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The legendary British actor Edmund Gwenn (Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street) was purported to have remarked on his deathbed: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” With no disrespect to Santa, events even in the last week have made it clear that in the media world nothing is harder than the news business.
It’s almost breathtaking just to catalog the news business pandemonium from the last several weeks. From the ultra-serious physical danger for reporters abroad to growing fallout from challenged business models to the perils of disinformation and political division to case studies of bad behavior on and off camera, the news business is now – as much or more than ever – not a business for the faint of heart.
Yet amid this chaos, I had the good fortune last week (before much of the latest deluge) of moderating an illuminating event at Grant Thornton (my day job) with three of the most creative players I know in and around the news business: Sara Fischer, Senior Media Reporter for Axios and CNN; Sunil Kapadia, Managing Director for News Partnerships Strategy and Operations at GoogleGOOG; and Anand Kini, Chief Financial Officer for NBC Universal. Their fundamental optimism about this ever-complicated sector of the media business left me more hopeful than I might have expected in the face of so much tumult.
Where to begin with the terrible, no good, very bad week (plus) for the news business?
Just last week came the announcement of the end of BuzzFeed News. Once one of the more innovative, news breaking and recognizable digital-first news sources, the end of BuzzFeed News and the layoffs of its 180 employees signaled a particularly dour and poignant moment for independent sources of news reporting. BuzzFeed is hardly the first nor will it be the last victim of the challenges presented by growing competition from social media, fragmented audiences and advertisers gravitating towards the greater scale and frictionless client-service offered with digital giants. For media giants such as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and ParamountPARA, the decline of broadcast and cable TV subscribers, audiences and ratings has dealt a series of body blows to their own newsgathering outlets.
For my source of light in a dark tunnel here, I’ll note a couple of observations from NBCU’s Kini. He highlighted the extraordinary and ever-growing news appetite from the public and the unending passion of the journalists who deliver it. No one-size-fits-all business model has yet been unearthed for the next generation of journalism, but Kini noted the rapidly accelerating experimentation inside of NBCU News. NBCU is testing hybrid subscription and ad supported streaming services such as Peacock and NBC News Now and a heightened focus on mobile as well as living room viewers. As Axios/CNN’s Fischer noted, CNN could pick up a few lessons from NBCU and other innovators here. If you’ve got a good idea for how to balance sub fees, ad inventory and Gen Z-attracting news content, it’s a safe bet someone is going to give that a whirl.
As just this week reinforced, news and media more generally have always attracted big personalities and big egos, with more than a little hubris and bad behavior in tow. We don’t know if Tucker Carlson’s firing by Fox News was a direct result of his one-air contributions to Fox’s false reporting in the now-settled-for-$787.5-million Dominion-Fox litigation or was more closely linked to allegations of a “hostile and discriminatory work environment” inside his prime-time program. Either or both proved untenable. Don Lemon’s move to lead CNN’s morning show was a ratings disappointment, but reports of years of misogynistic and cruel behavior as well as his more recent tone-deaf on-air commentary were more likely foundations of his termination. NBCUniversal’s CEO Jeff Shell wasn’t a news executive per se, but his firing not only for an inappropriate consensual relationship with a CNBC employee but possibly for sexual harassment as well, evokes a litany of fatal behavioral flaws from the likes of Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Les Moonves, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Jeff Zucker.
No one’s likely to solve the problem of men in power behaving badly. But there has been at least a semblance of course correction attached to the decisive actions at ComcastCMCSA, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global to cut their offensive chords. And say what you will about Rupert Murdoch and his family, but the man just slashed ties with a host who anchored one of the most watched shows in all of prime-time TV and served as a cultural lightning rod for Fox News’s right-wing core audience. As Michelle Goldberg noted succinctly in The New York TimesNYT, “one in a while, justice is delivered.”
On a far more sobering note, part of our panel discussion included the horrifying situation of The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, facing an outrageous prosecution in Putin’s Russia. His real crime, not the fabricated one, has been to tell the truth about the war in Ukraine and about what is really happening inside of Russia today. In an age where disinformation and the fomenting of conspiracies is frightfully rampant, that role of telling truth to power – and to those who lack power – has never been more essential. Gershkovich’s incarceration, and the more horrifying memories of the murders of Daniel Pearl and James Foley not so many years ago, should remind us of what is truly at stake for news and the people that report it all over the world.
In the face of these life-threatening challenges to journalists, and existential threats to democracy itself, Axios’s Fischer pointed out to our audience with some pride and relief that at least in the U.S. we don’t see journalists jailed and we still have press freedoms undergirded by constitutional history. In a business that has so many reasons to flee, this is a worthy reason to stay the course and fight the fight.
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