We begin this edition with our sincere condolences to those employees at E.W. Scripps, who found out yesterday that their jobs are being eliminated. The company put the total at 431 positions, hitting nearly every station it owns. Regardless of the situation, losing your job always sucks—but in the fourth quarter, it sucks even more.
We’ve written before about the “shuffling of the deck chairs” aboard the Titanic-like corporate “vessel” being piloted by CEO Adam Symson, and this is the third round of cuts in four months. In his announcement, Symson had to tap-dance around this baffling news: while ending hundreds of current positions, Scripps will create more than 100 new ones, including local reporting and “community connection” roles they hope to fill with some of the same people they just cut.
All of this in service of the goal he laid out for Wall Street in August: Scripps is becoming an “AI-powered broadcast journalism company.” (We decode that as the company saying goodbye to those making too much money and replacing them with lower-paid people who will keep the AI journalism engines running.)
One wonders how long it will be before someone notices that running the bilge pumps full-time just isn’t keeping up with the water filling the boat. The looming iceberg the entire industry is trying to steer around? Scripps appears to have already found it.
Here’s the thing: Scripps is plotting the same course as other major station groups, and this route makes streaming each station’s effort its #1 priority for 2027. Scripps has already promised 24/7 local news streams, starting in about a dozen smaller markets and eventually reaching every station it owns.
This isn’t the first time live streaming has been a focus at each local station; it’s been an almost annual topic for years now. What’s different about this version of the annual mandates from corporate is that it focuses on live streaming starting first thing in the morning straight through to the end of the late newscast.
The recent rise of the “Anchor-as-News Jockey,” where a local anchor appears on a live stream while punching and hosting their own live show, is the new model. Your local TV station seems more like an all-news radio station—with pictures.
And why not? Radio stations figured out long ago how to stay live on the air around the clock with one (or maybe two) people in the studio. If you swap the songs and callers for reporter packages and Zoom interviews, you’ll see the formats aren’t all that different, especially on streaming video platforms—where audiences already accept more unpredictable presentations.
Frankly, the biggest hurdle we have seen in the execution of these “news radio with pictures” on local TV stations’ live streams is that the TV folks haven’t figured out the key thing radio figured out long ago—you need a format clock that repeats each hour of the day (outside of those special times when events may warrant “stopping the clock”).
And you need to teach the audience what each minute of the clock delivers for them.
Opening the broadcasting history book, as we often do in this space, let’s go back to 1965, when Westinghouse Broadcasting debuted its first local all-news radio format on WINS in New York City. General Manager Joel Chaseman (who would later lead the Post-Newsweek Stations television group) announced the debut of “All News, All the Time” on “1010 WINS” (pronounced “ten-ten wins”) on April 19 of that year.
The station has delivered on the simple but effective promise of its most famous line: ”You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world”—every hour of every day, ever since. That’s sixty-one and a half years and counting.
That catchy promotional line did far more than explain what listeners could expect to hear on the station. It taught them the routine. Today’s version of the WINS clock is a model of dependable repetition: traffic on the 1s, weather every few minutes, sports at :15 and :45, business news at :26 and :56, and the top stories cycling back around before you’ve finished your commute.
Radio programmers call that wheel the “hot clock,” and the great ones follow it religiously. The clock stops only for major breaking news, and even then, the basic elements return as soon as possible. Top 40 stations in their heyday followed the same rules.
We’d offer that local TV stations trying to craft a live-streaming strategy could learn a lot by studying the nation’s best all-news radio stations and their close cousins, news-talk stations, which run long blocks of hosts talking with newsmakers, commentators, and, yes, regular listeners on the same news-intensive clocks.
Don’t look now, but news-talk outlets have figured out that putting cameras in their broadcast studios and streaming their programming is an effective way to plant their flag in the streaming land rush, whether on YouTube or their own app/website platforms.
But a local TV station’s news department has far more resources to execute this format than a local radio station does, except perhaps in the largest markets. And at stations owned by Nexstar, Gray, and Fox, the push is on to adopt what Alec Baldwin might have called an “ABS” strategy in his classic monologue from the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross.” (Definitely worth the 7:14 to watch the clip at that link, though we’ll advise that it is also definitely NSFW.)
Always. Be. Streaming.
But while these station groups were creating their “ABS” plans and installing the technology to let one person serve as anchor, producer, director, and nearly every other role needed to deliver these hours of streaming news, something unexpected happened. These streaming hours quickly got past their initial shakedown cruise and became watchable newscasts. So much so that some stations made the obvious move of carrying some of the hours from the live stream over on their main broadcast TV channels as well. With so few decent, affordable syndication shows to schedule, stations could also present a live, fresh program they were already creating for a digital audience to a broadcast audience.
Talk about lowering your programming costs.
How far will this fast-moving evolution of TV news production go? Damn if we know. One thing is for sure: if there is an audience to be had and a buck to be made from it, the new “ABS” mandate might start being promoted this way:
All News, All the Time. All the Places You Might Watch. Maybe even on a TV.
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