A brief story ran on July 12, 2006, which went almost unnoticed by everyone except Stephen Colbert. The item pointed out that according to Nielsen Media Research, the first week of July was the “least watched week in history for the four biggest networks,” beating the record of the last week in July 2005.

Sure, there were a lot of explanations. It was the Fourth of July and people were outside, and the networks were airing reruns. But the reality is the four networks combined reached only 20.8 million viewers during the average primetime minute.

Given that there are almost 300 million people currently living in the U.S., that means that at any given moment 280 million people were doing something else besides watching the networks. Of course, they might have been tuned into The Sopranos, ESPN or Cartoon Network. But still, it is hard to imagine that on any given evening, less than 7% of Americans watch CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox combined.

So, what does this mean for the future? How many will be watching next year? How many in 50 years?

Given the trends, I think it is fair to say that the number is heading downhill and is unlikely to change course. The number of entertainment options for the average American grows everyday from MySpace to Mario World.

From a news perspective, the trend is even more profound. In the PR business, getting a placement on the nightly network news is normally considered the Holy Grail. However, during that record-breaking week in July, an average of only seven million viewers watched each of the three newscasts, which means 93% of the population got their information from another place or they didn’t get it at all. We all know that there are a lot of other information sources available. In fact, more than 50 million use the internet to keep up with current events. But the biggest difference is that people are increasingly accessing information in bits that they have often pre-selected based on their own preferences. The idea of families across America gathered around a television set all sharing the same stories together, night after night, would be an appropriate scene for a Norman Rockwell painting.

The reality is fewer people are consuming information as an evening meal. Rather, they are snacking all day long on bite-size morsels they pick up from a variety of sources, while they work, drive, jog and play. Is this a loss for the collective consciousness of our citizenry?

It is hard to imagine a future without household names like Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw and now even Katie Couric, but it will happen. Fifty years from now, the nightly news may become the weekly news compiled for people who didn’t have time to catch up on a daily basis…or more likely the every-minute news, delivered like commercials in 60-second segments all day long on TV, PCs, PDAs and cell phones. That way everyone will have an extra half hour in the evening to update their MySpace profiles.