The business news cycles that keep a media mogul awake

If you’re a news mogul, you need to keep an eye on turf fights, especially among your platforms.

Why? Well, TV producers want people watching TV all the time. Web folks want people clicking all the time. Radio and podcasters want people listening all the time.

So the platforms compete. It’s noticeable in news media in general and particularly in business news journalism, where the audience is narrower and more defined. (“You know, I consider your Web site competition,” a TV colleague once said to me, “because if they are on the Web site, they aren’t watching my show.”)

But the competition can be a little misplaced, because in reality, people don’t do anything all the time.

Digital news tends to get the bulk of its traffic during the day. Here’s a typical daily traffic pattern (very basic and lacking a lot of nuances and specifics):

TV is a little different. Unfortunately for the 24-hour news networks, most people don’t work with a TV on hand. Business news is a bit of an exception because of the news-sensitive finance industry. But Nielsen tends to discount non-home viewing too. So the gross traffic numbers lump toward the evening. Hey, there’s a reason it’s called “prime time.” In the case of news there’s also typically a slight bump in the morning. So the TV pattern tends to look like this:

News radio is typically a drive time champ, getting the most listeners when the most folks are commuting. Social media also has a bit of this characteristic as well. For instance the best time to Tweet is 5 p.m. and Facebook shares spike around noon, according to one study. But pinning down social media is a bit of a problem since measuring the cut-and-paste world of “dark social” is difficult and social media intertwines with other media consumption (i.e. Tweeting about the news you’re watching).

But taking radio and social media altogether, you get the sense of a kind of “filler” pattern, like so:

So each platform has its own pattern. (And yes, for the nit-pickers, these graphics lack a lot of detail and could change depending on the specifics of a particular news outfit).

But as a media mogul (think Murdoch or Bloomberg) your goal is to keep the most audience (readers, viewers, listeners) possible in your empire at any given time, be it TV, digital and all the in-between.

So the pattern you’re paying attention to is this:

So the winning move is to get your platforms to shift the audience among themselves at the key times, maintaining the highest level of audience for your media empire OVERALL.

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, folks operating on a platform level don’t see this big picture. They still struggle to get people to watch, click or listen to their stuff ALL THE TIME.

And that’s the challenge for the media mogul.

Allen Wastler is the former managing editor of CNBC.com and the former managing editor of CNNMoney.com. He can be followed on Twitter at @AWastler.