The history of news is also the history of how technology changes the way it’s delivered. From radio to television to streaming, each new platform brings with it unique opportunities and challenges—and influences the norms around how news is curated and presented. On this episode of News Over Noise, host Matt Jordan talks with media scholar Cory Barker about the implications of streaming the news.
Special thanks to our guest:
Cory Barker is an assistant teaching professor in the Film Production & Media Studies department and co-host of News Over Noise. His research explores media industry convergence, focusing on legacy media's use of new technologies in production and distribution. His book, Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture (2022), examines the U.S. television industry's failed social media revolution and won the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from the Media Industries Studies Interest Group. Before joining Penn State, Cory was a tenured faculty member at Bradley University and earned his Ph.D. from Indiana Universit
Matt Jordan: Welcome to season three of News Over Noise. Today, we're going to move forward by looking back at history. Change is a constant in media. And we've had some changes on the show as well. Leah Dajches, my cohost for the first two seasons, was a postdoctoral fellow working with the News Literacy Initiative. We always knew she was destined for great things. And she's taken a position at New Mexico State University. In this episode, we'll be introducing our new cohost, Cory Barker, who, along with his interest in media literacy, also happens to be an expert on today's topic. The history of news is also the history of how technology changes the way it's delivered. On November 2, 1920, KDKA, a radio station based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, announced the results of the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox, kicking off an era of news over radio. Nearly two decades later, on August 24, 1940, the Esso Newsreel aired on NBC on a new technology, television. The program, which featured a mix of news stories, interviews, and commentary, marked the beginning of television as a medium for delivering news to the American public. Then the new millennium came and, with it, a new media, once again changing the way news is delivered. When CBS News 24/7 launched in 2014, it became the first streaming news broadcast in the United States. Today, every major network has a 24/7 free streaming news channel. But the viewership is pretty small. And in this era of news-finds-me mentality, the fact that viewers have to seek out those services via dedicated apps or on YouTube poses a hurdle to adoption of this new format. For the moment, broadcast TV news is doing better than a lot of other TV programs. But how long will that last? What happens to consumer choice and the ability to get diverse media diet without free TV? And how do regulations related to news differ across platforms? To find out, we're going to talk with Cory Barker. Cory is an assistant teaching professor in the Film Production and Media Studies Department at Penn State. His research explores media industry convergence, focusing on legacy media's use of new technologies in production and distribution. His award-winning book, Social TV, Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture, examines the US television industry's failed social media revolution. And again, Cory is going to be my new cohost for this podcast. Cory, welcome to News Over Noise.
Cory Barker: Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Jordan: I'm very excited to be working with you here and especially excited to hear about some of your expertise about how television news has changed over time. So, tell us a little bit about—in broad strokes—about the history of television news broadcasting.
Cory Barker: Yeah, the history of television news broadcasting in many ways is a great way to think about the history of television. So much of early television experiments are news based. A lot of the experiments and projects that are happening in the '40s, in particular, are built around the infrastructure that's already there from radio with our big broadcasters—CBS, ABC, and NBC. But there's also a lot of experimentation that doesn't really work in that period. There is an extension of newsreel programs to focus on the visual side of things that television can bring that radio didn't have. What really takes off in the middle part of the 20th century is when television grows in the home, broadcasters realize that they should have a set schedule built around news. And that's where we see an expansion of the nightly news broadcast from 15 to 30 minutes. That's where we see a more consistent establishment of anchors in the home that people can trust. And that, in many ways, is the peak of national broadcast news, especially in the evening, where we have a lot of the anchors and newscasters that people still might know today in 2025. In the latter part of the 20th century, obviously, the introduction of cable begins to fragment that big national audience with the introduction of things like CNN in the 24/7 news cycle, an increased focus on live footage, live 24/7 global coverage where we're going to correspondents all around the world and really focusing on the spectacle. But that certainly also divides the audience, where the audience has a lot more options for what they can watch. As early as the middle '80s, and as we get further and further into the cable era and into the streaming and internet era, we've seen more and more fragmentation, development of diverse audiences, but also a growing sense that people are watching so many different types of news and getting their news from different places that we don't have that same connection to even an imagined idea of shared reality.
Matt Jordan: So, in that early days of the golden era of television, where we have figures like Ed Murrow, who came over from radio and audiences knew because of his London coverage and whatnot, how did that shape, though, the programming format of the news?
