NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 16: (L-R) Daniel Cormier, Joe Rogan and President-elect Donald Trump … [+]
The news business – along with much of the U.S. population – is still trying to make sense of what happened in this year’s election and what it means going forward. But while news “civilians” will mostly pivot back to a more balanced diet of media consumption, those in the news business have to immediately focus on retrofitting their approach to reflect an unknown but vastly different environment.
I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion this week with three significant figures in the news business who will help determine its future: Rebecca Blumenstein, President of NBC News Editorial; Jon Klein, longtime network news executive particularly as President of CNN; and Abby Livingston, an experienced congressional correspondent now with Puck. As Klein noted, this election exposed a “revolution, not evolution” not only in politics but in technology, the news and media business and the broader culture. I’ve synthesized some of my own takeaways from a series of terrific insights.
Take nothing for granted
No matter how much or how little news we consume, we all exist in our own bubble in one way or another and are shaped by our chosen environment. With so much data at hand now, the public would surely see that the U.S. economy was fundamentally strong, inflation is far below where it was two years ago and government’s investments in the green economy will pay off big, right? As Puck’s Livingston noted, the impact of inflation on the ground in her hometown of Fort Worth felt quite different than for many in always-expensive places like Manhattan and West LA. It turns out that human feel (and feelings) can still have a lot more influence on voter preferences than the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Many will say in retrospect that they saw everything coming here, but I’d take any such claims with a massive grain of salt. Presidential debates are always a game changer, right? Well, a resounding yes for Joe Biden, a clear no for Kamala Harris, and a “who knows” for Donald Trump (from sitting out all the primary debates to wildly uneven performances against Biden and Harris). And of course, polls are a mess, and you shouldn’t believe any of them. But when you get past the “hot takes” the polls for months had the Presidential race and most of the key congressional races as virtual toss-ups, pretty close to what happened. And after the first Trump Administration the public would never go for another one, right? Oops. Consistent with the advice from NBC News’s Blumenstein, the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff – perception from reality – is to invest in more and better reporting from producers and consumers. Detective Friday always wanted “just the facts” and sometimes we have no choice but to just listen to them.
Demographics aren’t destiny after all – in politics or advertising
I’m no political scientist – although I played one in college – but this presidential election certainly threw a curve at those who expected that voting would easily track demographic and geographic patterns of recent decades. Trump demonstrated surprising strength with Black, Latino, and young voters. Even in deep red places like New York City’s Bronx and Queens, with significantly diverse populations, you saw hundreds of thousands of previous Democratic votes that didn’t show up. All of this despite not just the lessons of history but a historic female nominee who is both Black and South Asian. I wouldn’t jump at the notion that we’re a “post-racial society” by a longshot. But those who run campaigns and those who cover them can’t get complacent about expectations based on demographics.
The news business and it’s need for a nuanced approach to demographics is precisely the challenge for the media business model’s increasing reliance on advertising. Multichannel video subscriptions continue to decline to the point that Comcast is about to separate NBC News from CNBC and MSNBC to diminish its reliance on the cable business. News-based subscription streaming services are at best unproven. Content producers and the advertisers that support that ecosystem need to use the vast array of new sources of data – yeah, can’t avoid AI folks – to better understand their target audiences and how to enhance engagement with them. What type of content resonates on which platforms for which consumers and where?
Jon Klein observed that one of the benefits of AI is its ability to make connections between things that are not at all obvious on the surface. The deeper we dive inside of groups to understand in a much more granular fashion how they are responding to news and advertising, the more likely it might be that we can bring individuals within very (superficially) distinct groups closer. It seems like a cliché but not all 25–54-year-old women think alike, nor do they consume the same news sources.
You’ve got to meet audiences where they are
Candidates have been showing up on nontraditional platforms for many years, from Richard Nixon on Laugh-In (“Sock it to me?”) to Bill Clinton playing sax on Arsenio Hall’s show to Obama hanging with Zach Galifianakis on Between Two Ferns. But this felt like the Joe Rogan election, where Trump’s interview with the “bro” based podcaster drew 46 million views on YouTube (Harris turned down Rogan’s invitation by the way). News consumers are flocking to digital newsletters such as Puck and Substack, and thousands of other podcasts. Blumenstein described the evolution of NBC’s “flywheel” approach to news creation, well beyond the familiar pillars of NBC Nightly News, Meet the Press, and the Today Show, to the soon to be spun off CNBC and MSNBC, to the live stream of NBC News Now to platforms such as the NBC News App, Snap, and TikTok. Even in a direct-to-consumer world you need a lot of platforms you don’t control to push out your content and reach the audiences you need to.
Trust and authenticity are essential, and audiences will be selective on where they get it
When I was a kid there was a famous commercial where the brilliant actor John Houseman intoned that a stock brokerage (ironically the now-defunct E.F. Hutton) made their money the old-fashioned way: “They earned it.” Getting an audience to trust you and to connect with the authenticity of content and the people who deliver it must similarly be earned, cannot be taken for granted, and often arises in unexpected ways.
Kamala Harris was seen as infinitely more trustworthy than Donald Trump among many in news and beyond, but – whether fair or not – was not embraced as authentic by many voters. In fact, Trump spent years not just as a TV personality but cultivating his followers on Twitter when many of us were paying little notice. NBC’s Steve Kornacki has built a unique following as NBC’s very substantive election numbers guru and also solidifies his “data nerd” authenticity through his khaki-wearing brand, drawing over 20 million views for a single TikTok video of during election coverage. Puck is a relatively new player on the news scene but that very quickly went after uniquely talented reporters and writers that deliver solid reporting. And influencers build their own connections and trust with audiences whether or not they fit a mainstream profile or a standard of objectivity that is assumed essential (see Fox News on that).
Future candidates and news creators are joined at the hip in the need to understand the characteristics of real trust and how to earn it. You say you wanna revolution? You got not one but many.