Two of the biggest players in broadcast news faced rocky transitions last week. Both ABC News and CBS News have announced new leaders, and the executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America” has abruptly left the network.
The upheavals, a source of confusion and anxiety for employees at both networks, each have different causes and different levels of palace intrigue. But they betray a bigger trend: in the era of streaming and social media, when the audience for broadcast news declines sharply and businesses navigate a cumbersome transition to digital, the entire industry faces a troubled future.
ABC News, which is competing with NBC News for priority in the broadcast, has hired a second commander at the far-third network, CBS News, who in turn has announced a new co-leader structure because three sources at the network said : his current boss no longer wanted the job.
The question about all this confusion is: what exactly do these new leaders inherit?
“Fifteen years ago in television journalism, network president or even executive producer was the highest profession you could think of,” said a longtime television news director. “The game we played is over.”
NBC News spoke to more than a dozen current and former news executives, executives and other senior-level insiders who expressed similar concerns about the state of the major broadcast news outlets, particularly the future of lucrative morning programs and the difficult transition to streaming.
Representatives from NBC News, ABC News and CBS News declined to comment.
Financially, broadcast news is in an existential dilemma. Morning programs, the profit centers for every network news section, lose hundreds of thousands of viewers every year. According to data from Nielsen, the media tracking company Nielsen, viewers among 25- to 54-year-olds, the demographic group coveted by advertisers, are about half of what they were a decade ago.
“There is no NBC news without ‘TODAY’,” a veteran said on television. “There is no ABC News without ‘GMA’.”
News networks have survived this decline by asking more money from advertisers to reach fewer viewers, a standard television strategy and a lifeline for media companies as they expand their streaming networks. But at some point, several television executives have admitted, the big advertisers are likely to decide that it is not worth paying higher and higher costs to reach fewer and fewer viewers.
This presents a difficult challenge for news departments. While audiences for entertainment programs such as ‘This Is Us’ or ‘NBC’, ‘The Big Bang Theory’ from NBC are just as large on their streaming services, some media executives have questioned whether there is similar interest in streaming morning programs or news reports in the evening. . NBC News has attempted to expand ‘TODAY’ to streaming with its 24-hour ‘TODAY all day’, and CBS’s streaming channel CBSN also features ‘CBS This Morning’ content. “Good Morning America” sections are available on Hulu.
But even if brands like “TODAY” and “GMA” start producing videos, people can watch on demand if some viewers are attracted to streaming services, it is not clear that the advertising dollars will follow.
The decline of a morning program causes problems for an entire news department because the morning programs are responsible for the majority of the revenue brought by the news broadcasts. An internal sales offer prepared for NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde last year and seen by NBC News indicates that the show “TODAY” brought in $ 408 million in advertising revenue in 2019, compared to “Nightly News” with $ 146 million and “Meet the Press” according to the document with $ 26 million. ABC’s “Good Morning America” brings in $ 350 million to $ 375 million in advertising revenue per year and is responsible for the bulk of the network’s revenue news revenue, ABC sources said.
NBC News is possibly stronger than its competitors because it is part of an NBCUniversal News Group that also includes cable assets MSNBC and CNBC. (NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC News.) A NBC News spokeswoman declined to comment on the sale offer.
The question for broadcasting departments is now the question of how to switch to digital and return an audience they are already losing on television – and it is by no means guaranteed that every newsgroup will survive. One prominent media executive who does not join any of the networks questioned whether CBS was in a distant third place in the mornings and evenings.
The task of running a broadcasting department has also become more complicated and perhaps less fun. (Susan Zirinsky, the outgoing head of CBS News, famously did not associate with the corporate bureaucracy.) Former news presidents who were given a mandate to win ratings and defeat the competition at all costs would be in the unknown with the new emphasis it has cultivated to cultivate a positive and healthy workplace culture.
Disney has put a lot of emphasis on that especially when we look for ABC News’ next leader. NBC News has received a seven-page document from talent recruiters sent to candidates for the post, emphasizing three times the importance of promoting an open and inclusive workplace. There was less emphasis on keeping ABC News competitive.
“Building culture in TV broadcasts – which are constantly under siege, with declining ratings and relevance – is an ungrateful task,” a veteran told the media. “In all the oral history of the Titanic, no one has ever asked, ‘How was the culture on the third and fourth covers?’
Aside from culture, the first task of the new ABC News president, Kimberly Godwin, is crucial to the success of the network. The day after Disney announced its rental, it announced that Michael Corn, the seven-year-old executive producer of ‘Good Morning America’, was no longer with the network. The reasons for his departure are unknown. Corn did not respond to a request for comment.
The upheaval allows Godwin to make the most important decision a news leader can broadcast – how to rejuvenate a morning program – at a time when the future of the business is at stake.
CORRECTION (20 April 2021, 15:28 ET): A photo caption in an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a “GMA” anchor. He is George Stephanopoulos, not Stephanopolos.