Scripps News on Monday launches a new weekday lineup featuring live programming from 6 a.m. through 10 p.m. and a marketing campaign to promote the network, which was rebranded from Newsy on January 1.
Scripps News had originally planned to program live news continuously within two years of its launch, but viewers were changing the channel during shows that were rebroadcast,” Kate O’Brian, president of Scripps News, told Broadcasting+Cable.
“We saw viewers come and stay for live and then, when we would be airing shows that were not live, we were losing audience,” O’Brian said. “The audience would come back after we went back to live.”
The network conducted an experiment and replaced its taped repeat of In The Loop at 11 a.m. with an extra live hour of its Morning Rush program. “In one day we saw that we were not losing the viewers that we had been before,” O’Brian said. “It was pretty definitive.”
Scripps hustled to get its new live lineup on the air to coincide with plans to launch a marketing push.
The campaign does not have a clever slogan, but focuses on Scripps’s 140-year legacy as a journalism company.
“This is actually the first journalism product of the Scripps company that is called Scripps,” O’Brian said. When a lot of people see the Scripps name, she said, they associate it with the company’s well-known Scripps National Spelling Bee.
“One of the things we did when we were looking to change the name from Newsy to Scripps News was a research project where people associated the Scripps name with trusted fact,” she said. “Overwhelmingly, they look at the Scripps name as something that could be trusted, which is great.”
The campaign does employ Scripps’s lighthouse imagery. Billboards call Scripps — and Scripps News — ”A beacon of the free press. Then. Now. Always.”
Spots for the channel will run on all the Scripps local stations. There will be print ads in major newspapers, audio spots and social media in addition to the billboards.
Scripps acquired Newsy in 2014. In 2021, it was converted from a cable channel to a free over-the-air network, available through digital antennas and streaming platforms.
Scripps doesn’t disclose viewership numbers, but when the network was first renamed Scripps News, viewership took an initial dip though numbers rebounded quickly. “Now it’s growing, and we expect that with the changes we are making that trend will continue,” O’Brian said.
The new Scripps News live lineup starts with Early Rush from 6 a.m.to 7 a.m. ET; Morning Rush from 7 a.m. to noon; Scripps News Live from noon to 6 p.m., Evening Debrief from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.; and Scripps News Tonight from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
The channel’s documentary show In Real Life, which premieres on Sunday nights, will have repeats at 4 a.m. on weekdays instead of 2 p.m. The show The List moves to 5 a.m and The Upside (previously called Afternoon Focus) moves to 5:30 a.m.
The Scripps show The Why, which had appeared daily, is becoming a weekly show premiering on Saturday evenings, while In the Loop is becoming a segment during Scripps News Tonight.
On weekends, Scripps News has two live news shows and live cut-ins at the top of each hour.
In order to program more live news, O’Brian said the network didn’t need to hire more people. Some employees were moved around so that all of the hours could be staffed similarly. Some people who worked on The Why when it was a daily program have been moved to other shows.
O’Brian added that the new live format will make it easier to work with the Scripps local stations, particularly when there’s a breaking news event.
“We are working much more collaboratively and closely with each local station on reporting and covering stories,” she said. “This just takes any hurdle, any stumbling block out of that.”
