Media Reckoning

Watching the Media Reckoning Unfold in a Now-Shuttered Broadcast Newsroom

Scripps sought to dominate national breaking news. Instead it became a paradigm of a broken industry.

Abby Vesoulis

In about two weeks, nearly everyone in this Atlanta conference room will be out of a job. But tonight, on November 5, the Scripps News team has an election to cover.

“Nothing goes on the air unless it gets vetted through the control room, okay?” says Brian Donlon, a New Yorker who tempers his gruff side with wisecracks. As the outlet’s senior director of live programming, he cautions two dozen anchors, writers, producers, and editors a couple of hours before showtime at the organization’s HQ, “It’s not the Wild West.”

Like other newsrooms across the country, Scripps News was bracing for the worst—potential violence, claims of rigged voting, a deluge of disinformation. But it was also wrestling with its own reckoning: the unraveling of its national broadcast news operation and the imminent unemployment of roughly 200 colleagues.

Scripps News is a division of the E.W. Scripps Company, one of the nation’s largest local TV broadcasters and the owner of brands Court TV and Ion Television. Acquired by E.W. Scripps in 2014 under the moniker Newsy, and then rebranded two years ago as Scripps News, it was pitched as a neutral voice in a hyperpolarized media ecosystem, a just-the-facts national alternative for viewers tired of punditry and hyperbole. Available free via digital antennas and on streaming services, the 24/7 news operation racked up awards and accolades for its evenhanded coverage from industry players like the Radio Television Digital News Association and gained a growing audience.

But financially, Scripps News could not outrun the trends decimating the media landscape—dwindling ad dollars and increasing competition from social media, podcasts, Substacks, and partisan outlets. It’s a downward spiral that began with print. Since 2005, a third of newspapers have disappeared while others have been gutted after being swallowed up by venture capital firms; over the past three decades, the number of newspaper reporters in the US has dropped by nearly two-thirds.

National TV news platforms now are facing a similar reckoning. Ad buyers want large audiences, but ratings are falling. Even primetime viewership on election night, broadcast media’s Super Bowl, was down 25 percent across all networks, compared with 2020. CBS and NBC have slashed jobs, while CNN has instituted a new paywall and is reportedly poised for more rounds of layoffs. Many mainstream outlets are also leaning into opinion and divisiveness, none more so than Fox News, which consistently scores the highest ratings. In 2020, Fox pulled out all the stops to help Donald Trump propagate his stolen election claims, and as a result, it was eventually forced to pay Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest-ever media settlements of $787.5 million for amplifying the actually fake news that its technology was used to commit widespread election fraud. Despite the debacle, Fox continues to thrive: In October, Nielsen said the network had marked 91 consecutive quarters as the most-watched cable news channel during primetime hours.

More traditional outlets are “increasingly struggling to reach people on the right, and there are other news outlets that have really sought to cater to them,” says Benjamin Toff, co-author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. “So you have this polarization of news audiences as well, and I think that puts a lot of conventional news organizations that perceive themselves as trying to be politically balanced in an awkward position.” This trend dovetails with social media platforms growing “less and less interested in actually delivering news content,” Toff adds.

In addition to unforgiving market forces, Trump and his allies have relentlessly attacked and attempted to discredit news outlets. Lately, Trump backer Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in undermining mainstream journalism, has joined the action. While frequently blasting out conspiracy theories and misinformation on X, the platform he owns, he has simultaneously worked to sow distrust in the press. Since November 5, he has relentlessly told his more than 205 million followers they are a practical replacement for trained journalists: “You are the media now.”

Scripps News is just one of the latest victims in an industry under siege. By the time you read this, it will have laid off the majority of its staff and dramatically scaled back its mission, no longer operating as a round-the-clock broadcast news source, and transitioning to a local news and streaming-only model. Usually, we learn about the fall of media organizations retrospectively, in postmortems. I wanted to see one in its liminal moment between bustling existence and relative extinction. So I spent Election Day in the Scripps News offices.

As Donlon reaches the end of his talk to a division he’s led since October 2023, in a conference room packed with pensive staff and trays of pasta, he tries to maintain his business-as-usual approach—but nearly falters. “Thirteen months and now we’re here,” Donlon says, his voice cracking. “When we educate one viewer and tell them something they didn’t know the day before, we did our jobs. That’s the job. Let’s go do it.”

