NBCU’s LX News To Close And Staffers Worry For Experimentation’s Future

On Wednesday, May 3, staffers at NBCUniversal Local’s experimental LX News service learned the unit would be shut down later this year.

“They handled it as gracefully as they could, but it still hurts,” says an LX News team member, referring to executives at NBCUniversal. While the entire staff will be forced to acquire new jobs, they have been given months’ worth of notice with which they can explore opportunities.

According to multiple sources close to the situation, NBCU has also told LX employees it is committed to reassigning as many of them as possible to other positions within the company. However, as the employee, who wished to remain anonymous after the company instructed workers not to comment publicly, tells TVNewsCheck, emotions are running high — for a number of reasons.

“It’s hard to be bitter,” said the staffer, citing the advanced notice they and their colleagues were given on the shutdown. “But at the same time, you’re trying to find something in a job market that’s not real hot right now.”

With publishers like Buzzfeed News closing shop, and companies like Vice and Sinclair laying off workers in large numbers, the employee noted that not only is the landscape currently flooded with unemployed talent, the layoffs point to serious questions about the sustainability of news.

Online paywalls may be helping to generate revenue for publishers, the source observes, but they also note that a large portion of what TV news covers is information the public should be entitled to — safety stories for example — whether or not they can afford a digital subscription to a news source.

“It’s disheartening because no one has figured out that secret sauce to do really good, in-depth content and make it profitable,” they said. Around the industry, it appeared to them that “everyone was pulling for LX” because of its mission, targeted demographics, innovation and well-crafted and -reported stories. With LX folding due to economic issues, the worker wonders if any product like it can survive.

“You have some of the most innovative and creative minds in the country in that room,” the staffer said, referring to a large conference room in the Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters of LX where the announcement was made. “That’s why we chose LX and that’s why LX chose us. We went through a lot together. We laid off eight people in January and since then there were three programming changes. Startups are hard. We all love LX. We love what we do, and we love the product we put out and just to hear [the wind down is] real is a difficult thing.”

Multiple sources confirm that Meredith McGinn, EVP of NBCU Local Media, multicast networks and original programming, delivered an address to the employees at the headquarters, informing them that she had bad news to break. For weeks prior, staffers had feared the worst as rumors of financial difficulties with the platform circulated. A half hour prior to the team’s usual editorial meeting on Tuesday at noon local time, the LX team received an email from McGinn stating that it would be an all-hands gathering. Remote employees were to join in via Microsoft Teams.

Typically, when McGinn attended LX meetings with the staff, she did so remotely from an office in New York City. Once McGinn walked into the conference room in person this week, though, according to the staffer it felt as though everyone knew an LX elimination was imminent.

As McGinn detailed the company’s plans for the digital platform across the 30-minute meeting, she grew emotional and teared up. The staffer whom TVNewsCheck interviewed says they believe McGinn was genuinely upset.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the room or among the remote workers in the meeting, according to sources.

“It doesn’t matter how much you prepare for that,” the interviewee says. “We’re all devastated.”

LX employees were encouraged to apply for job openings throughout the company, not just NBCU Local, but at the news networks and inside other holdings.

“It was comforting to hear that, but being completely honest, I don’t know how confident we all feel about getting reassigned within the company,” the employee says. “We had a recruiter in yesterday and she’s coming back Friday [and] it’s one of things where, like, there are job openings, but you’re asking people who have done very niche, special-projects work to flip their game and go back to the day-to-day grind in cities that they don’t know and [they’re] still competing in a very competitive realm in order to get those jobs.”

Elaborating on the type of work LX producers do, the source says they specialize in longform content, where a “five-minute story would be very short for us.” Producers devoted entire blocks to one subject instead of moving from story to story every 45 seconds.

“We also did a lot of pre-taped segments,” they continue. “We didn’t start covering breaking news until the last six months or so. We focused more on depth and context instead of headlines of the day.”

How those kind of skills will translate on job applications internally and externally remains to be seen, the source observes.

“A lot of us are looking outside the industry,” they say. “For me, it’s soul crushing to do that.”

NBCU Local declined to comment on the situation. A public statement about the LX closing and its impact on the company is expected to emerge at some point before its content ceases to air later this year.

The interviewed staffer says executives told employees not to announce the shutdown on social media because the company wanted to inform LX partners and advertisers about the change first.

The staffer who spoke to TVNewsCheck says that, while they appreciate all that NBCU is doing for its LX employees and recognizes it must have been a difficult decision to close down the platform, it’s a challenging development to deal with “especially when you know those in upper management are going to be OK.

“Your normal newsroom people are the ones scrambling,” they add. “Unfortunately, it feels like the entire industry is that way right now.”