Cory Barker: That's a great question. As I mentioned before, early experiments were more newsreel focused than the extension from 15 to 20—or 15 to 30 minutes, I should say, of coverage at 5:00 or 6:00 PM in prime time really established—we've got one or two anchors who are there to establish trust. You can see them every night. They're talking directly into the camera. And that's where we see an increased focus on national politics, focus on breaking news inasmuch as it can be covered in that era. But the establishment of we have one anchor who's going to be surrounded by a floating cadre of experts who cover certain beats brings together a certain level of consistency and trust, especially as more and more people get televisions in the home in the '60s and '70s.
Matt Jordan: So again, we're talking here about a half-hour show every night for the national nightly news. What does that mean in terms of the way that they can cover stories?
Cory Barker: Yeah. There's only so much you can cover even at that time. I think, in 2025, we think about how there's so much news and information washing over us. At that time, and even if you watch a nightly broadcast news show now, they're only covering a handful of stories in the first 10 or 15 minutes of that broadcast. And then they're going to throw things to more human interests, maybe some sports, some weather, often finishing with something that's very soft news, maybe inspirational or humorous. But we have a very narrow band of things that are being covered. And so that's where you see that increased focus on what's happening in Washington. The US's role in things happening around the world, but only to a certain extent, really framing and setting the agenda of what the folks who are watching that, which is tens of millions of people at that time, how they're thinking, how they're imagining the US's role in global affairs.
Matt Jordan: And news was, in a way, a quid pro quo that a lot of these broadcasting companies had. So, they effectively got license over a percentage of the radio spectrum in order to do their broadcasts. And news was a public service that they gave back on. So that changes the way that they cover. When did that start to shift in news, where it was not just the news division was given control over its content, and they tried to do stuff that was serving the public interest? When did the news have to start of pulling in ratings and the very same things that were—the network was pressuring its programmers to do?
Cory Barker: I think, to some extent, that's always there. I mean, the other networks were consistently jealous of Walter Cronkite and trying to figure out, how can we beat CBS? How can we top CBS? Rotating anchors, in particular, to try to find that one person that the audience can trust. But when you've locked somebody in who's America's newsman, it's hard to break through that wall. But I think the next big iteration is something that I mentioned earlier, which is when we have the establishment of CNN and the growth of cable, when there's an obvious growth of who the competitors are and that the audience is being dispersed across different parts of the television dial, if you will, or the program guide, there's an increased focus on, how do we keep people coming to the nightly news when they can get news on CNN 24/7? And especially when there are big world events that are happening, people are thinking about going to CNN a little bit more throughout the day to see what's happening during the first Gulf War. That's the big moment for CNN. And so national broadcasters have to figure out how much they want to break in during the day during these breaking news environments, how they want to treat that coverage, knowing that CNN and other cable news channels are going to be all over it. And they're going to be approaching it from 15 different angles because they've got air to fill. And then if you're ABC or NBC, you're coming on, and you've got 30 minutes. So, you're trying to figure out, how can we cover this journalistically in a way that we stand by but also maybe appeal to folks who are being peeled away by your CNNs and MSNBCs and Foxes of the world.
Matt Jordan: So, in the early days of cable, obviously cable—well, not obviously, but our audience might not know that cable has—abides by different rules. The FCC has a lot less to say about cable than they do—station licensing is less of an issue. And CNN, in the early days, didn't quite understand what it was doing. People thought with now that it's more than a half hour news every night, we're going to be able to cover so much more. And so, they started off covering farm reports and all sorts of different things. And it didn't really work in terms of the economic imperatives to get advertisers to buy ad time and whatnot. I think sometimes cable historians look at the Reagan assassination as the first big moment where you can literally see people figuring out how it's going to work, because in the early days, the press feed didn't go to cable news. And all of a sudden, CNN had the same press coverage of the assassination of Reagan. And you can see them figuring out on air, “We're live here. We're going to go to this.” And after that moment, you really see cable news figuring out that breaking news, that temporal dynamic, as opposed to curating the news every night into a package that Americans get what they need to know in a half an hour. You see this expansion to fill the time, really. But it's not really having to abide by the same rules. So, in those early days, you see this same legacy media quid pro quo. But over time, that starts to shift, right?
