Scripps News will lay off 250 people and close its broadcast channel

EW Scripps will effectively shut down its national news channel Scripps News soon in mid-November, company CEO Adam Symson confirmed Friday in a memo to employees.

In the memo, Symson said Scripps News would return to its roots as a streaming news brand but would no longer be syndicated on television nationwide and would significantly reduce the number of live programs produced.

The move will result in the loss of about 250 full-time, part-time and gig workers, according to a person who spoke to the company. Desk in the background early Friday morning. Most of the affected employees work in Atlanta, Denver and Cincinnati, although some work for the Scripps News brand in other parts of the country.

Symson said the number of jobs that will be lost will exceed 200. A core team of about 50 journalists will remain with Scripps News, producing branded content for digital platforms and distributing news packages to local Scripps-owned stations, he said.

As described, sources say Scripps News will essentially return to its roots as a news production and distribution service. The channel was created by Newsy, a content production company that distributed short clips to clients such as AOL, Huffington Post and Yahoo. Scripps acquired News for about $35 million in 2014.

News evolved several times under Scripps. The brand launched its own 24/7 streaming channel that sifted through its news packages, and then launched a co-branded but otherwise separate linear TV channel that offered a limited amount of news throughout the day. Linear News was distributed to cable, satellite and some streaming services, including Comcast and Philo.

Newsy experienced its biggest evolution in 2021, when Scripps announced that it was combining an aggregated content stream and a linear cable channel into one product that would deliver continuous news coverage throughout the weekday. The company established a permanent studio for the News in Atlanta and relaunched it last year under the Scripps News brand.

For three years, the company worked to transform Scripps News into a national news channel that sought to stand out from other outlets. At a time when network and cable news channels are perceived as increasingly biased, Scripps focused on fact-based journalism that favored no one and nothing but the truth.

From the outside, this strategy seemed to be working. The channel increased its live programming on weekdays and weekends, distributed some of its core programming to local broadcast stations across the country, and underwent a major overhaul of its website and mobile apps to rebrand itself as original, unbiased programming. and award-winning journalistic brilliance.

It didn’t count where it mattered most: in the book. Despite wide distribution on television and free streaming platforms, Scripps News has not made a profit in the three years since its relaunch.

Election years are typically good for linear TV broadcasters because political campaigns drive large audiences to buy large amounts of advertising inventory, especially for news programming. Scripps executives were willing to invest more in talent and programming, hoping that political ad money would flow to Scripps News, but were surprised when it didn’t, one source said.

In a Friday memo to employees, Symson did not address the channel’s financial problems, but noted that a general softening of the traditional television advertising market helped influence the decision to shut down the channel from its current state.

“Despite the efforts of our sales teams, the prospects for the necessary revenue growth have not materialized,” Symson wrote. “Scripps News’ current financial situation has led me to make the decision to scale back our approach to 24/7 news and over-the-air broadcasts.”

Symson said most brands and media buyers “have decided that advertising in national news is simply too risky for them, given the polarized nature of this country, regardless of the praise and credentials a news organization like Scripps receives for your objectivity.”

“I strongly disagree with this,” he wrote, “but it harms Scripps News, as it does every other national news outlet, linear and digital.”

Signs that something was wrong at Scripps News began this summer when employees learned that several television stations carrying some of the channel’s syndicated programming had decided to replace those programs with local news or talk shows, according to two people, including a large -level director of Scripps News.

Rumors began circulating after some anchors and reporters in Denver, Atlanta and New York began telling other employees that their contracts were not being renewed. One person I spoke to Desk Early Friday morning, he said they had been advised to “put a sizzle reel together” and offered to use the digital filing system at Scripps for the project.

Other employees in Atlanta began to feel that Scripps was increasingly prioritizing two of its other initiatives, Court TV and Scripps Sports, in a way that gave the impression that Scripps News was a less watched product. That feeling intensified earlier this year when Scripps told employees it would divide part of its Atlanta facility to Scripps Sports, which launched a new studio there in August. (Prior to its launch, Scripps Sports shared a studio and set with Scripps News.)

Scripps Sports and Court TV succeeded where Scripps News failed. Over the past few weeks, Scripps executives have touted record viewership for Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) games produced by Scripps Sports for the Ion TV network, with some of those games averaging a million or more viewers.

By comparison, the Scripps News Channel averaged about 20,000 viewers a day, the source said, and most of them watched it on streaming platforms such as Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Xumo Play and Tubi. Fewer than a dozen people watched the live broadcast as of 3 p.m. EST on Friday, according to the broadcast tracked by YouTube, where Scripps News has more than half a million followers. Desk.

On-demand clips are performing better, with most averaging around 5,000 viewers, with some international stories and longer packages getting tens of thousands of views on YouTube. Some of the higher-viewing segments included collaborations with other newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica.

Scripps will continue to produce some of these stories for the foreseeable future, albeit with a smaller team. On Friday, Symson said the brand still has an obligation to support the company’s local television newsrooms, which enjoy greater support from advertisers.

“Locally, our local news receives advertising support and stations have the ability to connect local businesses with audiences,” Symson wrote. “It remains our responsibility to serve our local communities and connect them to the larger world through Scripps News national and international reporting.”

Some workers laid off by Scripps News will be offered jobs elsewhere in the company, but the vast majority of those laid off are likely to leave in mid-November. Human resources teams will meet with affected employees next week to provide them with information about open job opportunities elsewhere at Scripps, as well as transition benefits such as severance pay for those who leave.