One thing I follow very closely as it pertains to podcasting is just the broader shift in the knowledge economy into audio has been really important. There's this company called Edison which is considered one of the most authoritative research firms for audio, and they put out this study that shows that the amount of ear is moved into being majority spoken word over music. That is because more people are shifting their sort of information and knowledge diets into audio.
In today's office hours, we discuss who will replace 60 Minutes or what will replace 60 Minutes, why billionaires keep buying media companies, and whether podcasting has already passed its peak. We're joined today by Sara Fischer, media correspondent at Axios. Sara, welcome to Prop G's office hours.
Hi, thanks for having me.
We're excited about this. Our producers, when we tried to find a talented, insightful person on media, two separate people on the team came back and suggested, and your name was floated. So, we're happy you're here. You ready to go?
There we go. Our first question comes from John Macaulay on Instagram who says, 'As the old 60 Minutes crashes and burns, what in new media will carry on the mission?' So the first thing I would ask as a prelude to that question, Sara, is it's a bit of a loaded question that assumes 60 is going away. What are your thoughts on what happens to 60, and if in fact it does decline, does that create an opening for something else? What do you think happens here?
Well, I think that three major correspondents signaling that they're going to stay on, including Lesley Stahl and Bill Whitaker, means that this show won't ultimately die. If they had chosen not to renew contracts, Scott, I think that 60 Minutes would have been done as we knew it and would have been replaced by a far different product. Because they're staying, I think you can and should expect the mission of 60 Minutes to carry on, but with a caveat, which is that one, I do think there's some audience trust that has been lost given Scott Pelley coming forward and saying he felt pressure to change his journalism in response to management. And then two, I think there have been some chaotic and confusing moments for consumers that they're going to have to reckon with when they decide whether or not they want to continue watching. In particular, pulling that episode about Secot down and only to air it a few weeks later unchanged. So 60 Minutes won't go away, but I think that the trust has been burned a little bit in terms of what could replace it moving forward. You know, on the broadcast side, they're facing such heavy cost pressures in traditional television that I'm hard-pressed to believe that anything from traditional television replaces it. On the new media side, there are some bright spots where I'm very optimistic. Right now, we're seeing a lot of nice momentum at the local level. Scott, you'd be surprised about that, but we are seeing philanthropists shift a lot of their effort and energy and money into starting local news startups that are commercially nonprofit, meaning they're going to get continued backing to break news and do investigations without the pressure of necessarily minting money. And then the other area where I feel increasingly optimistic is the public definitely recognizes the need for investigative journalism. We're seeing more reader donations go into outlets that do good investigative reporting. One area where I found that's expanding that I've been happily surprised by has been ProPublica. A lot of new donations coming in. We're seeing record reader revenue at places like The Guardian that are committed to, you know, investigative journalism. So the efforts of regular everyday people and philanthropists right now seem to be filling the void that, you know, traditional commercial models are not.
There is some truth that fact-checked journalism that tries to hit it straight down the middle is important to a democracy, and people realize that. With respect to 60, and I'm curious to get your thoughts here, their approach of trying to disrupt it from a position of strength doesn't make any sense. They're basically trying to perform open-heart surgery on the healthiest person, you know, in the franchise. For 50 consecutive seasons, 60 has been the number one rated news program and garnering about 9 million viewers. That's up 9% year-over-year in an industry that's in structural decline. And it grew 5% in the key demo of 25 to 54. So, it's growing and it's doing well. It did about $80 million in revenue, ad revenue. That's $10 million more than The Late Show that same year. So, this isn't an entity that needs to be disrupted. This has become very politicized because I think an obvious way to connect the dots here is quite frankly that a group of billionaires who feel there's probably more profit incurring favor with the current administration want CBS and specifically 60 to, I'm trying to say this as generously and as politely as possible, to be less anti-Trump. I can't figure out any strategy other than the Ellisons are either themselves very politically motivated to change the tone and tenor of CBS and 60, or they see more money incurring favor with the Trump administration, who seems to be, I've heard, was incandescently enraged by the interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then Barry Weiss was similarly enraged with Anderson Cooper's sign-off. I think what will be interesting, if you look at the actual data, you know, I had a bunch of people call me from 60. I think three or four of the seven correspondents have resigned. Six of the eight senior managers have left. But none of the corpus, the 60 or 70 editors, producers, analysts have left so far. So I think it all comes down to, you know, these layoffs or firings were timed not accidentally around the end of the season. They're going on a three-month hiatus. It'll kind of be up to the product. While we all pick our corners based on, you know, politically and what makes us feel good and big grandiose notions about journalism and Trump, at the end of the day, if the product is really good in the fall with new correspondents and some old ones, I think it'll be fine. If it doesn't, it'll die a quick death and everyone will say, 'I told you so.' So, I don't, you know, it all comes down to this, the first five or six episodes in the fall. Any thoughts on that?
