Good afternoon, I'm Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In the Room, my private email on the inner workings of the American media. Thanks as always for your interest in Puck. You can read a free preview of my work below. Or, better yet, subscribe now to read all of my reporting in full, online or delivered directly to your inbox. 

Thanks,

Dylan

The Great Post-Trump Cable News Correction

The inside conversation about CNN’s impending pivot, The View’s G.O.P. problem, and the ballad of Suzanne Scott.

This week, I’m responding to a few pressing questions in my inbox and observations about the state of the media-tech-financial industry. As always, if you have feedback you’d like to share or a question you’d like answered in a future column, you can reach me at dylan@puck.news. My inbox is always open.

Dylan, the Journal and AP recently offered brutal assessments of waning post-Trump news consumption everywhere from the Washington Post to CNN. Do sources in your world share these concerns that major media brands have over-indexed on politics, and will they face a correction?

News engagement rises in times of crisis, or perceived crisis, and wanes in times of relative calm. Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency was effectively seen as a six-year-long DEFCON 1-level threat to the sensibilities of liberals, moderates, and even more traditional establishment conservatives (who may have nevertheless voted for him). So it stands to reason that news engagement would decline precipitously after he left office, just as we might expect news engagement to decline after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But there will always be future crises—including America’s quadrennial obsession with another presidential election—and so news engagement will ebb and flow, as it has forever.

What’s unique about the Trump situation was the duration of the perceived crisis, which incentivized many news organizations to restructure their editorial, marketing and business models almost entirely around one story. Most news outlets invested heavily not just in political coverage, but in building their brand around the idea of resistance to the president, or the preservation of the Republic, or of truth itself—hence The Washington Post’s urgent new tagline, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and CNN’s “This Is An Apple” campaign. I’m not sure I’d say these outlets over-indexed on politics, anymore than ESPN over-indexes on football in the fall. But you have to have a strategy for the off-season, and I’m not sure most Trump-obsessed news outlets knew what that was...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT