Ad Age Concurs

WHO CARES IF 'SEX AND THE CITY' IS GONE?

About 5 million to 6 million viewers have tuned in (if that's still a verb) to the exploits of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte each week during the past year, according to Nielsen. But that's less than one-fifth the viewers drawn by the top broadcast show, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

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But you wouldn't know that from the column inches spilled on Sex and the City. During the last year, Sex star Sarah Jessica Parker pulled in 2,001 clips, according to a cheap search on the Factiva database. Comedian Ray Romano, creator and star of Everybody Loves Raymond, whose average audience is about four times the size of Sex's, garnered only 805.

During the week ending Feb. 18, NBC's Law & Order outran Sex and the City by 1 million viewers. But poor Jerry Orbach, its star, drew only 193 newspaper articles during the past year.

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True, newspapers, like all media, have their demographics, and those demos have moved increasingly upscale and older as younger audiences obtain their news from TV and the Web. Newspaper executives have been scrambling to find ways to reach out to the missing millions. Hitching their caboose to the engine of pop culture is their preferred strategy. But that's a risky gambit, if they allow editors and reporters to populate their pages with unthinking self-references to their own psychodemographic obsessions.

See also

Big Media Echo Chamber