As pundits, strategists and opinionated Uber drivers wax on about the mixed results of Tuesday’s midterm election, a dark-horse candidate has emerged.
NewsNation, the Chicago-based cable news network, which has struggled to build an audience since launching more than two years ago, found its mojo — and some viewers — during a breakthrough election season.
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The network notched big ratings with the Fetterman-Oz debate, bolstered its prime-time lineup with former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and pulled off a credible cable news election night broadcast, replete with touch screens, talking heads and timely projections.
“If I was looking at us right now, and I was at CNN or Fox, I’d be scared right now,” said Michael Corn, 54, president of news for NewsNation. “I think we’re dangerous to the status quo.”
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CNN declined to comment, while Fox News did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
NewsNation, formerly WGN America, has come a long way since the days of “Bozo’s Circus” and “Andy Griffith Show” reruns, but it still has a long way to go. The network’s election night broadcast averaged 93,000 viewers in prime time, while Fox News averaged 7.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
Dallas-based Nexstar Media Group bought WGN America in 2019 as part of its $4.1 billion acquisition of Chicago-based Tribune Media, creating the nation’s largest TV station group. Reinvented as a cable news network, NewsNation launched in September 2020.
For most of its tenure, NewsNation has been defined by bold aspirations and tepid ratings. Under Corn, a former ABC News executive who joined NewsNation in May 2021, the network may be gaining some traction, nipping at the heels of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, the titans of cable news.
“They are in our sights in the next few years,” Corn said. “Right now, we’re just trying to do a great job and get some attention and get some eyeballs.”
The hotly contested midterm elections gave an increasing number of viewers a reason to find the channel.
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Three pivotal debates put on by local Nexstar TV stations were broadcast nationally by NewsNation, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vs. Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock vs. Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
The biggest numbers were garnered by the Oct. 25 debate between Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz, a celebrity TV doctor, who were vying for the Senate seat held by retiring Pat Toomey. Fetterman, a Democrat who is recovering from a stroke he suffered in May, struggled during the debate, but defeated Oz at the polls Tuesday, flipping the Republican-held seat.
Nearly half a million viewers watched the one-hour Fetterman-Oz debate, Corn said, the biggest ratings night since the inception of NewsNation. About 214,000 viewers stuck around for Cuomo’s show following the debate, according to Nielsen.
“This was an opportunity for us to really draw attention to the channel,” Corn said.
The arrival of Cuomo, who began anchoring his eponymous prime-time show on NewsNation last month, may also be a watershed moment.
Cuomo, 52, who long hosted the top-rated prime-time show on CNN, was fired in December for allegedly violating network standards by advising his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as he navigated sexual harassment allegations.
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During his inaugural Oct. 3 broadcast for NewsNation, Cuomo devoted the first 15 minutes to addressing his abrupt exit from CNN, acknowledging lessons learned and vowing to “change the game” in the politically polarized cable news landscape by talking to the “reasonable majority.”
His audience remains a distinct minority of the prime-time cable news pie, but Cuomo has moved the needle in his first month on the air.
NewsNation ranked 72nd among all cable networks in prime time during October with an average of 83,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. Fox News ranked second in prime time with nearly 2.3 million viewers, MSNBC was fourth at nearly 1.2 million viewers, and CNN ranked 10th with 624,000 viewers.
While NewsNation’s audience remains a fraction of its long-tenured cable news competitors, viewership is up 69% from September, when an average of 49,000 viewers tuned into the network’s prime-time programming B.C. — before Cuomo.
“Chris is going to be a hit again,” Corn said. “It’s going to take some time, but we have plenty of patience here.”
Mark Feldstein, chairman of the broadcast journalism department at University of Maryland and a former CNN correspondent, is skeptical Cuomo can overcome his fall from grace to return to cable news prominence at NewsNation.
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“Chris Cuomo is a tainted brand,” Feldstein said. “That’s why he’s going to NewsNation. If he weren’t, he’d be going to some place people actually watch.”
Feldstein was equally skeptical NewsNation has reached a turning point, citing a saturated market and the decline of the linear cable model in the fragmented digital age.
In other words, one good night — the Fetterman-Oz debate — does not a cable news network make, Feldstein said.
“It’s a much longer haul,” Feldstein said. “So I wouldn’t be bullish.”
Launched as a three-hour nightly newscast, NewsNation has slowly expanded into other dayparts under Corn, adding cable news veterans such as Dan Abrams and a morning show in September. Corn formerly served as executive producer at ABC’s “Good Morning America”
NewsNation has 240 anchors, producers, editors and researchers working at its newsroom inside the 61-year-old WGN-TV studios on West Bradley Place in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood. The network has 548 employees and also leverages the resources of Nexstar’s 110 TV newsrooms and 5,500 journalists to provide coverage.
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It was all hands on deck Tuesday evening as NewsNation sought to coalesce its newfound political relevance, the resources of its local TV stations and its new prime-time star for election night coverage, a crucial showcase and battleground for cable news networks.
