As larger, chest-thumping digital news upstarts like BuzzFeed and Vice wobble mightily with multimillion-dollar losses and layoffs, E.W. Scripps’ Newsy is steadily and modestly growing and making a strong case that old-fashioned, nonpartisan reporting on multiple platforms is the best to reach and keep young news consumers.
Scripps bought the mobile-centric service from founder Jim Spencer in 2013 for $35 million and promptly moved it into OTT, making it one of the platform’s earliest news movers and helping it find a target audience of millennial viewers hungry for an alternative to deeply polarized likes of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
“They’ve got a very interesting strategy,” says analyst Dan Kurnos, managing director, internet and media for The Benchmark Co. “They’ve succeeded where others have failed — guys like BuzzFeed, who were the talk of the town forever.”
Then, with a decidedly anti-ideological news stance, it widened its presence into millions of cable households beginning in 2017 (a move not without its own learning curve) and expanded its original programming to 14 daily hours, including ramping up collaborations with Scripps’ television stations.
Those moves are beginning to pay off. The company earned $25 million in revenue in 2018, marking 144% year-over-year growth. “It’s still small numbers, but it’s nice, steady growth,” says Carolyn Micheli, Scripps’ VP of corporate communications and investor relations.
