Sweeps month is over, the numbers are in and Austin’s news directors, general managers and sales directors are poring over the ratings results for November. KVUE is a solid Number 1 at 10 p.m. and in the morning, while KXAN has increased its stranglehold on the early evening newscasts. FOX 7 suffered a serious loss of viewers for its prime time 9 p.m. newscast. After almost a year of Sinclair Broadcast Group ownership, KEYE seems stuck in place and is competitive only at 10 p.m., where strong CBS prime time lead-in programs help provide a boost into second place.

I’ve looked at a number of ways of reporting on the ratings and decided I like the format used by Dallas media blogger and former long-time Dallas Morning News TV critic Ed Bark, perhaps better known as Uncle Barky. I thank him for his permission to steal.  I’ve eliminated ratings and share numbers, which are harder to follow, and simply converted the ratings numbers to the number of households they represent. Each rating point represents one percent of the total households in the market. If you really want the rating number, you can do the math in reverse. As you can see below, our fast growing market has added more than 18,000 households since November 2011.

Here are the numbers with my comments added for each major time period:

Monday-Friday

Mornings

The November morning ratings were an enigma in some respects, especially for FOX 7. With the departure of popular long-time morning anchor Joe Bickett last May, some ratings decline was to be expected. That happened at 4:30 a.m., 5 a.m., 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.  FOX 7 lost almost 2,000 households at 5 a.m., and more than 5,000 homes at 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. So how do we explain FOX 7’s 6 a.m. numbers where the station added more than 5,000 viewers? Were all of Bickett’s fans either early risers or stay-at-home people, accounting for losses early and late? And why the big jump at 6 a.m.?

KVUE led the pack throughout the morning with significant gains at 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. KVUE’s new morning co-anchor, Yvonne Nava, is strong, but it may be too soon to give her all the credit. And at 11 a.m., in a show also anchored by Nava, how do we explain KVUE’s unexpected loss of almost 6,000 homes since November 2011? For some reason, other viewing appeared down in that time slot—even the venerable “Young and the Restless” on CBS suffered a serious rating decline.

KXAN was third at 4:30 a.m. and 5 a.m., but jumped into second place at 6 a.m. over FOX 7, despite the latter’s significant viewer gain.

KEYE, which debuted a new morning team last April, remains a distant fourth with just slight gains over its November 2011 totals.

On the network level,  Austin appeared to buck the national trend where ABC’s “Good Morning America” has moved ahead of NBC’s “Today Show.” Here, “GMA” was up just slightly while “Today” gained almost 5,000 households over November a year ago. The revamped “CBS Morning News” also picked up 4,300 homes compared to year earlier levels.

Late Afternoon/Early Evening

KVUE, KEYE and FOX 7 continued to suffer at the hands of their poorly-performing syndicated lead-ins. On KVUE, the new Katie Couric show was even worse in the ratings than Ellen DeGeneres a year earlier. Ricki Lake on KEYE delivered fewer homes than the station’s locally produced “We Are Austin” had a year earlier, while Dr. Oz was also a weak performer on FOX 7. KXAN still benefits from the strongest lead-in with “Jeopardy,” but even that show slipped from year earlier levels. To their credit, both KXAN and KVUE improved significantly on the ratings of their lead-ins, while KEYE and FOX 7 did not.

At 5:30 p.m., the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams dominated. At 6 p.m., KXAN could not hold many of those viewers, but still widened its lead over KVUE compared to the 5 p.m. news numbers. Comparing year-earlier ratings, KXAN was up more than 3,000 households, while KVUE was essentially flat and KEYE was down almost 2,000 viewers. Viewers seemed to be responding positively to KXAN’s heavily-promoted investigative team, in place for almost a year, which ran most of its reports at 6 p.m. One case in point, supplied by KXAN–on November 13 at 6 p.m., Lead Investigator Chris Willis followed up on the murder of 85-year-old “Pecan Queen,” Bonnie Harkey. That show produced 55,717 households, compared to KXAN’s average 6 p.m. audience of 40,906.

“We are excited to see continued multi-year growth from November 2010 to 2011 to 2012 in most of our newscasts, particularly at 6 p.m. where we have placed many of our key investigations featuring Lead Investigator Chris Willis,” said KXAN President and General Manager Eric Lassberg. “Viewer feedback has been a major reason to cover investigative stories and we greatly appreciate the viewer tips we receive on a daily basis; please keep them coming and thank you.”

Evenings

The big news in the prime time/late evening ratings scene is the sudden drop in viewers for FOX 7’s 9 p.m. hour-long newscast. The program drew 5,000 fewer households this November compared to November 2011 and a dramatic 8,500 fewer than last May. The reason was probably an even steeper decline in viewers for the Fox Network’s prime time programming from 7-9 p.m., leading into the FOX 7 newscast. On average, national Fox’s prime time shows drew almost 18,000 fewer viewers this November in this market compared to last November. FOX 7’s hour long newscast continues to beat the early version of KXAN’s news, which appears at 9 p.m. in a 30-minute format on sister station KNVA. FOX 7 wins by more than 10,000 homes.

At 10 p.m., the news race changed very little in a year-to-year comparison and produced opposite results from the early evening news ratings. KVUE holds a significant lead over KEYE and KXAN. After grabbing a slight 10 p.m. lead last May, KEYE slipped back 7,000 households behind KVUE. Once again, KEYE tried its ratings “trick” by scheduling a WasteWatch special each Friday at 10:15 p.m., thus shortening its news to just the first 15 minutes for ratings purposes. Viewership always drops off at 10:15 p.m. as people opt for sleep over sports and feature stories. Apparently, the subterfuge didn’t work this time. KEYE also had the strongest network prime time lead-ins on average but lost a significant number of those viewers, whereas KVUE lost very little of its lead-in. As in past ratings periods, if you combine KXAN’s news viewers at 9 p.m. on its sister station and its 10 p.m. viewers, KXAN actually moves ahead of KEYE into second place. I’m not sure if that’s legit, but it works for me.

Weekends

Thanks to college and NFL football pre-emptions, weekend news ratings in November are really not very useful. I’ll simply point out that KXAN’s 7 a.m. news beat KVUE’s on Saturday mornings by a slim margin and KVUE moved into first place on Sunday mornings by a wider margin.

On Saturday at 6 p.m., KVUE held a wide lead over KXAN by more than 15,000 households while both trailed college football on KEYE/CBS. At 10 p.m., KXAN’s news beat KEYE’s by more than 5,000 households while both trailed well behind college football on KVUE/ABC.

Sundays are not worth discussing in detail with pre-emptions, newscasts moved to different times and NFL football smashing any newscast in its path, both early and late.