Cory Barker: Yeah. And I think your point about the attempted Reagan assassination is a great one. And we see, especially in big breaking events, the advantages that cable, especially a CNN, has, when if they have the infrastructure to be able to cover these things immediately but then also to bring in experts from 15 different areas, whether those are specifically related to the topic in question and just fill time with all of these different angles, especially when there's not a lot of actual new information related to this inciting incident. When they're just vamping for time, when they're waiting for the press conference from law enforcement or they're waiting for additional pieces of information to come from a hospital or people on the ground during a natural disaster, that becomes the default way that people start to think about news, especially in the real-time environment where you have—instead of an anchor talking to you confidently in a prepackaged 90 seconds, you have multiple anchors or an anchor and multiple experts or analysts just talking and even speculating, even educational speculation about what's happened and what that means. There's that turn towards not just here's what happened, but here's what happened. And now we need to talk about the implications or the consequences or the context, which can be a productive way to inform the citizens. But when you don't have all the information but you're live on air and you've got to fill time between a few ad breaks, that's when we can get into what we might call less responsible coverage.
Matt Jordan: Well, even in terms of responsibility, the technology has a lot to do with it so that a television is a visual media. So, what do you start to see on the television news because it's a visual media?
Cory Barker: Yeah. I mean, that's where we start to see way more live shots. We also start to see a lot of B-roll of, when we're talking about disasters, people that are suffering. That's when we're starting to see the increased focus on having a correspondent stand right in the middle of a disaster zone or something horrible that's happened and gesture and, again, speculate about what's going on. But to your other point related to cable, or to add to that, that's where we see the increase of breaking news chyrons, the additional information visually on the screen, where the presence of the anchor or the people, the human beings on screen, starts to get minimized or squished because now we have three different layers of a bottom line ticker and then a breaking news ticker. And now we're also providing the chyron for who this person is. Maybe we're adding things on either side of the image. We're seeing multiscreen simulcasts or multi-frame simulcasts, where maybe the CNN anchor is setting up, now that we're going to go live to the sheriff. Or we're going to give you the live feed from the local affiliate somewhere. But I'm going to talk over it as the CNN anchor. So, we're seeing multiple streams of information, visual and textual, coming at us all at once.
Matt Jordan: But the production value tends to gravitate toward the visual, because that's what the medium affords.
Cory Barker: Yeah.
Matt Jordan: Yeah. So over time, as cable news started to grab bigger market share, you start to see a shift in the way that cable news works as well. And you talked a little bit about fragmentation. So, describe how the introduction of Fox News, say, for example, starts to change the way that news is covered.
Cory Barker: Yeah, I mean, obviously Fox News is now infamous for the shifts that they've brought forth in the cable and the general news environment, where we're moving to a place where the news is covered far more through an ideological filter, a visible, pronounced ideological filter. Clearly, all news, starting from broadcast all the way through the cable era, has a certain bent to it. They're making editorial choices. But when we see the introduction of Fox News, and especially the growth of Fox News inspired by a lot of the things that are happening in conservative talk radio at the time, that's when you're seeing so much more focus on how this event impacts or reflects a particular political party or reflects what Fox News talent or producers might want to perpetuate from an ideological standpoint. And that creates an environment where people can now go and, of course, find news that may fit exactly what they believe or maybe aligns with a couple of things that they believe. And then they can fall a little bit further into that ideology if they stick with that news source. And that then leads to the creation of other news programs and cable channels that have a little bit more of an ideological bent.
And you see the financial incentives. When MSNBC starts, it's not necessarily started as a way to be the liberal corrective to Fox News.
Matt Jordan: It was actually a conservative station.
Cory Barker: Absolutely, yeah. And so, then they realized that there are financial reasons, beyond politics, beyond ideology, to provide something else to a cable consumer that is maybe looking for something that is not CNN, which is perceived to be down-the-middle live coverage and not the perceived to be ideological bent of Fox News. They start providing coverage filtered through a perceived liberal or Democrat ideology and vision.
Matt Jordan: Well, there's a political bias, but there's also a production bias as well. One of the things that they borrowed from talk radio was the move away from the staid presentation style of the Harry Reasoners and David Brinkleys and Walter Cronkites toward something more fun, toward somebody who would express emotion, be bombastic, use their voice to do storytelling, all the stuff that was kind of forbidden in the early professional annals of journalism. With cable news emulating that shock jock format, you start to see a shift toward a more emotional kind of delivery as well.
