Sam Donnellon: Social media spur greater interest in Games

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In this Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012 file photo, people react as they watch a television broadcast of the United States women's soccer team taking on Japan in the gold medal match at the 2012 London Summer Olympics, at Nevada Smiths bar in New York. The U.S. won 2-1. The London Olympics may well be remembered as the event that drove home the power of social media, partly to the chagrin but mostly to the benefit of NBC, which controlled images of the games in the United States. Many factors surely drove interest, like compelling competition and the amount of coverage available on TV and online. AP Photo/Alex Katz

Published: 11:58am, 14 Aug 2012Updated: 4:24pm, 14 Aug 2012

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.