Two of the biggest players in newscasts faced rocky transitions last week. Both ABC News and CBS News announced new leaders, and the executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America” abruptly left the network.
The upheaval, a source of confusion and fear for employees in both networks, each has different causes and different levels of palace intrigue. But they betray a bigger trend: In the era of streaming and social media, where audiences for broadcast news are declining and companies are making a difficult transition to digital, the entire industry faces an uncertain future.
ABC News, which competes with NBC News for prime in broadcast, hired a second-in-command on the distant third network, CBS News, which in turn announced a new co-leadership structure because three sources on that network said the current chief wanted the job no longer.
Over all this confusion looms a question: what exactly do these new leaders inherit?
“Fifteen years ago in television journalism the president of the network or even the executive producer was the highest calling imaginable,” said a longtime TV news manager. “The game we played is over.”
NBC News spoke to more than a dozen current and former news managers, executive producers and other high-level insiders who expressed similar concerns about the state of the major news outlets, particularly the future of the lucrative morning shows and the difficult transition to streaming. .
Representatives for NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News all declined to comment.
Financially, broadcast news is in an existential dilemma. Morning shows, the profit centers for every network news outlet, lose hundreds of thousands of viewers every year. Viewership among 25- to 54-year-olds, the demographic that advertisers crave, is about half what it was a decade ago, according to data from Nielsen, the media tracking company.
“There is no NBC News without ‘TODAY’,” said an experienced television news manager. “There is no ABC News without ‘GMA’.”
News networks have survived this decline by charging advertisers more money to reach fewer viewers, a standard strategy on television, and a life raft for media companies as they build their streaming networks. But at some point, several television directors acknowledged, the major advertisers will likely decide that it’s not worth paying ever-increasing costs to reach fewer and fewer viewers.
This presents a difficult challenge for news departments. While audiences for an entertainment show like NBC’s “This Is Us” or CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” may be just as big in their streaming services, some media managers wondered if there would be similar interest in streaming morning shows or evening news broadcasts. . NBC News has attempted to expand “TODAY” into streaming with its 24-hour “TODAY All Day,” and CBS ‘streaming channel CBSN also offers “CBS This Morning” content. Episodes of “Good Morning America” are available on Hulu.
But even if brands like “TODAY” and “GMA” start producing videos that people can watch on demand or lure viewers into streaming services, it’s not clear that ad dollars will follow.
The downturn in a morning program means problems for an entire news department, as the morning shows account for most of the revenue from the broadcast news shows. An internal sales presentation prepared last year for NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde and watched by NBC News indicates that the “TODAY” show brought in $ 408 million in ad revenue in 2019, compared to “Nightly News” with $ 146 million and “Meet the Press” with $ 26 million, according to the document. ABC’s “Good Morning America” brings in $ 350 million to $ 375 million in ad revenue per year and accounts for the bulk of the network’s news revenue, ABC sources said.
NBC News may be 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 spokesperson for NBC News declined to comment on the sales presentation.
The question for broadcast news departments now is how to move to digital and reclaim an audience they already lose on television – and there is no guarantee that every newsgroup will survive. A prominent media manager who did not fit in with one of the networks wondered whether CBS, in a distant third place in the morning and in the evening, was too far away.
Running a broadcast news department has also become more complicated and perhaps less fun. (Susan Zirinsky, the outgoing CBS News chief, famously hated the corporate bureaucracy that came with the job.) Former news presidents mandated to win ratings and beat the competition at all costs would be in uncharted territory. are with the new emphasis put in place to promote a positive and healthy work culture.
Disney put a particularly heavy emphasis on this when looking for the next ABC News leader. NBC News obtained a seven-page document from talent recruiters sent to candidates for the position, three times emphasizing the importance of promoting an open and inclusive workplace. There was less emphasis on keeping ABC News competitive.
“Building a culture on broadcast television – which is under constant siege, with declining ratings and relevance – is a thankless task,” said a veteran media manager. In all of the oral histories of the Titanic, no one has ever asked, ‘What was the culture like on the third and fourth decks of cards?’ ‘
Culture aside, the first job of the new ABC News president, Kimberly Godwin, will be one critical to the network’s success. The day after Disney announced its appointment, it announced that Michael Corn, executive producer of “Good Morning America” for seven years, was no longer with the network. The reasons for his departure are unknown. Corn did not respond to a request for comment.
The turmoil puts Godwin in charge of the most consistent decision a news leader can make – how to rejuvenate a morning show – at a time when the company’s future is at stake.
CORRECTION (April 20, 2021, 3:28 p.m. ET): A photo caption in an earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of a “GMA” anchor. He’s George Stephanopoulos, not Stephanopolos.