NBC News Now is a Small Oasis in The Hellscape of Corporate News
NBC's FAST news channel is growing at a healthy clip—and it's pretty good.
The U.S. news industry is in a bad place. Inflationary conditions have damaged the advertising side of the business. Web traffic, subscription revenue, and viewership are flat or down significantly, depending on the sector. Journalists are being laid off en masse. People under 30 trust social media platforms nearly as much as they trust national and local news affiliates.
There are pockets of good news, however. The New York Times subsidizes good journalism with Connections, Wordle, and Strands. New York and The Cut produce “viral” articles consistently. The Atlantic rebuilt its audience with more provocative (annoying) stories uncoupled from the news cycle.
One of the industry’s unheralded successes is found in the streaming realm. NBC News Now demonstrates that streaming news channels can thrive by focusing on conventional broadcast journalism. Launched in 2019, the free ad-supporting streaming television (FAST) channel has consistently grown over the past two years. NBCUniversal reported in January that NBC News Now experienced ratings spikes in each of the channel’s 11 hours of hours of daily programming in 2023. Two of the channel’s three best-performing quarters came last year.
NBC has made serious investments in its digital strategy over the past five years. The news division’s evolving strategy on YouTube has paid serious dividends. Investments in NBC News Now include talent as well as technology. The channel is available on more streaming and smart TV platforms than similar products by ABC, CBS, and CNN. Full episodes and dayparts of NBC News Now programming like Hallie Jackson Now are uploaded to YouTube, too.
NBC News Now’s expansion comes as more people than ever prefer to get their news from digital devices. A 2023 Pew Research report found that 58 percent of U.S. adults surveyed selected digital devices as their top news platform, whereas only 27 percent picked television.
I’m particularly fond of Morning News Now, a morning show without the trappings of a modern morning show. Anchors Joe Fryer and Savannah Sellers have strong and easy chemistry. The broadcast lets their personalities come through without dominating the proceedings. Similarly, the show is “youthful” without trying too hard to gawk at viral trends on TikTok or exploit youth culture. The show streams live on newer platforms and devices, but it doesn’t contort itself to be a Cool or Hip News Show.
There is very little of the folksy, performative warmth of broadcast morning shows like Today and Good Morning America. Coverage highlights field reporters and subject area experts and almost never gives time to talking-head style debates seen across cable. Presidential politics are part of the focus but only part.
Cable news coverage is a black hole. Godspeed to regular viewers across the political spectrum. The broadcast morning shows operate with an astonishing amount of ambivalence. An A-block segment breathlessly reports on the “crisis” with airplanes while the D-block highlights “hacks” to get cheap plane tickets. Local TV news is increasingly corporatized and nationalized, even for the affiliates outside of the Sinclair death grip. Here in Peoria, the morning news broadcast is just as likely to highlight some soft police propaganda from another region as it is to tell me anything about a city council meeting.
For a heavy news consumer, Morning News Now and the NBC News Now project is a minor breath of fresh air because it feels like an actual news broadcast. As a former sorta-journalist and journalism professor, I’m predisposed to trust institutions more than most of Americans, who are increasingly distrustful of everything. There are countless ideas for how news organizations can rebuild trust with citizens. But a refusal to pander and a focus on context are great places to start, and Morning News Now accomplishes both pretty regularly.
This is TV Plus, a newsletter about television written by Cory Barker, a media studies professor and veteran blogger. Readers can expect dispatches on industry trends, overlooked shows, and historical antecedents to current events.
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