ABC News Now: Future is uncertain

When ABC launched ABC News Now, its 24-hour news channel that airs on digital cable and the Internet, executives called it an experiment that would end Election Day.

Many observers now expect the channel to continue, but as of Monday, the network wouldn’t comment on whether viewers watching its election programming tonight, anchored by Chris Cuomo, Michel Martin and Hari Sreenivasan, will see a test pattern at midnight.

ABC News Now began in July with gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Democratic National Convention. Executives explained that they had taken the step because their corporate bosses were giving the convention so little air time on the ABC broadcast network and, unlike their competitors at NBC, they had no cable news channel to fall back on as an outlet for additional reporting and analysis.

One executive, who declined to be named, said ABC is “ultimately very hopeful” that the network would keep going but nothing had been decided, nor is it known how many people are actually watching the channel via cable.

-- Elizabeth Jensen