The mood in the room ranged from sullen to surly. One of the nation’s venerable institutions of journalism was transforming—“refounding” to use the term E.W. Scripps Company CEO Adam Symson preferred—and not everyone was going along for the ride. Scripps employees at its Cincinnati headquarters and in dozens of newsrooms across the country shifted in their seats as Symson answered a series of pointed questions from producers, technical directors, reporters, and photographers who wanted to know just one thing: Am I out of a job?
“It was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do as CEO,” Symson says, recalling the first week of August when he announced Scripps was moving its news operation to a streaming model and would use enhanced technology and artificial intelligence to cut costs and reinvest in local newsgathering efforts.
Intellectually, Symson maintains, employees get it. The news business has changed and, if Scripps is to survive and thrive, it can no longer operate as if Walter Cronkite is still in the anchor chair. “But when the rubber hits the road, well, that’s when things get hard,” he says, still looking—two weeks after the announcement—like a man who’d just lost his best friend. And maybe he had.
The company’s decision to lay off 268 mostly production workers and move to 24/7 streaming will hit some of Scripps’s smaller markets first. Along with the layoffs, the company has eliminated 432 positions and 126 open jobs for a total reduction of 12 percent of its 2025 workforce. “Some of these employees had been with us for decades, so it was a tough week,” says Symson. “And I had to remind employees that the work is not yet done.”
What made the Scripps layoffs particularly hard for some employees was the company’s announcement that it would fully embrace an investment in enhanced technology and AI. They wondered if flesh-and-blood reporters and editors were about to be replaced with scurrying bots governed by a soulless algorithm.
“No, news will not be written by a computer,” says Symson emphatically. “It will be covered, written, and edited by our reporters who will be in the field and able to stay there longer because of the automation we’re investing in the production area.”
Symson pledges the savings that automation and AI make in the production processes will allow the company to hire more reporters who will then have the time to fully embed themselves in the communities they cover. “This is a reallocation of resources,” he says, “that will bring us back to what we always were: a customer-driven company that covers the good and the bad that happens in our communities.”
Symson prefers talking about employing “automation and enhanced technology” in future news operations, but he acknowledges artificial intelligence is a key component. Use of these technologies, he says, will significantly reduce the time it takes to process raw video and audio, convert it into a finished product, and push it into the news stream. Reporters, he says, will be able to do that entirely from the field, eliminating the need for back-in-the-newsroom editors, producers, and other technical staff who have, for decades, refined those reports for broadcasting at scheduled times. “We don’t sit on the couch any more to watch the 5, 6 and 11 o’clock news,” Symson says. “We really haven’t done that for a long time. Americans depend on us all day long to get their news, and they do so on a variety of platforms.”
Viewer habits have evolved since CNN introduced 24-hour news in the 1980s, and the business model has changed with them. Symson sees Scripps’s “refounding” as essential to its survival. An unstable advertising market, heavy long-term debt, cord-cutting across its 61 local stations, and intensified competition—in both the business and journalism arenas—have made change imperative.
He worries that Scripps and indeed the entire industry may be late to the party. But not too late.
An internal Scripps task force comprised of journalists and technical experts convened more than a year ago and designed the new business model that uses technology, including artificial intelligence, to lighten the production load while pouring more dollars into content and field reporting.
Symson clearly sees Scripps’s journalistic niche as moving into communities that are left uncovered or only marginally covered by major news outlets.
And why wouldn’t he? He is, first and foremost, a trained professional journalist and the first Scripps CEO to come from the industry’s TV/video segment. He has a degree in communications from UCLA and started his career as an investigative journalist for two CBS affiliates, KCBS in Los Angeles and WBBM in Chicago.
He joined Scripps in 2002 to work at KNXV in Phoenix before moving to Cincinnati. After a five-year stint as the company’s chief digital officer and an even briefer stint as COO, he ascended to the CEO role in 2017.
Under his leadership, Scripps has left the newspaper business, jettisoned its radio stations, sold its Stitcher podcast company, partnered with Berkshire Hathaway to purchase the ION broadcasting network, bought and sold Court TV, fought off a hostile takeover attempt, and continues to build a growing portfolio of live sports broadcasting opportunities. Transformation into a streaming 24/7 news network and using cutting-edge technology to do so efficiently is another step toward successfully navigating the hypersonic changes happening in the business, Symson explains. “If there were no financial pressures, I would gladly just continue as we are,” he says. “But that’s not the case, so we have to change.”
Change isn’t new to the business. When cable disrupted the over-theair news and entertainment business, it was massive. Following CNN’s entry as a 24/7 news channel in 1980, Fox Broadcasting followed up a few years later to create a network providing both news and entertainment and breaking the ABC/NBC/CBS stranglehold. Remember Married With Children and The Late Show with Joan Rivers? Homer Simpson still rules Sunday night on Fox and has since 1989.
