Scripps Dropped the Anchor. Who Goes Live When It Breaks?

In August, E.W. Scripps told staff it would eliminate 268 positions as part of what CEO Adam Symson calls the company's "refounding": round-the-clock local news streams, starting in about a dozen smaller markets and eventually reaching every Scripps station. Baltimore was among the first to see what that looks like. On WMAR's 7 and 11 p.m. newscasts, NewscastStudio reported, no studio anchor introduced the stories. The show opened with weather, then ran prerecorded local reports and national stories produced by Scripps, stitched together with graphics and the occasional stretch of dead air before a break. Last week Symson defended the changes in a memo, and in a LinkedIn post he said total viewing hours on the streams were up 23 percent. TheDesk, which reported both, said it could not verify the figures.

I am not going to argue that the anchor desk is sacred. A lot of the six o'clock ritual is furniture, and Symson's description of the new model, as quoted by a former Scripps strategy executive in TVNewsCheck, is not unreasonable: the 5 p.m. newscast becomes "simply the manifestation of what that stream would be at 5 o'clock." When Scripps announced the cuts, it also said it wanted to move resources from production tasks to the field. That is the right instinct. In September I argued that AI is good at automating the cheap half of local news, the desk work, and that what actually broke local news was too few reporters covering too much ground. On paper, Scripps is betting on the half that matters.

Here is the part that worries me. An anchor desk is not just a face reading copy. It is the newsroom's standing ability to go live: a person already on the air, with a producer and a director in the booth, who can correct a story, update a number or take a breaking report in seconds because they do it every day. Scripps says stations can still break into the stream for live coverage when the news warrants it. But in Baltimore the layoffs reached anchors, producers and directors, and the Baltimore Banner reported that photographers were cut too. Going live is not a switch. It is a crew that has practised it, and a newsroom that has not been live for weeks will be going live cold, on the night it matters most.

I study media audiences for a living, so the 23 percent deserves a second look. A new stream that starts from a small base will post big growth numbers almost by definition, and Symson himself acknowledged the audiences are small. The questions that would tell us whether this works are different ones. Are the stream viewers new to the station, or people who used to watch the 6 o'clock and moved? What happened to the linear audience in the same markets over the same weeks? Symson says the streams have not hurt traditional viewing; TheDesk could not verify that either. And what does the audience do on the first big breaking-news night in an anchorless market, when the habit people built was to turn on channel 2 and find someone there?

So I would judge the refounding by two things, not by the viewing-hours chart. The first is a headcount: a year from now, are there more reporters in the field in these markets than there were before the cuts, or fewer? If the savings really move to the field, Scripps will have done something the rest of local television should study. The second is the first bad night. When the tornado warning, the shooting or the plant fire comes, who goes live, from where, and how fast? Symson wrote that "the work ahead will still be hard." The answer to that second question will show whether the hard part was planned for, or just cut.