Cory Barker: Yeah. And what we think of as credibility and trust with someone like Cronkite, where he's the centerpiece of the CBS Nightly News, but it's not called, like, Cronkite. It's called the CBS Nightly News or Evening News. And he is the anchor most of the time and then is replaced by Dan Rather and so on. We start to see, in the cable environment, it's not just the force of personality from a credibility standpoint. It's as you said, the performance of it, the charisma of it, the ability or the willingness to go loud, to go controversial, to have more of a debate, but also then to start to build shows around those people, their personalities, their brands, where we have things called The O'Reilly Factor. We have Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of these folks, where it is a new show in theory. But what you're seeing, even on the programming guide, is that this is O'Reilly Factor. You're coming here for Bill's reaction to the news, not for the news. You're there to see and to listen to his version of the day's events and sometimes not even that day's events. It becomes more like an ongoing serialized narrative, where individual anchors or talent have their 3 to 10 things that they're always frustrated by or really angry by or really happy about. And they're able to tie those things back to maybe something that's happening that day or that week. But it's not even a necessity that those folks on cable talk about things that happened in the last 24 hours, since their last episode. They're there to talk about things that they think are important. And their audience tends to go with them.
Matt Jordan: Yeah. And so over time, I think, one of the things you see as well is, whereas the early days of CNN, where they're showing the farm reports and showing international affairs and whatnot, I think, over time, what you start to get is a smaller amount of content every day, just repeated again and again and again in the mouths of these different personalities. So, it'll be the same story that you get repeatedly through the day but told from the different anchor. The one who you prefer is going to give you your commentary.
Cory Barker: Yeah. And then you also start to see the reuse of that coverage on each of those shows. So, on O'Reilly, you might see multiple segments replayed from Fox and Friends where he's playing that from earlier in the morning to show you one newsy item. Or they had a conversation with a politician, or they had a reporter live on Congressional Hill or whatever. But what that's also doing is just reusing programming and content that they've created at different parts of the day, which allows it to be a more cost-effective way to produce news. And you can generate stories out of what your personalities have said in reacting to news. We're talking mostly about political top-level news here. But certainly, something like sports news and ESPN, they've become great at this too. Somebody says something on a podcast, gets covered on First Take, gets covered on ESPN Radio, then makes its way to SportsCenter.
And it's this whole churning of the cycle on one tidbit of news or even one reaction to the news becomes a day's worth of content, which is both cost effective and a way to get your talent out there across all of these different platforms.
Matt Jordan: Right, right. So, one of the things that MSNBC, which is Microsoft—so that's—we're starting to talk about—in the era of the 2000s, we're starting to talk about the emergence of digital. What does digital do to the way news content is distributed, even when we're still talking about the content producers largely being cable news providers?
Cory Barker: Yeah. I mean, obviously, the introduction of digital news reporting plays a big role in upending the industry, which would take up multiple episodes, of course. But I think the relationship between digital news and television news is really interesting because we start to see the growth of digital reporting serving as the source for content and programming on TV, where a digital site, whether it's a company that's owned by one of these broadcasters or cable channels or not, they report something at random parts of the day. And that then gives especially the folks on cable news more material to work with throughout the day. If there's a new story that breaks in The Atlantic at 11:00 AM, now folks who are maybe working on programming on MSNBC or Fox or CNN have the ability to react to that story. And especially as cable becomes more reactive to news, as opposed to exclusively reporting it, the stuff that's being reported and produced across the digital realm now becomes source material. And as the news cycle speeds up because of the growth of digital news and the internet, that speeds up the cycle on cable news and eventually on broadcast, where I think all of these different media play into one another in a way that just pushes the speed of the news cycle further and faster.
Matt Jordan: Yeah. So, we're in a moment now where we see all these things kind of cohabitating. We still have your nightly TV news—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS—because we will want to talk a little bit about public media here as well. And they still do what they do, still kind of following that same format from the era of Walter Cronkite. Still, the evening news is still a thing on these channels, right?
Cory Barker: Yeah. And I mean, relatively speaking, where we're seeing insane amounts of cord cutting and people watching primarily via streaming platforms, which I know we're going to talk about, the nightly news on the big three networks is doing pretty well. So, ABC and NBC have somewhere between 8 and 7 million viewers a night. CBS has fallen a little bit further behind that. They're under 5 million viewers. But those are better ratings than a lot of what we would call successful prime time television shows get. So, between 5 and 6, the networks are doing pretty well, all things considered. And they've obviously done a lot of different experiments across social and digital, which we'll talk about. But they're hanging on the best they can.
