On My Mind: Measuring the news initiative’s success

Colleagues:

It’s been a year since I first explained why we needed to launch a bold new approach to serving our local communities through a news initiative focused on strengthening the economic sustainability of our newsrooms and improving our news coverage. Over the past year, viewing habits have continued to fragment. The difference between the No.1 newscast and the last-place newscast in some markets can be fractions of a rating point, which is further evidence that we’re all fighting over a smaller piece of the pie. Given these macrotrends and economic pressures, some broadcasters have opted to shutter smaller-market newsrooms while others have stayed on the same old path to hack away at budgets annually. But that is not the Scripps way. Our mission and entrepreneurial spirit are the driving forces behind our desire to be a meaningful part of these communities through impactful newsrooms with more journalists on the streets.

At Scripps:

Back when I first announced our news initiative, I described that we’d go through a “big shift from the way we operate” – and we have. By the end of 2024, we will have added 250 reporters to our local newsrooms, a 67% increase in our local news-gathering operations. Our smaller markets will have at least 10 reporters while our largest markets will have more than 25 journalists in the field. Those reporters are led by more than 20 executive reporters, a new role to support reporters in the daily development of their craft. We’ve reinvested $11.4 million to increase the compensation of those news-gathering employees, especially in our small and mid-sized markets.

To fund these investments and enhance the sustainability of our newsrooms, we moved away from daily live production in our smaller markets and in specific time periods within our medium and larger ones. This strategy allowed us to eliminate many positions dedicated to newscast production and repurpose some anchor roles to reporters in the field. As difficult as it was to say goodbye to those Scripps employees, the change was fundamental to focus our resources on better covering our communities in a more financially sustainable way. We made the decision to allocate resources to journalism on all platforms instead of to the more performative aspects of broadcast television news.

We took a theory about how to better serve our audiences and put it into practice across our newsrooms in a year, upending 50 years of tradition. Going through this dramatic change has been difficult on many of you, our news leaders and employees. And it’s natural to feel uneasy working for a company that is leading change when nearly everyone else is more comfortable staying the same.

So how will we know if we’re successful? We’re carefully monitoring two key indicators: one objectively quantitative – the financial contributions of our news operations to long-term sustainability, and the other subjective and qualitative – the quality of our work to assess the impact we have on our mission. On both fronts, early as it is, we should be pleased with the progress.

While we expect to benefit from political revenue in the back half of the year, we are still operating in the midst of a soft advertising marketplace. And yet, there is no doubt the strategy we are executing has stabilized and bolstered the economic contribution of our newsrooms to the bottom line — critical given we are a business with obligations to our shareholders and want to sustain the company so we can execute our mission.  

In the past, strategies like these were measured by their impact on ratings. Today, I’d contend that the ratings, or the currency we use to sell advertising against, is only one important barometer of how well our product resonates. Other measures of engagement, like digital video consumption and brand preference, matter too.

Did you just read that the CEO said ratings don’t matter? No. But given the overall declines in linear TV viewing habits, ratings matter less than other more important economic metrics that we also monitor, like a news operation’s overall financial contribution and the measures of qualitative performance I described above. Ratings today are a means to an end, but they just can’t be the end itself.

Measuring the quality is more subjective. The perfectionist in me will always say we have more work to do, but I am exceptionally proud of the product I see coming from our transitioned stations when compared to just one year ago.

In our smaller markets through the neighborhood news strategy, we’re covering more of the community with far more reporters than in the past. In our medium and larger markets, the new staffing structure is opening the opportunity to cover markets farther and wider, from the rural edges and far-flung suburbs to a city’s core. We are rebuilding trust with our audiences because we are committed to covering their community all the time and not just occasionally parachuting in. Across our newsrooms, we’re covering topics that otherwise would have been unreported and doing so with a greater focus on the journalism. We’re measuring the number of unique stories our stations produce, the quality of that reporting and the unique nature of those packages against the local competition. We’re assessing the geographic and demographic distribution of the coverage, the diversity of the sources and the consistency against our brands.

Now a year in and with most of our local stations transitioned or having started their transition, by focusing on both quality journalism and financial performance, we are creating a stronger foundation for our future to serve our communities with local news for years to come.  

At home:

My older daughter (who has just graduated high school) and I were having a discussion recently about what was the more important arbiter of success for her upcoming years in college: the grades she will earn or the education she will receive. She wants to go to medical school, so she contends that ultimately, her grades will matter most. Thirty years ago, I worked hard in college for good grades too, but I never went for any advanced degrees nor has anyone ever asked me my GPA. She’s still right of course, because to get into medical school, she’ll need the grades. But I am right too — these next four years will be an unparalleled opportunity to expand her mind, if she so chooses. Sometimes, it takes 30 years of perspective to be able to look back and recognize when something can be more than a means to an end.

Adam Symson (he/him)

President and CEO