003.
But Koppel and company’s relative success in Chicago probably owes as much to the enduring local power of the station “Nightline” airs on in Chicago, WLS-Ch. 7, as it does to the civic-minded public. “Nightline” is sandwiched between Channel 7’s long-dominant 10 p.m. newscast (which beat its nearest competitor, WMAQ-Ch. 5, by 14 percent in 2003) and the nightly rerun of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (which also dominates its time slot), both of which are phenomenally successful with viewers. It would be difficult to fail with those neighbors.
