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Eight Hundred Viewers and Counting: A Lesson for Newswav from Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks handed MSNOW a number. Platforms like ours hand themselves excuses. There is a difference.
By Mihar Dias June 2026
There are many ways to learn that your audience is small. The least comfortable is when a movie star says so out loud, in front of cameras, with the mild amusement of a man who has nothing to lose and everything to be charming about.
That was Tom Hanks at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on 18 June. MSNOW correspondent Jacob Soboroff approached him for a comment. Hanks obliged — but not before turning the question back on the channel itself. "What can I do," he asked with a grin, "for the 800 people watching MSNOW?" https://newswav.com/A2606_Z1QzYR?s=A_DzL22Bx&language=en
He offered to add a zero if it helped. Soboroff said he should try millions. Hanks said he could hear the clicks happening before his very eyes — presumably the sound of the audience finding something more interesting to watch. Back in the studio, anchor Katy Tur smiled the smile of someone who has learned to take these things professionally.
MSNOW's first-quarter numbers for 2026, it turns out, averaged 691,000 total day viewers and 1.1 million in primetime. Hanks was off by a factor of roughly a thousand, but the spirit of the jest was not wrong. https://newswav.com/A2606_Z1QzYR?s=A_DzL22Bx&language=en
For a national American cable news network, those figures are, as they say in polite company, a conversation starter.
“The difference between a platform with small reach and a platform with large reach is often not the quality of the writing. It is the willingness to be uncomfortable about the gap.”
I confess I found the whole episode instructive — not for what it revealed about MSNOW, but for what it revealed about the rest of us who run small platforms and pretend, with great dignity, that we are not in the same boat. We at Newswav are not a cable channel. We do not have a Katy Tur holding the studio together with professional poise. What we have is a fes columns and the recurring hope that this week's piece will reach more people than last week's. It is, in its own way, a beautiful arrangement. It is also, in its own way, a rather small number.
Here is what I have noticed about platforms of modest reach: we are very good at explaining why we are not bigger. The algorithm does not favour long-form writing. Readers no longer have the patience. The news cycle moves too fast for considered commentary. Malaysian audiences, in particular, are said to prefer a short video of a cat doing something unexpected to a 300-word analysis of political realignment. All of this may be true. It is also, I suspect, a very convenient set of truths.
Tom Hanks, bless him, did not explain himself. He arrived at the Obama Center as Tom Hanks — two-time Oscar winner, keeper of the national conscience, beloved to three generations of filmgoers — and even he understood that proximity to fame is a form of reach. He was not at that event because MSNOW's viewership numbers called for him. He was there because he is Tom Hanks, and Tom Hanks draws eyes wherever he stands. The reporter sought him. The clip went viral before Katy Tur finished her thank-you. Within hours, the story of MSNOW's modest ratings was being read by more people than watch MSNOW in an entire broadcast week.
“We do not need a Tom Hanks. We need the willingness to be as honest as Tom Hanks — which is to say, to name the number without flinching, and then to ask what we intend to do about it.”
The lesson is not that we should all find a Tom Hanks and ask him to mention us. Though if Tom Hanks is reading this — and one never entirely rules it out — the offer stands. The lesson is rather simpler and considerably more annoying: reach is not an accident of quality. It is a function of imagination, specifically the imagination to conceive of your audience as larger than it currently is and to behave accordingly.
Newswav has the bones of something worth reading. The commentary is sharp. They ask questions that other platforms are too timid to raise. But it does not constitutes a growth strategy. It constitutes a very comfortable small room, and comfort, as any honest media person will tell you between their second and third drink, is the natural enemy of scale.
What would it take? A hook more urgent than good prose. A distribution channel more shameless than hoping the right person forwards the link. A willingness to court the algorithm without entirely becoming it. These are not romantic ideas. They are, however, the ideas that separate platforms that complain about their numbers from platforms that do something about them.
MSNOW, for all its 691,000 daily viewers, at least had Tom Hanks make the joke for them. The clip reached millions. The irony was not lost on the channel's marketing department, one assumes — or at least it should not have been. Even a wound, in the right light, is an opportunity.
We have no Tom Hanks. What we have is this column, and the mild suspicion that 800 readers — adjusted upward, as Hanks so graciously offered — might, with a little less comfort and a little more ambition, become something considerably more interesting. The clicks are there. Whether we can hear them happening before our very eyes is, I suppose, the only question that matters.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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