Founded in 1878, the E.W. Scripps Company has navigated a century and a half of media evolutions. Starting from a single paper in Cleveland, it would become the nation’s first modern newspaper chain. It then established a wire service in 1907 that competed with the Associated Press. It branched into radio and, after World War II, opened its first local TV news stations. By 2011, the company owned about 20, reaching 13 percent of US households.

In 2015, with online news outlets growing and poaching advertisers, Scripps spun off more than a dozen local newspapers—those ended up with Gannett, which has gutted them—to focus on TV news. Today, Scripps has a presence in 40-plus markets with more than 60 local television stations. Its local programming is supplemented by correspondents stationed around the country.

When Adam Symson took over as CEO in 2017, he had an idea. What if the company drew upon the content its national reporters were already producing for local channels to create a national news division with its own anchors? What if the product was free? What if it delivered information unfiltered by hosts and opinion panels that have come to dominate the cable networks? The model would rival traditional broadcast news channels and attract viewers who didn’t want a cable package but could access this content via antennas or streaming platforms.

In 2023, Donlon, who had worked for many leading television news companies over a multidecade career and had most recently been an executive producer at Scripps News, took charge of fine-tuning all the live programming. Slowly, the division ramped up its offerings from intermittent live shows on weekdays to a 24/7 operation with an emphasis on breaking news.

“If it’s happening, we’re going no matter what. We are taking the viewer there. We’re going to book the best guests around it, and we’re going to try to get reporters there, because that’s where we can make a difference,” Donlon reminisces about the strategy a few days before election night. “That’s where the TikTok competitors don’t matter and the social media doesn’t matter, because they’re not always going to be there. We can get there.”

Donlon wanted Scripps News to educate viewers without persuading them—even if it came at the expense of attracting a more diehard audience. “I’ve worked at Fox. I’ve worked at MSNBC. And I can’t always say that I left those buildings thinking we served the viewer best,” he tells me. “I can honestly say that I’ve never left here thinking we didn’t do the right thing.”

The commitment to impartial reporting helped reporters connect with viewers across the political spectrum. Sometimes when political correspondent Haley Bull was in the field, people asked her, “Well, which way does your outlet lean?” She tells me she took pride in answering: “I am able to say that we approach our coverage in an objective, fair, unbiased, and balanced manner.”

Of course, sometimes the appearance of balance comes at the price of avoiding the obvious. When a comedian at a Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” Scripps News initially said “many have called [the comment] racist,” instead of just calling it racist. And last summer, a three-minute segment recapping the June debate that led to Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race made little mention of how poorly he performed or how decrepit he appeared.

Nevertheless, viewers were responding to Scripps’ understated approach. Streaming viewership increased more than 40 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to Scripps News Vice President Christina Hartman. Viewership of Morning Rush, a Today Show alternative, jumped 73 percent from December 2023 to September 2024. America Tonight had its best month ever this past September, with a 61 percent increase in viewers compared with the show’s debut in May. As its audience grew, Scripps News earned recognition. Two days before Symson announced the division would face major layoffs, Scripps News won an Emmy for its reporting on the residents of Flint, Michigan, who still don’t have lead-free water. Later, Scripps took home two prestigious Edward R. Murrow awards, which honor excellence in broadcasting.

“That’s the hardest part about this whole process,” says America Tonight host Maritsa Georgiou, who was part of the layoffs. “We got to a place where we were hitting these marks. Our viewership was growing every month. Show ratings are doing great.”

But the ratings didn’t translate to a balanced budget, which came as a surprise to Symson. A former reporter himself, he had seen major corporations, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, pledge to double down on supporting the pillars of our democracy, including the media. Seeing an opening, he embarked on a “personal quest to leverage their words to spawn conversations about how they could step up now,” he says. “I had conversations directly with the CEOs and CMOs of some of America’s largest companies, trying to draw the line between the important role that journalism plays and what we were doing at Scripps News and how they were spending their ad dollars­—and I failed.”

