Michael Corn, NewsNation’s president of programming and specials, and promo images for two NewsNation podcasts: Reality Check with Ross Coulthart and the new spinoff Unreported with Meagan Medick. Pictures: NewsNation
US cable TV channel NewsNation is using Youtube to “take chances” launching a diverse range of spin-off shows for the platform.
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NewsNation’s president of programming and specials Michael Corn told Press Gazette the broadcaster has “really started putting some energy and some focus onto Youtube, because there’s a tremendous audience there for our content, we discovered”.
He said they noticed “a lot of appetite” for “deeper, smarter, longer content on certain topics” some of which does not lend itself well to TV, he explained.
“Television has a very rigid structure in terms of commercial breaks and how much time is allocated to each programme. So we thought of Youtube, it’s an incredible place for us to spread our wings and take some chances, do deep explainers, dive deep towards very specific niche audiences, and so we’ve been doing that and having real success.”
Although these audiences are “niche”, he said: “It’s so massive that a niche audience on Youtube is huge.”
NewsNation launched its Youtube channel in May 2020 and now has 2.6 million subscribers and more than 1.8 billion views since launch – more than several major newsbrands that have been on the platform much longer such as The Washington Post (1.7 billion since June 2006), The New York Times (1.4 billion since October 2006), news broadcast strand 60 Minutes (1.3 billion since March 2006) and The Guardian (821 million since February 2006).
One of NewsNation’s winning “niche” areas is around what it describes as UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly known as UFOs) following the success of a 2023 interview with ex-intelligence officer whistleblower David Grusch.
“We realised there’s an audience out there that really cares about the issue of government transparency as it relates to the UAP issues, and so we started servicing them,” Corn said, adding: “We started applying the NewsNation rigid editorial standards to a topic that might have been considered fringe before.”
The Reality Check podcast from NewsNation contributor Ross Coulthart, a former 60 Minutes correspondent, regularly ranks highly in Youtube’s podcast chart.
In the week of 4-10 May, it was 46th in Youtube’s ranking of the most popular podcast shows in the US and Corn said it has at times cracked the top 20. The podcast (defined by Corn as a digital video show) has received more than 100 million views since its March 2024 launch.
This has led to the addition of a weekly spin-off show, Unreported with Meagan Medick, previously a NewsNation producer, looking at various paranormal phenomena and related topics.
‘You’ll see all of our talent on television involved in our digital projects very soon’
Corn also cited the “personality-centric” nature of what is often popular on Youtube.
“We’ve got really smart people at NewsNation that do an hour’s television show a day or a week, and they have more to say… so we found that giving them a platform to target the things they care about the most to their specific real fanbase, that’s been very successful too.”
They include, he said, Jesse Weber who has a weeknight show on NewsNation and now additionally interacts with the Youtube comments and questions on livestreams two days a week via Hot Take with Jesse Weber.
Corn said some of the TV anchors “lend themselves more to live because it’s more of a conversation directly with the audience and having that real-time interaction is just something special that it’s a lot harder to pull off on a traditional television show”.
Another example is Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has a cable show on Saturday evenings and now broadcasts on Youtube on Mondays to Thursdays via Prove it with Batya.
NewsNation is also building Youtube shows in other genres such as entertainment and crime, which Corn described as “some of the things we don’t get to a lot on the news channel, as much as we’d like to, because we have to first and foremost do the news”.
For example weekly entertainment podcast The Scoop with Paula Froelich, who is a senior story producer and former New York Post gossip columnist, has launched.
Corn said: “We have a pipeline. We have infinite white space to fill, as far as we’re concerned, and we’re just trying to create as many new and interesting shows as we can.
“So I think you’ll see all of our talent on television involved in our digital projects very soon in various ways.”
Corn noted that Youtube provides a “level of data that’s kind of astounding to most television programmers”.
Typically cable news viewers are “somebody that trusts the brand and they want you to curate for them the big stories of the day and tell them what’s going on.
“Youtube is a much different kind of audience… you’re programming your night yourself, you’re choosing what you click on, you’re choosing what stories you care about, so it’s a lot more a la carte… you have to actively make them want to engage in your content, and you have to actively pay attention to exactly what it is that they’re clicking on.”
Corn added that he does not know how much overlap there is between NewsNation’s TV, website and Youtube audiences but that “it doesn’t really matter to me, because to me they’re all NewsNation fans, and that’s what matters”.
NewsNation ‘exploring’ how to make money from Youtube
Asked about revenue, he described NewsNation’s Youtube and cable TV output as both being good businesses.
“We’re just starting right now and we’re doing quite well, and so I see a huge upside to Youtube right now. Cable is an excellent but a very long established business… but I think that what’s so exciting about Youtube is I feel like we’ve just started to scratch the surface.”
He continued: “There’s so many ways to make money on Youtube, and we’re exploring all of them. But we just started really figuring out the business part of it.
“We’ve really been focusing mostly on building our audience, which we’ve done really well, and so that’s priority number one, just building a huge audience and servicing it, and I feel like with all things with content, the money will follow.”
Nexstar Media Group acquired WGN America in 2019, launched programming strand NewsNation in 2020 and rebranded the whole channel a year later, ultimately making it a 24/7 cable news network and moving it away from its roots which had a wider variety of programming.
Corn said Nexstar “brought me in to turn it into a news channel because they felt at the time that CNN and Fox had become so polarising that there is room for a middle ground cable news channel, and so we built it from the ground up”.
NewsNation promises “unbiased news, which reflects the full range of perspectives across the country” and Corn said “building trust with the audience is a really key feature” of what they do.
“Everybody with a cellphone can have a Youtube news show now and at a certain point trust is going to matter a lot.”
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