From Newsy To Scripps News: A Reboot Of A Reboot?

The E.W. Scripps Co. will sunset its Newsy brand name, rechristening its national news network as “Scripps News” on Jan. 1, 2023, and folding it into a new national news division of the same name, the company said Thursday.

So, given Newsy was only rebooted a year ago with a dramatic expansion of weekday programming and a wider distribution footprint to include over the air carriage, does that amount to a reboot of a reboot?

No, says Kate O’Brien, currently Scripps’ head of network news and soon to be its EVP of the Scripps News Division, who is quick to clarify that it will not be scuttling all it has undertaken in the last year.

“We are still a high quality, high context, anti-partisan news organization,” O’Brian says. “That is what we have been and what we have tried to do for the last year.”

The new division will encompass Newsy, Scripps’ national bureau in Washington and its Local News national desk in Denver, while Scripps-owned Court TV will remain in O’Brian’s portfolio. All have been working collaboratively already, sharing content multi-directionally.

O’Brian says that Newsy’s new name draws it closer into Scripps’ long news legacy, lending some of the parent brand’s luster to the relatively fledging brand still building a national audience.

“This is a renaming that is indicative of the legacy of the Scripps organization, an organization that was born in journalism,” she says. “The company is really doubling down on its reputation as a leader in journalism, now especially at the national network.

“This is truly a merger of three really important parts of the organization that all have done an incredibly high level of high-quality content,” she adds. “It is putting them together so that we can really realize a collective value for the national audience, but also for the local stations.”

O’Brian says Scripps is still hashing out the logistics of integration in the new division, reorganizing new workflows and realigning overlapping functions. She emphasizes that the target is an even more seamless flow of content between the national network and the national content-producing bureaus with local stations benefitting and contributing more as well.

“I hope the result is that we are both stronger, we both have more content available to us, the value of what we are doing raises up both the local station and the network side,” she says.

Scripps has not shared any audience metrics for Newsy, which is not yet Nielsen rated and will likely not be until 2023, according to Lisa Knutson, president of Scripps Networks. The network is also carried on numerous OTT and digital platforms, but it hasn’t disclosed any audience data there, either.

O’Brian would only concede, “The numbers are all going in the right direction, and they are decent.”

She says viewers won’t see any dramatic on-air overhauls but for the name change come January. Behind the scenes, however, there will be lots of shuffling going on.

“We are going to be looking at everything, but really in sort of a holistic, integration way,” O’Brian says. “Do we have too many people doing this thing and maybe not enough people doing that thing? [There will be] those kinds of questions, but you are not going to see any differences on the Scripps News air from what’s on the Newsy air except maybe expansion and more news stories.”