Companies can buy ads anywhere. Faced with the choice of marketing their products next to coverage of war, famine, and political strife or during sitcoms or football games, guess which one they’ll pick. The fewer viewers an outlet gets, the less likely a company is to risk being highlighted next to news that generally bums people out. “When push came to shove,” Symson notes, ad buyers were “uncomfortable putting their dollars to work around the news.”

While E.W. Scripps’ local news stations and entertainment assets were profitable, Scripps News was posting huge losses that contributed to a precipitous decline in the company’s share price; it slid from $20 three years ago to a low of $1.74 this past September.

“We were losing millions upon millions upon millions at a time when E.W. Scripps became increasingly unable to support that kind of loss,” says Hartman, who says she was responsible for decreasing the team’s expenses and increasing the product’s revenue. “When I look at our weekly broadcast revenue, we’re more than doubling what last year was. We could have tripled it, and it still wouldn’t have closed that gap.”

In retrospect, Georgiou says there were signs the budget was growing tighter. Then, on the morning of September 27, a blog post warning that Scripps News was headed for layoffs began circulating in employee group chats. Quickly thereafter, Symson convened a town hall and delivered the bad news.

With about 200 positions eliminated, approximately 60 people will remain at Scripps News. They will continue to report and package political, investigative, and national news segments that appear on and complement E.W. Scripps’ local stations. Sans anchors, the standalone news packages will be available on streaming platforms. Matt Simon, the vice president of news leading the leaner unit, says that by focusing on streaming, Scripps will be able to glean better metrics on the types of reporting that attracts viewers.

“Going straight to streaming as our primary and, in many cases, sole distribution is going to enable us to make sure we’re delivering to consumers and viewers the news that they need and want,” he says.

Donlon, who departed in mid-­November with most of his team, isn’t sold on the viability of the new strategy. “Frankly, I have not been involved with the development of that product at all,” he says. “I wish they would have involved me. I probably would have made some different suggestions, at least on personnel, but I wasn’t consulted.”

CEO Symson is also unsure whether streaming news segments will translate to profit. But his qualms have nothing to do with the quality of reporting. “I know for a fact that our journalism will continue to serve the industry and serve the country,” he says. “I think what I worry about is whether the American people are willing consumers.”

A few hours after the last production meeting, election results begin to trickle in to Scripps’ darkened control room. A writer drafts teleprompter scripts for the anchors, producers keep the live banners fresh, and a director seamlessly toggles among 14 journalists in the field.

Twenty different conversations are happening at once. The person making sense of them all is Donlon. Sometime around 8:15 p.m., he tells the team to pivot from focusing on the anchor desk to covering a press conference where law enforcement officials were discussing bomb threats made to more than two dozen Georgia voting sites. In a studio down the hall, host Georgiou asks a guest to “very quickly” answer an unrelated election question before cutting over. “No, no, no,” Donlon mutters in the control room, wanting his team to cut away. “There’s no such thing as very quickly.”

Within seconds, a control room producer starts to phase in instrumental music to cut off Georgiou and her guest. It is a master class in controlled chaos, and it takes only three words to make it happen. Nobody breaks a sweat.

When brief lulls allow, Donlon compliments his team’s hard work and ­repeatedly asks whether they would like more pasta. If he could, he tells me that night, he would have offered them stable jobs instead. Departing anchor Georgiou describes the depressing circumstances as “working through a funeral—our own.”

“The professionalism shining through has been heartwarming,” says Simon, “but also incredibly heart-wrenching—knowing that when the election starts to get resolved, people will stop having a place to work.”

Although the results of the presidential race were clear by early Wednesday morning, Scripps News had prepared for a repeat of the chaotic 2020 race, when the winner wasn’t determined for nearly a week. Because of the impending layoffs, the newsroom had already wound down some of its programming and wasn’t scheduled to broadcast live over the weekend. The previous week, Donlon had asked his team if anyone would be willing, on their own time, to staff an emergency show if necessary. He needed 12 people; more than 30 volunteered.

Kate O’Brian, president of news, who was to depart Scripps at the end of 2024, wasn’t surprised. “There will be emotions that are connected to what’s happening to them and their jobs,” she says, “but I bet they are way pushed down while we do the work.”

“You don’t have time to cry now,” she adds. “You cry later.”