Sam Donnellon: Social media spur greater interest in Games

PHILADELPHIA — Among the difficulties covering the Olympics for a newspaper is balancing the touching stories with the televised ones, having the chops to write about people and players who don’t get prime-time play by the network. You risk, in skipping the women’s beach volleyball semifinal in favor of a compelling story about a javelin thrower, appearing to be out of touch with what’s important.
When you were there, though, the suspicion always was that you were simply out of touch with that night’s network programming, a suspicion confirmed by me during these Olympics.
No one from the Philadelphia Daily News was sent to London. The rationale for that decision, made by the newspaper’s previous owners, was simple: Too much cost for something people cared too little about.
Oh, really?
Citing a report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, an Associated Press story said that eight of every 10 Americans watched these Olympics at one point or another. NBC was pleasantly surprised by a 12 percent increase in its average nightly audience from the Olympics of Beijing, despite airing events that had been completed hours before, and whose outcomes were already well known.
That spike averaged out to 31.1 million viewers. Theories abound about this surprise, but at least one of them has some honest-to-goodness scientific data to support it. Social media only feel as if they’ve been around forever. Truth is, their explosion has taken place largely between the last Summer Olympics and this one.