Well, one thing that new management would tell you is that a lot of the success of 60 Minutes does ride on the NFL because it airs right after. And the reason that they claim that they needed to come in and modernize it, even though that they were ahead, as you mentioned, ratings were up 9% under executive producer Tyan Simon, is because they say, 'You're not taking into consideration how much this show relies on the NFL.' What's now happened is that even if things were to go back to status quo, there's still a trust that has been broken between CBS 60 and the audience, and CBS 60 and the management and the day-to-day staff there. And that trust being broken means that anytime somebody does encounter an ethically challenging situation or a situation where there's ambiguity in terms of what's the best path forward, the trust is what allowed you to have a constructive conversation to figure out the best path forward for the audience and journalism. And with that being broken, nobody believes that any decision you make was done in good faith. That is the big challenge that they're going to face moving forward. And make no mistake, there will be a time when an episode is questioned. Does it need to be pulled from air? Do we need to make changes? And I think that's where the rubber will hit the road. And if people feel as though they can't trust the product changes or decisions being made, I think it's going to be very hard to get back to some of those, you know, the traditional ratings that they've seen for a long time.
Also curious to get your thoughts on this. I find the media is just self-obsessed. This is the number one story in the nation and this is an $80 million business. This is like, you know, Nike's FuelBand was a much bigger bit. This is just a small business. Now granted, I get that it does play an important role in America's dialogue. And the notion that a diminished 60 or even goes away is a threat to our democracy. I get the notion that there's an overall chill that's suppressing free speech. I think that's a big threat and this is another indication of that. However, having said that, I see so many small aggressive, you know, truth-to-power startups, including Axios, including Semaphore, including Puck. I don't see journalism or truth-to-power in any way being quashed. I would argue that every time they try and do this, it's a game of whack-a-mole and it just inspires a series of new startups backed by people. You know, The Bulwark. My God, are they giving Trump a hard time and they're making money doing it. I don't see the threat to journalism. And I find that I would say there are few people, few groups, and this will piss off everyone's favorite intellectual support animal, journalists, but there are few groups that more so than journalists or I would say writers who see themselves as more precious than they actually are.
I could not agree with that more. I did this analysis once on the show Succession, how it is consumed by so few people relative to the amount of coverage that it got by journalists because journalists are obsessed with covering their own industry and obsessed with themselves. The reason that this story is important from my point of view is because broadcast as an asset is a public good as defined by our laws and as such it needs to be regulated as a public good. When there's political pressure on somebody on their journalism asset to get a deal closed, the broader implications of that are: are we regulating a public utility based off of political preference? That, Scott, is a pretty serious problem because you always want public utilities to be governed by independent agencies who can do what's best for the public. To me, that's the broader existential crisis. And it's bigger than just what's happening in media and the FCC. I cover the FTC. The Supreme Court will determine and is likely to side with Trump in Trump's firing of Democratic commissioners under that agency. I cover the Copyright Office, which the music sector that I cover, you know, broadly relies heavily on. Trump, his administration tried to oust the head of the Copyright Office. So, what are the political implications of agencies governing public goods no longer being independent? That is a massive, massive story, Scott. But the problem is we're often neglecting to link some of these small incremental happenings like this $80 million show 60 Minutes to that broader narrative. And that's where I think the discussion has gone awry.
