Scripps cost-cutting, AI integration is latest effort to grow earnings

E.W. Scripps is setting into motion what it calls a transformation plan for the broadcast station company — intended to generate growth for both earnings and its local TV stations.

The company announced Wednesday that it’s targeting growth of between $125 million and $150 million in annual enterprise earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by 2028. In order to get there, Scripps will go through a number of cost savings and revenue growth measures that lean on technology, namely artificial intelligence, CNBC can exclusively report.

“This will essentially be a reorienting of the entire company … with a much more agile and efficient cost structure,” CEO Adam Symson said in an interview with CNBC. “We have to act like a media startup. We’ve got to act like the company E.W. founded, because the marketplace cannot bear the legacy pace or legacy thinking.”

The company plans to outline more details about its efforts during its next earnings call with investors on Feb. 26, but Symson described making changes to the newsroom to alleviate journalists from administrative tasks and to focus more on gathering and reporting the news.

The company declined to comment on specific impacts to staffing as a result of the cost cutting, saying potential effects to jobs would be determined over the next several months.

“Everything is on the table, but our goal is to always preserve the journalism and the sales, the two things that make up our customer relationship,” said Symson.

Scripps owns more than 60 local affiliate broadcast stations across 40 markets, including Ion, which has become a broadcaster of the WNBA and other pro sports games.

The company’s stock has dropped 70% in the last five years, a decline not unlike many of its media peers.

The revitalization for the almost 150-year-old Scripps comes as the company — as well as the broadcast industry at large — finds itself at a historically challenging moment.

The broadcast station industry — which also includes publicly traded companies like Nexstar Media Group, Tegna, Sinclair and Gray Media — faces the same challenges as its cable and content studio peers, namely the defection of pay TV bundle subscribers for streaming alternatives.

As a result, the industry has been in pursuit of consolidation as it awaits key regulatory changes. Scripps itself has been an M&A target, with Sinclair recently making a hostile approach to merge with the company. Scripps has rejected such overtures.

Meanwhile, media outlets across print, digital and TV have been in the midst of massive layoffs in the last year. Paramount Skydance has cut thousands of jobs across the company, including at its CBS News, and most recently The Washington Post reportedly told staffers it would eliminate a third of its newsroom jobs.

The rise of AI has also fueled fears about mass layoffs, especially in newsrooms.

In 2024 Scripps announced the creation of an AI team that would report to Laura Tomlin, Scripps’ chief transformation officer. Symson said her first order of business has been to “consolidate technology from across the company.”

Symson said Scripps’ move to implement new technology is not meant to replace journalism jobs with AI, but instead help newsrooms work more efficiently and ensure a long runway for local news.

“This cannot be a cost-cutting exercise in service to incrementally trying to improve margins from cutting product. That has proven to be the beginning of the end,” said Symson. “This really has to be about starting with our consumer understanding, what it is they need out of us, both from our news product as well as our sales product.”

This week, Symson gathered 200 leaders from across the company at Scripps’ headquarters in Cincinnati to outline the latest plan, which will be announced more broadly on Wednesday to Scripps employees and investors.

The company will also reaffirm its most recent earnings guidance, noting it expects its 2026 financial performance to be lifted by midterm elections — local broadcast stations rely heavily on political advertising — as well as the airing of the Winter Olympics and upcoming World Cup on its affiliates this year.

This transformation, with the vision tagline, “We Create Connection,” is the latest step in recent years for Scripps to find new avenues of revenue growth.

“Scripps’ transformation effort is not unique, per se. Everyone in the space is cutting costs,” said analyst Dan Kurnos of Benchmark in a recent interview. “Last we checked, broadcast TV wasn’t the most rapidly growing segment of the media ecosystem. It’s just not as bad as cable.”

During a November earnings call with investors, Symson teased further initiatives the team has been working on, calling out its focus on “expense management.”

For the local media division, Scripps said its third-quarter expenses had decreased more than 4% year over year and the networks business saw expenses drop 7.5%, both due in part to “lower employee-related costs.”

Yet Kurnos said that Scripps has deviated from its peers with other moves, such as growing Scripps Sports with local media rights. Scripps’ networks now have the rights to air WNBA games, and the company has also been picking up the rights to NHL teams exiting their regional sports networks.

“I think Scripps has been forced to reinvent themselves a few times,” Kurnos told CNBC.

While Scripps has rejected a merger with Sinclair, the company has been doing smaller deals on its own, such as offloading stations and a station swap with Gray Media, which is still pending approval. This week the company also agreed to sell its Court TV network for less than $125 million, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified speaking about internal matters.

Symson acknowledged the need for consolidation as the industry forges ahead into a new era. But he fell short of saying it was a necessity, at least for Scripps, as some of his peers have said on recent public calls.

“Responsible consolidation is important for the industry, without question. But make no mistake about it, it is financial engineering,” said Symson. “It will create a tail wind for our business that investors should appreciate, and we will go after it, but it will not create the organic growth that we are talking about here.”  

Symson’s history at Scripps runs deep and began in the newsroom. He started at the company as an executive producer of investigations and special projects at a Scripps-owned affiliate in Phoenix before joining the corporate parent in 2003 and taking over as CEO in 2017.

The latest transformation efforts follow similar shifts in 2023, when Scripps eliminated some anchor roles, added reporters in smaller markets and increased reporters’ wages, among other changes.

“It is very personal to me. I think at this point, I’m the only CEO of a broadcast company that comes from a journalism background and from the newsroom,” said Symson. “What we do is too important for us to not go on the offense and aggressively transform the company in order to ensure that we’re a company that continues to thrive.”

Disclosure: CNBC parent Versant is carrying NBC Sports-produced Olympic coverage on its networks, including USA Network and CNBC.