Matt Jordan: Right. And so now that we're talking about streaming, so how is that starting to shift the way that content is produced and distributed?
Cory Barker: So, all of the big broadcast networks, if we stick with ABC, NBC, and CBS, they have infrastructures now that are far more integrated. And they are producing news packages and stories with all of these different platforms in mind. And each of these broadcasters has their own 24/7 streaming news channel app, depending on where you're accessing them, whether that's in your YouTube TV Guide or just on YouTube proper or through links on social media. They all have an operation that is thought to be streaming only. So different talent. But a lot of the stories that are reported on the website for NBC News are then serving as source material for NBC News Now, the live streaming focus for NBC. And then some of those stories naturally are going to make their way to the NBC Nightly News, maybe presented by the same person who presented them on the streaming app but also maybe not. If they've got a more higher-level on-air talent that they want to present that story, there's going to be some collaboration there where a more familiar face in prime time on broadcast TV is presenting that story. But you're seeing an attempt to try to cover all bases. And sometimes the story is literally just shown in all these different places, no matter who did it in the exact same way. And then other times, it's being produced and massaged to fit different audiences where something might be a 12-minute segment that ends up on YouTube. But then when they put it on the nightly news, it's much shorter because they have a lot less time.
Matt Jordan: And so, what does this do to—we talked a lot about, in the early days of television, this synchronicity, that everybody's—every night the news hour is the news hour on all the channels. And so, every night, people are tuning in for a shared environment, tuning in for a shared reality. And as you described it, this is the story of the history of the fragmentation as well. So how is the move to streaming as a mode of content distribution changing that temporality, that experience of sharing the same news every day?
Cory Barker: I think it's having a huge impact. It's impossible to know for sure who's watching what at any given time. But when we have the same news source and NBC and ABC and CNN putting news on a dozen different platforms at different parts of the day, something they've been doing for years—but it has increased significantly over the last decade—it's hard to say that that doesn't have an effect, that if you're consuming news primarily through NBC on YouTube and you're getting it mostly on demand, you're clicking on the stories that matter to you versus someone who's just sitting down and watching it in the evening, where they've more clearly curated the five things that they think are most important in the A block, that's a different experience of the news. And that's a different experience of your understanding of a shared reality and how you come to understand what's important to you and what's important to the people around you. And then when you take that to something like social media, where even those segments that appear on the live streaming app on YouTube or on their streaming channels, and those are chopped down even more. They're edited to be more vertical video. They've had text put on them. The context changes. And that changes the understanding of what you're seeing but also the relationship to other people that might be consuming it. Now, of course, things like Instagram or TikTok or even Twitter and Facebook give you the ability to see what other people are saying. You get that reactive element that's more visible than what you get on broadcast TV. But that's certainly a completely different form of participation and connectivity in a social media environment versus the imagined, shared reality that I think we have when you watch something live on a mass, mass medium like television.
Matt Jordan: So over time, I think one of the stories of cable news is a movement away from hard news content toward opinion, commentary on the news.
Cory Barker: Definitely.
Matt Jordan: Is that a trend that you see increasingly with streaming as well?
Cory Barker: What's interesting to me is that I feel like some of these streaming news apps from the broadcasters actually try to approach things in a more conventional journalistic sense. I mean, just personally, I often watch NBC News Now in the morning. Their morning show is a huge departure from the Good Morning Americas, the Today Shows of the world, where they occasionally have soft news segments. But they're approaching things in a pretty conventional journalistic standpoint, in a way that I find refreshing. Now, that's obviously a contrast between a very clear lifestyle package in the Today Show and something that is more explicitly newsy on the streaming app. But I think in certain instances, they are trying to be a little bit more, capital J, journalistic. And then with other things on social media, there might be experiments that are trying to be a little bit more playful or have a little bit more of an opinion. The one benefit of having all of these different platforms for your news coverage is you have the ability to experiment, to do a little bit of A/B testing to figure out what is the way in which we present or package this news that different types of people will respond to. And I think that's the biggest place of experimentation and the biggest challenge for conventional broadcast news outlets, is because they have all of these different options in front of them. But it takes time. It takes resources. It takes talent who know all of those different apps and different platforms to figure out, OK, if we present the news this way at 6:00 PM on NBC, that's going to appeal to a certain audience who watches that show. If we present it in this other way on the streaming app or on Instagram Reels, that's going to appeal to a completely different audience. But internally, in the newsroom, do we have the people to do that? Do we have the time, the resources? Financially, do we have sponsors and ad support to be able to do those different things to make it worthwhile? And I think that's where we are right now, is a lot of different experimentation. But the question is, can that experimentation lead to sustainable models in each of those areas?
