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11/09/2018
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Updated on Sep 11, 2018 at 04:08 PM EDT
Miss New York 2018 Nia Franklin is crowned Miss America 2019 at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, Sunday, Sept. 9, 2018. Miss New York 2018 Nia Franklin is crowned Miss America 2019 at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, Sunday, Sept. 9, 2018. (Tim Hawk | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
By Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
In keeping with the steady decline of previous broadcasts, the 2019 Miss America pageant drew fewer viewers this year than last.
Except this time, the Atlantic City competition, which aired Sunday from Boardwalk Hall, was the subject of much more scrutiny in the wake of the decision to cut swimsuits from the pageant .
The absence of the usual runway and bikinis was just one change in the pageant telecast this year. Rebranded "Miss America 2.0," the pageant implemented other changes. Some never really materialized, like allowing contestants to wear other formal attire besides evening gowns in the freshened "red carpet" eveningwear portion of competition. (Everyone decided to wear gowns or had already purchased them.)
So just how much worse were ratings?
Variety reports that the 2019 Miss America pageant, which crowned Miss New York, Nia Franklin , drew just 4.3 million viewers , a decrease of 19 percent from last year's 5.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen overnight data.
In the 18-49 demographic, the pageant was also down 36 percent from a 1.1 rating last year to 0.7 this year.
The pageant regularly airs opposite Sunday Night Football and this year was no exception, with the show going up against the game between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers (which drew 18.9 million viewers at most recent estimate).
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Last year, the pageant, which still had its swimsuit competition in full effect, shedded just shy of a million viewers, down from 6.2 million viewers in 2016.
The 2016 pageant had been down 13.3 percent among viewers in the 18-to-49 demographic from approximately 7 million viewers in 2015, when Miss America's former CEO issued an onstage apology to Vanessa Williams , who returned as head celebrity judge after being forced to resign her crown in 1984 because of a nude photo scandal. When the pageant returned to Atlantic City from Las Vegas in 2013, the telecast, which also returned to its traditional September date from years as a winter broadcast, drew its best audience since 2004.
But current numbers are still higher than when Miss America left ABC and aired on cable -- TLC and CMT -- at one point managing just 2.4 million viewers. Still, if the descent continues, it won't be long before the show finds itself on the same shaky ground.
Of course, Miss America has grasped at relevance for decades, with today's telecast audience seeming tiny when compared with the first pageant broadcast, in 1954, which aired at a time when Americans only had a handful of networks to watch. Before there was even a Super Bowl, a whopping 27 million people tuned in to see Lee Meriwether become Miss America 1955.
Other pageant changes this year presented stark differences to previous pageants, like having contestants talk about their social impact initiatives (formerly the pageant "platform") during the eveningwear portion, and the introduction of a "peer question" segment in which contestants asked each other questions, instead of responding to a host or celebrity judge (though they asked questions, too). The overarching goal was to hear more from the contestants during the show, to reflect more of the modern, empowered woman the pageant seeks to highlight.
Gretchen Carlson, chairwoman of the Miss America board, and Regina Hopper, president and CEO of the Miss America Organization, who have been criticized for breaking with tradition, preferred to call contestants "candidates" in line for a job, potential spokeswomen in a competition, not Misses in a pageant. Some contestants even introduced themselves without the "Miss" in front of their state.
When Carlson was asked in June about the prospect of the pageant losing more of its audience as a result of the lack of swimsuit competition, she said that talent was actually the highest rated portion of the broadcast. That segment arrives nearer to the end of the pageant, with the announcement of the top 10 finalists. This year, talents included spoken word poetry, Irish stepdance, ballet and piano.
Franklin, 24, who studied music composition , won the crown after singing "Quando m'en Vo'" from the Puccini Opera "La Boheme."
Considering another measure, the younger generations the pageant so desperately wants to attract may again be too far out of the Miss America orbit. The Nielsen Social Content Ratings , which track activity on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, have the pageant ranked no. 10 this week for series and specials, behind "Bachelor in Paradise," also on ABC, "The Bobby Brown Story" on BET and "World of Dance" and "America's Got Talent" on NBC.
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