“But cable, massive as it was, was just one change,” says Symson. “Digital has lowered all barriers to entry and increased the speed by which everything in the world has changed: banking, pharmaceutical, healthcare and journalism.” That’s especially tough, he says, on legacy networks with large capital investments in equipment and people. On the entertainment side, they face competition from behemoths like Netflix and Amazon Prime, whereas it’s all about speed on the news side. Competitors range from huge news sites with worldwide reach like CNN to a local gadfly with a smart phone and a nose for good stories.
“In the past, CEOs would typically consider one or two competitors where we could lose or gain market share,” he says. “Our environment now is more like Gulliver’s Travels. We’re Gulliver and the Lilliputians are everywhere and some of them have actually become so big and massive that we’re now the Lilliputian and, not to mix metaphors, they’re Goliaths.”
The Nielsen Gauge, which measures total viewing habits in the U.S., showed that Scripps had a 1.6% national market share in June, good for 10th place. The Goliaths? YouTube at 13.8%, Disney at 9.6%, NBC/Peacock at 9.1%, and Netflix at 7.9%. That’s a lot of muscle at the top, and none is likely to become a Lilliputian. But the fact that the leader commands just 13.8% of the market illustrates the media landscape’s immensity now and how scattered our eyeballs are.
The aggregated mass of competitors has fundamentally disrupted the business by attracting your attention here, there, and everywhere. That’s significantly impacted advertising revenue, particularly in a shaky economy. This year’s mountain of political ads has helped, but Symson knows that revenue stream stops as soon as the ballots are cast.
So where does Scripps find its place? Symson believes strongly that it’s in local news coverage. That, he notes, is the company’s legacy. Community journalism and, presumably, the advertising dollars it could attract is where its founder, Edward W. Scripps, made his mark, offering a newspaper for the masses for just 1 cent.
It was the Gilded Age and the Scripps brothers, Edward and James, borrowed $10,000 to start penny presses in Cleveland and later Cincinnati. Ironically, the penny press was, like today, born out of technological innovation. The steam-powered printing press replaced hand-crafted printing, allowing for mass production of tabloids.
Instead of relying on subscriptions, Scripps put newsboys out on the street hawking papers who readily found customers willing to part with a single penny to learn the latest news—much of it on the lurid side. E.W. was able to sell his newspapers for a fraction of the price of his competitors, relying on the blue-collar customer who often met those newsboys outside the factory gates when they ended their shift.
The journalism was personal, based largely on what was happening in the community. Scripps’s journalists staked out the jails and the courthouses, writing spicy stories about barroom brawls, pickpockets, and swindlers. They rooted out political corruption and crusaded against big business. While the “big city” newspapers (usually selling for 6 cents) covered the news from Wall Street and Washington, D.C., in exhaustive detail for their mostly wealthy customers, Scripps condensed it to a sentence or two. The masses, he reasoned, were more interested in knowing what was happening in their neighborhood.
While the world may be more complicated now and certainly more connected, Symson says the need for local journalism is as strong as ever. He considers it a Scripps core value and believes it’s the key to the company’s profitability. There are stories out there in northern Kentucky and Butler, Warren, and Clermont counties left untold because, with the limited legacy news time slots, there wasn’t enough time. With streaming, there will be. “We won’t just parachute in where there’s a big fire, a homicide, or a terrible crash,” he says. “There’s a lot of important stuff, good and bad, happening in the community, but it just doesn’t get covered.”
Reporters on the ground in the communities, the technology to deliver the news quickly, and the 24/7 news cycle mean a viewer might see coverage of a local teacher being honored, city council members debating a zoning issue, road crews cleaning up after a bad storm, or “be there” for the grand opening of a new restaurant—all of it live, local, and available on a variety of devices.
Symson decries niche advocacy journalism, the kind that pushes Republicans to Fox and Democrats to MS Now. Scripps, he says, is committed to “straight-down-the-middle journalism” that’s fact-based and gives the consumer the information he or she needs to make decisions on their own. “Our job is not to influence them but to inform them,” he says. “I’d say that’s a rarity today.”
It is that difference in approach to journalism that Symson suggests doomed the merger discussions with Sinclair Broadcast Group, owners of Cincinnati’s CBS affiliate, WKRC. The Maryland-based broadcaster offered $622 million in November 2025 in a bid to acquire Scripps after purchasing a little over 8 percent of the company’s common stock. The Scripps board rejected the proposal a month later even though the $7 per share price offer was financially tempting.