Matt Jordan: When we talk about sustainability, we're really talking about economics, right?
Cory Barker: Absolutely, yeah.
Matt Jordan: So, we should probably think a little bit about how television news is on a for-profit model, that we really are, as news consumers, the commodity audience that's being sold to advertisers. It's different from public television, where you're doing a nightly news, and you think what we're covering is in the public interest. But television news is about what's going to generate revenue, which is why the morning shows you have a different format, because you're selling coffee and whatnot. And you want to be peppy. And it's lifestyle oriented. And that's going to get a different type of consumer. It's going to get a different type of audience. And all these things are really being churned by the advertising departments who are trying to sell their audience. So how does that work? We know a little bit about how this works on television news. The more gripping news coverage we know during wartime, whenever there's an ongoing branded war coverage, a Gulf War or the explosions in Iraq or whatever we want to call these things, that that's going to increase viewership. How is this working on streaming? How are the advertisers being lured into these different streaming formats?
Cory Barker: It's a really great question. And I think it's a little unclear at this point. In doing some prep for this interview, I found that NBC News Now is the most popular of these 24/7 streaming channels or apps from the big broadcasters. And the way they're presenting on their PR site, their viewers, they're being presented primarily in week totals. So instead of even hour by hour or 15-minute increments that we see on broadcast and cable or have seen historically as a way to break down viewership to then sell that to advertisers, in the streaming environment, they're presenting their viewership in week-long chunks. And the viewership—NBC News Now is celebrating the fact that they had a little over a million viewers total in a week and then breaking that down into conventional demographics of folks 18 to 29, 18 to 34, that sort of thing. So, you're seeing familiar strategies. But they're obviously trying to find ways to put more numbers together to make it appear as if, hey, this is a successful path that advertisers need to come and put their products or their services on. But those numbers are a lot smaller. And I think that's something that's—it's really interesting as far as we don't really know what quantifies or qualifies as a success in these realms. A million viewers over the course of seven days when you're running 24/7, that doesn't seem like a whole lot. But if the other—if your main competitors are in the 200,000s for the week, then you're at least able to say, in this experimental space, we're doing relatively well. You see some of the same things with how they promote their YouTube subscriber numbers. So, in that regard, ABC News is the biggest, with 18 million, NBC with 11, and CBS with 6.3. And with TikTok, where they're all bunched between roughly 6 and 1/2 million to 9 million. But there's not a lot of explicit acknowledgment of how the ad process is working on those platforms. They're not doing any sort of integrated news packages like you might see on something like GMA, where they're bringing out their deals expert to talk about all of these different products. Generally speaking, they're treating these platforms—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube—with relatively straightforward news. And I think that's in part an effort to try to combat concerns about people using social media to get their news and things like that. But when it comes to advertisers, they're not bringing in the huge numbers that would mean that the folks who or the companies that advertise in prime time or in the early evening on broadcast are going to necessarily be the same ones who want to drop an ad on NBC News Now. And even just from a consumer standpoint, you see a lot of the types of targeted ads if you watch on YouTube that you would see no matter what type of video you're watching on YouTube, where the collaboration is obviously happening with the YouTube ad infrastructure. And you're seeing personalized ads as much as you're seeing any sort of national ad campaign that might go across platform.
Matt Jordan: So, there are two ways of thinking about streaming. So, we see the emergence of these services that are for people who have cut the cable. A lot of some of our audience may have cut the cable and moved away from cable. And on cable news, part of the economic model for cable news is carriage fees. So, in fact, like Fox News, who has dealt with many ad embargoes from their coverage of things, advertisers dropping off, they still make 60% of their revenue from carriage fees, which is, if you're out there listening, you pay $6 a month to your cable company for Fox News. But you also pay that for ESPN, for MSNBC, et cetera. So, you get a range of things. As people stream, do they do you see them dropping off in terms of the potential range of news that they can consume? Do they become one-station news consumers?
