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Scripps News Shutting Down OTA
- Thread starter tripinva
- Start date
Yeah, PTBoardOp93's observation pretty much sucks the wind out of this idea's sails. Oh well.
In this case KTTV would also object to anything that drew ratings away from channel 11 while it was live, yeah...
Are they on any of the streaming platforms like Pluto or The Roku Channel? What about running a 24/7 Youtube stream like Al Jazeera English?
Do you remember who the very first to start doing that was, and why? I still remember when they all began at 11:30. SNL is the only remnant of the 11 o'clock news ending at 11:30 that I know of now.
Jeez. This nonsense is out of control. What do we need, disclaimers now, going into commercial breaks like when going into violent TV dramas? "The following commercial sponsors didn't know which news stories would be airing when they booked these ads. They just want to feed their families and aren't political. Viewer indiscretion requested."
I don't think they ever really did. Most people don't start caring about the news until they either have kids or the government has a draft.
Yes:
Watch Scripps News
Search your local channel number or browse a list of available platforms and devices to watch Scripps News.
www.scrippsnews.com
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I had to cut-and-paste the text from the New York Times, because the relevant article is behind their paywall, but it was NBC with Johnny Carson, as I had remembered originally (post #18). The network made the announcement on May 22, 1991 and it took effect on September 2 of that year. The network said it was "to satisfy demands of affiliated stations for a longer late-night newscast".
Nightline followed suit within a year and when Letterman moved to CBS in August 1993 his show also got an 11:35 start.
HappyThoughts1257
Banned
Actually KILM Channel 64 is owned-and-operated by Scripps it might probably become a independent station possibly branded as California 64
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I highly doubt it. Have you any basis for that speculation other than wishful thinking?
Frankly, that sounds like a justification from an executive who wants to point a finger somewhere, away from themselves.
According to "The Desk", Scripps News had an average audience of only 20,000 and not much in the way of on-demand viewing. That's an absolutely tiny audience, if that report is accurate.
Revenue woes leads to winding down of Scripps News, 250 to be laid off
Advertising revenue woes are largely to blame for the falling apart of Scripps News, a highly-decorated national news brand that aimed to reach viewers with facts-first, non-partisan journalism.
thedesk.net
FS2 has ratings on that scale, and FS2 is almost entirely reruns and is usually in a premium cable tier.
For scale, Fox News had an average audience almost 100x larger for a random day last week. (Nielsen total day, 2+ demo), and 150x bigger in prime time.
The only news network I can find with a smaller audience is CNN Español, which is obviously a limited audience.
You're comparing two different things. Scripps, like Newsnet, was trying to present news without bias. That's not what Fox News or any of the big cable news channels do. They realized presenting unbiased news was not going to attract a large enough audience. But even they are struggling if you look at the quality of advertising they attract. You see a lot of the same "junk" spots that were seen on Scripps. So perhaps it was both: bad viewership and bad advertising. In any case, they're getting out of the business.
This is why so many media companies want to get out of 24/7 linear programming. They have to staff for full coverage regardless of the size of the audience. We used to do this in radio. Not anymore.
Yes. Arguably Scripps news was digital-first. They were one of the only news networks that focused on putting their whole product on streamers, rather than only clips.
But right this minute, late on a Saturday night, the Scripps Live stream on YouTube has ... 1 viewer.
And they’re the ones who created the overall distrust in media. People weren’t driven to only get their news from the internet until the whole “fake news” thing began. Now, because of all of the opinion based shows, media trust is at an all time low and media outlets are going dark
One thing that came to mind as I was thinking on this, is that between the Bounce sale and this shut-down, they'd be left with six networks OTA (ION, ION Plus, ION Mystery, Grit, Laff, Court TV). That's exactly the right number to also have HSN/QVC/JTV on the ION stations using the current gear. It implies they could be considering ceasing leasing from other stations in places where ION stations carry the programming.
The question is would they save more money by ending leases than they would make by adding HSN2 or QVC2 in place of Scripps News. I don't know the answer to that question.
- Trip
The question is would they save more money by ending leases than they would make by adding HSN2 or QVC2 in place of Scripps News. I don't know the answer to that question.