Symson believes the merger might have been beneficial to short-term traders but would fail in the long run. The two companies, he says, have vastly different management styles and ethics, making the combination “unwinnable.”
“We have two very, very different visions for the way journalism, local media, and media in general is supposed to behave,” he says, reiterating Scripps’s adherence to objective journalism and suggesting Sinclair’s right-leaning and polarizing style would have been a bad fit. He notes that Scripps’s journalism focuses on local news with reporters embedded in the community. “Others,” he says without specifically naming names, “have made the choice of serving their customers by importing news from the outside.”
In the long run, he says, the clash of styles and ethics would have doomed the combined company. He harbors no second thoughts, and, as far as he’s concerned, Scripps has moved on.
As Scripps prepares to refocus its journalism on local communities, the company faces a skeptical public who for years has witnessed the red line between objective reporting and advocacy fade. They’ve heard their political leaders decry unfavorable coverage as “fake news.” They’ve watched conspiracy theorists break into their Facebook feeds with oftentimes baseless “news.”
An algorithm in their social media feed can give credibility to a Russian bot or an AI deep fake, triggering their rage button. What can you believe anymore? It’s a jungle out there. Meanwhile, the legacy media works to break through the noise, saddled with shrinking budgets and ad revenues and turned-off viewers. Profit margins continue to thin, and news deserts advance.
Democracy, Symson says, depends on a healthy media ecosystem and an informed electorate. He hopes Scripps can fill that void, saying that’s a special responsibility for broadcast journalism. He thinks we need to find a way to rediscover the common experience that television brought us before fragmentation.
Back in the day, everyone watched the M*A*S*H finale, The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Sammy Davis Jr. planting a kiss on Archie Bunker. “We had those common experiences, often through television, and then we went to work the next morning and had those water cooler moments,” says Symson. “We need that again.”
Scripps’s strategy for reconnecting audiences centers on broadcasting live sports. “Sports is one of those products that brings people together,” he says. “We all watch the Bengals on Sunday.”
While the Big 4 networks and streamers like Amazon have picked up the major sports leagues from the NFL to MLS, Scripps has found its local niche out west by aligning with the Big Sky Conference for football coverage. They’ve secured local rights for several men’s professional teams like the Detroit Pistons, Vegas Golden Knights, and Nashville Predators.
And they have become leaders in broadcasting live women’s professional sports, covering hockey, volleyball, soccer, and, their biggest catch, the WNBA. Scripps distributes sports content through ION, the Scripps Sports Network, and local TV stations.
None of those channels is behind a paywall, and Scripps intends to keep it that way with broadcasts supported solely through paid advertising. Like E.W.’s value proposition 150 years ago, Symson says, Scripps remains committed to offering both news, and now sports, to the masses. “Sports is just another way for us to wrap the community into something it loves,” he says.
Locally, Scripps’s Channel 9 affiliate, WCPO, produces a weekly FC Cincinnati show even though live matches of our Major League Soccer team are behind an Apple TV paywall. Symson has a dim view of sports paywalls but clearly sees the trend: You can find NFL Thursday Night Football on Amazon, English Premier League soccer on Peacock, and MLB’s Home Run Derby on Netflix, and there’s nothing more exhilarating or dizzying than YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket.
Scripps, he says, will be looking for more opportunities to partner with teams in the communities they serve, no matter what the sport. Live sports programming is complementary to the company’s local news strategy and, when presented with a hometown feel, it can be an attractive option for advertisers.
The refounding strategy Scripps launched in August was focused initially on some of its smaller markets, but the layoffs and reorganizing will eventually encompass all 61 of its stations, including WCPO. And what will you be seeing in the months to come?
“There will still be the 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock and 11 o’clock regular TV newscasts,” Symson says. “The viewer won’t recognize a change there.” At the same time, though, they’ll be able to turn to their other devices—desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—at any time of the day or night and watch the news, often a live broadcast. “It’ll be presented in a way that’s comfortable and familiar to them, and it’ll be local and meaningful.”
As CEO, it’s Symson’s job to create economic value, see around corners, and figure out what’s next in an industry that continues to evolve with more competitors, disruptive technology, and limited resources. Pile that on top of a diverse customer base with dozens of viewing options and a skeptical to hostile view of the news media, and the path to success can look like a minefield.
Symson admits it’s a challenge and some of the decisions he’s had to make are personally wrenching. He says more than once that “all I really ever wanted to be was a reporter.” But it seems the battle scars one incurs in the pugilistics of executive management haven’t drained him of his journalistic idealism, blended with fiduciary responsibility.
“We can play a role in bringing this country back together again,” he says. “Democracy depends on us. We can heal what’s tearing us apart if we do our job right and create economic value at the same time.”