“In any cable news network, politics is a big component,” said Cherie Grzech, 52, a former Fox News executive who joined NewsNation in July 2021 to head the day-to-day news operations under Corn. “You collaboratively have to do a lot of things when you put on an election production. It is a huge night.”
In addition to traditional election night newsroom pizza — Chicago deep-dish, of course — NewsNation brought in an outside team from Decision Desk HQ, an independent Washington, D.C.-based firm that projects race results for a number of major news organizations.
About 20 heavily caffeinated “data nerds” clustered in a separate glass-partitioned computer room, poring over the race results in real time. Getting it right is paramount, but the mercenaries were no doubt hired for a separate race with other news organizations to declare a winner first.
“In 2016, we were the first to call it for Donald Trump, and in 2020, we were the first to call it for Joe Biden,” said Scott Tranter, head of data science and majority owner at Decision Desk HQ.
On Tuesday night, NewsNation and Decision Desk HQ projected Republican J.D. Vance would defeat Democrat Tim Ryan to claim the Ohio Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Rob Portman four minutes before CNN.
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But by Wednesday afternoon, when CNN, MSNBC and Fox were still sorting out the unfolding election night results, the former WGN America reverted to a five-hour block of “Blue Bloods” reruns.
“The fact that we’re not 24 hours yet is a massive thing,” Corn said. “Until you can turn NewsNation on anytime of day and find news, we’re at a disadvantage.”
NewsNation plans to fill the remaining afternoon void in its weekday news schedule by spring, Corn said. It won’t be 24/7 news — including weekends — until 2024.
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Corn joined NewsNation soon after the abrupt resignation of Jennifer Lyons, the former news director at WGN-Ch. 9, who oversaw the transformation of WGN America into a prime-time cable news operation. Lyons was named general manager in August 2021 of CBS 2 Chicago, where she has since hired former NewsNation anchor Joe Donlon and weathercaster Albert Ramon for the local news broadcasts.
In September 2020, NewsNation landed a one-on-one interview with then-President Donald Trump, conducted at the White House by Donlon, that executives hoped would catapult the nascent cable newscast into the big time. Instead, it was panned as a “softball” interview by critics and failed to boost NewsNation’s ratings or reputation.
NewsNation’s prime-time ratings are still only a third of what they were in January 2020, when an average of 265,000 viewers tuned into WGN America each night to watch reruns of such shows as “Last Man Standing” and “Blue Bloods,” according to Nielsen. Early-afternoon airings of “Blue Bloods” remain the highest-rated show on the network.
Over the past 18 months, Corn has shaken up the lineup, expanded programming and brought in big names like Cuomo. He likened the reboot to building a cable news network from scratch.
“When I got here, I saw a lot of talented young people from local news stations around the country, and a product that was, in a lot of ways, trying to be the nation’s local newscast,” Corn said. “I think we brought production value and a real eye on how to appeal to the masses.”
NewsNation plans to hire another hundred employees over the next year, while building out satellite bureaus in New York and Washington, D.C., Corn said. The mission remains the same: harnessing the resources of a massive local TV news organization and packaging it as a competitive national cable network.
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Another integral part of the inaugural NewsNation mission was to deliver unbiased reporting, looking to lure centrist viewers away from the politically polarizing cable news at MSNBC, Fox News and, perhaps to a lesser extent, CNN.
While news viewing habits are hard to change, Corn said, NewsNation plans to “chip away slowly” at the competition, hoping to add some of the thousands who sampled it during election season tuned in.
With management and programming changes amid falling ratings at CNN, Corn said the political middle is wide open.
“I don’t think there’s any competition right now in the middle,” Corn said. “There’s a tremendous audience out there for what we’re doing. It’s about patience.”
Some industry analysts believe it would be unwise, however, to underestimate the resiliency of CNN, which launched more than 40 years ago from Atlanta with a husband-and-wife anchor team, introducing the concept of a 24/7 TV news channel.
Derided initially, CNN gained traction as cable’s penetration grew, making its mark with round-the-clock coverage of the Gulf War in the early ‘90s. When former NBC President and CEO Jeff Zucker took the helm of CNN in 2013, he added more personalities and the now-ubiquitous pundit panels to the lineup, boosting the network’s ratings amid the partisan programming on MSNBC and Fox.
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Zucker was ousted in February in the wake of Cuomo’s departure and revelations about a consensual relationship with a colleague. CNN, which became part of merged media giant Warner Bros. Discovery in April, has since hewed closer to its straight-news roots under new CEO Chris Licht.
Carol Costello, a journalism instructor at Loyola Marymount University and a former anchor and correspondent at CNN for 20 years, said the original cable news network has weathered storms before.
“This is a bad time for CNN,” Costello said. “But CNN has an incredibly strong brand. And I would be stunned if something like NewsNation could compete, or even remotely catch up with CNN.”