Cory Barker: I think that's possible. It's certainly if you're the type of person who is primarily getting your news through social media or YouTube, where if you have a diverse media diet, you may follow a couple of these channels on those spaces. But it's just as likely that you pick one. Maybe it's the one that your parents watch on a broadcast level, and you're transitioning to that environment. And I think that does have some implications. From a financial standpoint or from a numbers standpoint, you mentioned the cable bundle. We've gone from 100 million plus subscribers to cable and satellite to under 70 million now. And what's happening is the new ways to get cable replacements, your YouTube TVs, your Hulu plus live TV, individual streaming apps, things like Fubo, Tubi, et cetera, that might have some of these streaming channels built in for free, those, much like your point about cable, are even less regulated than cable channels. And so, we've seen not an insignificant number of those streaming cable replacements having fights with cable channels, or even broadcasters, over carriage and retransmission fees, thinking about Fubo had a two- or three-month fight with CBS News. YouTube TV has fought with a number of channels, including some of the news channels and broadcasters. And there's been some congressional action or interest in congressional action to try to bring them under the same sort of legislation even that cable is at. So if we have an environment where people are maybe less willing to seek out news and are essentially getting things that are coming into their algorithm and the cable replacements are willing to play more hardball with those more conventional news providers, that does potentially narrow the diversity of news that you might get, especially if you are getting more conventional news presented to you in algorithmic systems, like YouTube, where you say, I want to get more conventional news. I'm going to follow NBC News on YouTube. OK, you are. But then now your consumption of NBC is filtered through everything else you're doing on YouTube. And that is a huge editorial decision that is not unlike the types of editorial decisions that are made on national news on television or in a newspaper. But it's so much more sophisticated. And it puts people into a blender of information that raises some really interesting questions about what we see and what we learn about the world.
Matt Jordan: One of the things is, as we talk about this history of the diminishing of the audience sizes and the fragmentation of news into these ever-increasing niche orientations to the news, is that they have fewer resources. These companies are now smaller than they used to be. The old days of CBS, NBC, ABC, they had an anchor because they had correspondents all over the world. They had reporters from wherever the stuff was going on. You just don't see that type of coverage anymore, right?
Cory Barker: Yeah. There are fewer people for the number of platforms that these news organizations are working on. The newsroom infrastructure is smaller. Folks are asked to do more with less. And that's where, I think, the growth of different platforms actually allows them to exploit that idea and reuse the same information or the same packages across a lot of different platforms. And on one hand, OK, there's a consistency in presentation of a story right across Instagram, YouTube, MSNBC, what you're seeing on NBC, to some extent. But what that really means is that folks are being pushed into smaller beat areas. They're being asked to focus on the things that do really well. That's backed up by even more sophisticated data, so not just TV ratings, what the internal metrics of what people are searching for or clicking on. And all of that feels more reactive and less expansive than ever. And I think that that lends credence to the idea that there's more information and more "news," quote unquote, than ever. But in some ways, the mainstream companies that we associate with news are doing less of it or producing a less diverse range of news. And that certainly trickles down to local news as well.
Matt Jordan: One of the things that you saw with—you were talking about with Fox News and whatnot, this return to these melodramatic storylines that you would follow over time, almost like a soap opera and whatnot. I'm thinking of the Fox News has a yearly war on Christmas. And every once in a while, they'll trot out their caravan at the border to drive the news cycle for a while. These are recurring motifs or characters. Do you see things like that starting to emerge in streaming news as well? Are they borrowing things from the cable format that you see continuing? Or is this ability to rethink the field allowing for new things to emerge?
Cory Barker: I think it's a little bit of both. On the 24/7 streamers, you're seeing, obviously, a reoccurrence of coverage of certain topics in a way that feels more conventional news oriented. The incoming new administration, they're doing a lot of things here in the first few weeks of 2025. So, there's obviously a lot of coverage of that. Also, you're seeing an absence of coverage of things. So for instance, you still don't see a lot of coverage on Instagram or any sort of social platform or YouTube related to Israel and Palestine in a way that might be deemed controversial by leadership at the corporate level or potential sponsors, whereas we're seeing a lot of coverage or conversation or live videos from what's happening in Israel and Palestine from maybe more independent news producers. So, in certain situations where these big companies are now in these newer spaces, they have the opportunity to connect to a conversation or a discourse or an angle. And their corporate leanings or their place within a larger conglomerate means that there are still some things that maybe they won't cover, or they won't cover in a certain way. And they might post something in a viral format or a meme format. But there's still a clear level of editorial principle that we're going to cover X in this way. And we're not going to cover Y in this way, which you could argue is a missed opportunity if you're trying to reach younger people or more diverse people who are thinking about the world in a different way.
