Newsnight hasn't been short of publicity over the last seven weeks. Most of it negative. As we all now know, the show aired on the 2nd November which wrongly linked the former Conservative party treasurer, Lord McAlpine to allegations of child sexual abuse has resulted in the BBC paying £185,000 in damages and prompted the resignation of the hapless director general, George Entwistle.

There has no shortage of speculation about the future of the programme, not least on air from occasional presenter Eddie Mair, but how has the latest scandal affected Newsnight's audience - a programme that was running already below the BBC2 average?

Viewing figures for Newsnight since the 1st October 2012-16th November 2012 make for interesting reading. As the Jimmy Savile crisis hit the BBC and began to develop and envelop Newsnight, the average weekly viewing figures started to slip dropping as low as 608,000 in the last full week in October. For those who have forgotten - Newsnight was investigating Savile and child sexual abuse a year ago, only for the programme editor to quash the proposed film.

The week commencing 29th October then saw a recovery, a slight improvement for the programme. It was boosted by the what turned out to be disastrous 'Tory paedophile' broadcast which brought in more than 1m viewers on Friday November 2. Average viewing figures of that week were 783,200.

The following week average viewing figures began to level off, but ironically, viewing shot up once it had emerged that the Newsnight investigation of the week earlier had been, in the words of George Entwistle, "fundamentally wrong". There was no senior Conservative who could be linked to child sexual abuse in North Wales - but once that became clear 1.1m people tuned in to the broadcast of Friday November 9 - with viewers joining Mair in wondering if it would be the last ever Newsnight to air.

The impact on viewing, though, is never revealed at the height of a crisis, but in the period afterwards - and by last week, Newsnight - without any scandals to prop it up - was heading south.

By the week commencing 12th November viewing figures had dropped again to nearer the 600,000 mark we saw at the beginning of October - hitting 685,800. That's well behind the 800,000 averages that were typical of 2010, but inline with the averages seen in the first part of 2011. Acceptable, perhaps, for now - but without the dubious support of sensational 1m-plus rating episodes that either make or examine mistakes made by the show itself.

Looking at viewing figures by presenter over this period, Eddie Mair had the highest number of viewers with an average viewing total of 850,750 - no doubt boosted by the 1.1m hit on November 9. Emily Maitlis has the next highest viewing average with 718,200 followed by Jeremy Paxman with 708,000. Gavin Esler had an average viewing figure of 696,000 and Kirsty Wark recorded the lowest average at 548,142 viewers.

Daily Newsnight viewing figures can be found in the table below, weekly averages and average viewers by presenter can be found in our downloadable spreadsheet. What can you do with this data?

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