- Trip
That distrust came to a boil after simmering for many decades. The unending wars, the yellow cake, the Iraqi incubators -- progressively larger segments of the population began perceiving large corporate media institutions as having abrogated their role as the fourth estate, allowing one too many bugs to multiply under one too many rocks that were too seldom being turned over in the proactive spirit of society's investigative guardians -- at least until, in these segments' eyes, it was too late. When Trump surfed in on the wave of Dissatisfaction With Virtually Everything(TM) that had been growing among the country's conservatives, that same media circled its wagons and went on a blitzkrieg defense of the status quo, all while maximizing its offensiveness to the other side by unwisely resorting to pejorative labels and insults. The people on that other side saw this new behavior as proof that some American Pravda decades in the making had finally come of age. Meanwhile, the sights of fiascos like Charlottesville and the tiki marches knee-jerked the left-leaning personalities of cable media like CNN and especially MSNBC dramatically further to the left, which then of course sent the right scrambling for even more entrenched defensive positions on their side, into literal foxholes like Rumble and X. (I guess Fox News was sort of their first foxhole, in hindsight. But when it canned Carlson, many of them even turned on Fox.)
I think, for me, it all culminated when I saw massive crowds, literally tens of thousands at the biggest Trump rallies, firmly chanting in unison, "F--- CNN! F--- CNN!", sometimes for a whole minute straight. That's when I knew the corporate media's future was basically roadkill -- that it had suffered a mortal loss of trust. How can you survive in the long term when half your potential audience now hates you, and when even a growing number of the people in the other half look at you as lowbrow teletypewriter shock jocks?
That's why NewsNet and now Scripps are such unfortunate losses in my eyes. They were old school straight news outlets. Like 1980s CNN but with visual facelifts ... though I suppose NewsNet's face always looked like it had last been lifted a decade ago.
Unfortunately, between the cultural exodus from anything that looks like traditional TV news, and the fact that both channels built their houses on Linear Highway (the old route, from before the 50 trillion lane internet bypass), they didn't have much of a chance.Ouch. Did they ever advertise in any way? Market-customized spots on radio giving their local channel number, telling people tired of cable news that there was some breathable oxygen available? As much as everybody hates Youtube ads, they could have even run spots there, saying "search Scripps News right here on Youtube" to pick up instant views from people already using the platform.
@K.M. Richards, thanks for digging the 11:35 backstory out from behind the New York Times' firewall. Interesting. And good memory! I'll assume that CBS and ABC would have preferred to have kept their 11:30 lead-in "edges," but that their own affiliates saw what NBC's were getting, and demanded parity.
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The creators of Current TV, Pivot, and Cheddar never got that message. Somehow, Cheddar is still going for now, despite it being a mix of the same ten episodes of "NYC Revealed" mixed with "news."
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
You are most welcome, and I think your assumption is totally correct.
After several years of ancillary/diginet programming experience on local stations, I rather doubt there would be high enough viewing numbers to justify even repurposing a struggling newscast block on a dot-whatever channel.
NBC tried doing a Millenial/GenZ-centered news and interest diginet with NBC-LX that never even left the dock from a viewership standpoint. Next, they tried to turn LX into a lifestyle/paid programming channel with expensive real estate showcases and higher-end products. It didn't take long before all that remained were Bissel Carpet machine infomercials and old Dateline shows to fill the time.
I think the problem is there aren't enough OTA viewers to support so many dot-whatever channels/diginets. Other than COZI, which is also shown on a lot of cable and satellite MVPD's, and maybe MeTV, I don't think diginets are long for this world. Also, NBCU owns all the rights to the shows on COZI and the spots are all national, so overhead is low and profitability is maximized.
I hope they add Ion Mystery in KC to replace Scripps News instead of HSN. They already have the other home shopping channels on their other subchannels.
I liked NBC LX, but at least on their affiliate here, the channel would run without audio randomly, so I stopped watching it.
So they go to the internet and social media where there are no standards, no responsibility, and ALL opinion based news. But now they can pick the news they want to believe. How has that helped media trust or the health of the country? People say they don't trust the media because it has opinion, but that's the only news that gets an audience. That's why Scripps is shutting down.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I would add a few more networks to that list: Buzzr, which like Cozi draws from a library owned by the same company as the channel (Fremantle); Antenna TV/Rewind TV, which are established concerns with viewer recognition and owned by the same company (Nexstar) as many of the stations that run those two networks; and the rest of the Weigel (MeTV) networks, especially H&I, Catchy Comedy, MeTV Toons, and Movies! since they operate on sheer volume of focused programming with a huge library to draw from and have wide carriage.
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