Making Sense of WGN's Transformation into NewsNation

I recall being perplexed by WGN's decision to become a part-time news channel ("NewsNation"). After all, we had been hearing for years about how cable was just doing worse and worse, the glory days of hits like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead receding into the past as the action moved to streaming. And we heard incessantly about how those who got their news from TV at all were old folk--the potential market a rather limited portion of the population whom one would guess were already spoken for with CNN and FOX and newcomers like Newsmax.

However, apparently impressed by how the horror show that was 2020 gave the cable news channels' viewership a boost the superstation decided to get in on the action. The results, of course, have not been impressive--the ratings, in fact, dismal. Still, considering details of the larger scene less publicized than that collapse in viewership of which we heard so much the essential decision seemed less profoundly counterintuitive. These were, respectively:

1. The Return to Niche Programming as a Strategy
2. The Increasingly High Valuation of Older Viewers

The Return to Niche Programming as a Strategy
I can remember how in the '80s and '90s the explosion in the number of channels, and the interest of the managements of many of them in producing and airing their own content, suggested an expanding space for niche programming--for instance, the possibility of a channel devoted exclusively to science fiction, which USA realized with the launch of the Sci-Fi Channel, which produced such cult fare as Farscape and Lexx.

Of course, later the managements of those channels became attentive to the possibility of wider, breakout hits (such as HBO's The Sopranos became), and in the '00s increasingly devoted themselves to pursuing such hits--in the case of the Sci-Fi Channel to such a degree that they no longer wanted to be Sci-Fi. Instead they became "Syfy" (whatever that was supposed to mean), while the channel that gave us Farscape and Lexx gave us blander, more general audience-oriented fare like Eureka and Warehouse 13, and packed its schedule with reality TV, and even WWE Wrestling. Eventually I stopped paying attention to it, and haven't looked back.

Since then the thinking has shifted again--it seems, because those big breakout hits have become more elusive, while the profusion of viewing options and the fragmentation of the audience has made trying to win a large viewership with a single show with a broad but limited appeal look less plausible than, again, producing something that any audience merely big enough to be profitable might like (with some hope of breaking out to capture a wider following). But what niches would be worth filling? As it happened, demographics and economics went a long way to answering that question.

The Increasingly High Valuation of Older Viewers
Younger people never stopped watching TV. Indeed, my guess would be that where visual media are concerned they actually watch more than ever. But they became much more prone to get that content from a streaming service via the Internet-connected device they take everywhere than watching a broadcast received via a conventional television made at a fixed time, with the content chopped to pieces by commercials and other such interruptions.

Thus by default TV in this sense meant the old--and where not long ago the fondness of the elderly for Matlock or CBS was a joke, now this orientation makes for a ratings winner, the more consequential because of what has happened with the distribution of income. Simply put, young people have MUCH LESS MONEY than their elders did at the same stage in their lives, and they have adapted to that poverty in ways that might well affect their habits even were times to get better for them--more prone to live at home, drive less, generally consume less. This makes the relatively affluent old a more natural target for advertisers yet again.

All of this has had predictable consequences for the content of the TV schedule, as with the increasing place of second-run content on cable. This is, partly, a matter of a declining readiness to fund the production of new content with the prospect of big hits more remote evident even on the channels least oriented to the older demographics (as with Disney). However, it is also a matter of the proliferation of channels devoted to classic TV, like H & I (Heroes & Icons), bringing back to the air shows that had virtually vanished--presumably in pursuit of older viewers who on landing on those shows will stop their flipping and watch them out of genuine pleasure at what they offer, more thoroughly nostalgic appreciation, or simply a feeling that bad old TV is more appealing than bad new TV.

All of this seems plausibly a factor in the case of WGN's transformation into NewsNation. Even before the change the backbone of its lineup was reruns of shows that skewed old--JAG (which was much joked about as an old person's show even when it was in its original run), CBS' Blue Bloods, and Tim Allen's Last Man Standing. Moreover, the tenor of these shows can seem significant given what has been said of NewsNation's politics. While marketed as a channel in the center of the political spectrum, NewsNation's own employees soon enough charged it with a conservative bias--which may seem a betrayal of its promise (and its continued PR, certainly to go by the Dan Abrams commercials I've seen), but which would seem natural from a business standpoint. The aforementioned shows were distinctly conservative favorites (with the gleefully lib-trolling Last Man Standing, according to one poll, having a liberal viewership of zero percent, exactly, literally zero percent)--suggesting this as the logical course for the channel from a commercial standpoint, especially after the channel's turn disappointed, and made trying to keep the audience their other shows have look like a safe strategy.

Of course, it remains to be seen where NewsNation will go from here. But the essential logic--the pursuit of niche audiences, and where broadcast television is concerned, the stress on pursuing older audiences--is likely to remain with the industry, perhaps so long as it continues to grind on in the new media market.