Matt Jordan: So streaming, obviously, is different than cable. But what kind of laws govern streaming? So, the cable was—back up there. With the FCC, used to cover the airwaves. And they would give licensing to stations. And that was the discipline that they could pressure people. If you didn't like the way you were covering things, to go back to something like the fairness doctrine, which they said you have to—each licensed broadcast has to give a balanced perspective on things of a range of opinion.
Slowly but surely, those rules eroded. And by the time you get to cable, there's no necessity for fairness on broadcasting. Is there any governing body that is going to look at how streaming works in the same way?
Cory Barker: Not really, at least not right now. I mean, I think—you think about something like Netflix that has over 300 million subscribers around the world, tons here in the United States as well, essentially no news coverage whatsoever. They have no nightly news. They have no regular news show that's even preproduced segments or anything like that. And there's no sense that I've never heard anyone push for regulation related to Netflix connected to news or almost in general. But then when we're talking about broadcasters or channels that exist on more conventional media and then have moved to the streaming environment, they do have less regulation about what they cover, how they cover it, the ads that go on their programming. And that's where there has been, again, as I mentioned, some at least congressional memos sent around that we need to do, as a government, the US government thinking, should we at least bring streaming into the realm of cable to maybe not legislate it or treat it in the same way that we would treat ABC proper and local affiliates related to that? But there's not been a lot of energy here in the United States for that sort of thing. Around the world, there's a lot more, where even when we talk about productions and the things that get licensed for Netflix and some of the global streamers in the EU, in other parts of the world, they are way more restricted by what they can put on their platform and who produces those things. Other forms of content regulations play a role there, where they can only have 30% international products. And they have to have things that are more explicitly labeled as educational or in the greater service of the citizenry. And here, we just don't have that in the streaming environment. And I think that's something that people will continue to talk about. Whether or not anything happens as a result, of course, is the big question.
Matt Jordan: What does that offer as a potential? For example, one of the things we're seeing early in the new administration is an attack on public broadcasting, that has Brendan Carr, the FCC head, who promised in Project 2025 that he would go after PBS because they couldn't be disciplined by the market. And so, he's now going after them for having commercials. Does the ability for PBS, say, to now put their stuff on a streaming platform and chop their content up and gather the revenue that they could gather from that, does that provide public broadcasting, a means of an opportunity?
Cory Barker: Potentially. I mean, I think the challenge with that is the scale of it, which is the same issue that basically every media company and individual content creator is dealing with, where if you go that route and you have chopped up your programming and you're thinking about different forms of subscription or support, which is very embedded into the public broadcasting model, getting support from viewers, in theory, that sounds like a great idea. I think the challenge is the market being so competitive, not to think about it in the Brendan Carr way, but just we've seen bigger, more corporate driven media companies trot out streaming apps or subscription models for their programming or content that have failed gloriously, like CNN+ being a big one that rolled out in 2022 and lasted about a month, that they thought, OK, people love CNN. So, they're going to subscribe to it. Fox has done the same thing with Fox Nation, had a little bit more success. But almost all of the programming is documentary. It's not a lot of even the types of news programming that they do on Fox News, the cable channel. So, there is a route for public broadcasting to explore more piecemeal, subscription-based content to a really dedicated, passionate person who loves public broadcasting and PBS. The question is whether or not there are enough of those people to maintain any semblance of the budget and production value of the things that PBS has been able to do. And that doesn't even get into all of the different ways in which PBS buys and licenses documentary, local projects, all of those different things that public broadcasting can provide. The slight positive thing right now is that they're not beholden to the same ratings and financial and corporate expectations that all of these other companies are. As soon as you move to a streaming environment and it's, “We need to get a certain number of subscribers or supporters every month and avoid churn,” that's a really uphill battle to try to face in a ecosystem that is so competitive.
Matt Jordan: Another thing, as we move to streaming, I mean, you said Netflix—and I'm sure people have their streaming favorites or whatnot. But one thing that they all share in common is a kind of asynchronous mode of consumption that people watch things when they're ready to watch them. Some people like to binge. Some people like to watch things with other people. How is that impacting the way that news is conceived of? So as instead of the nightly news hour being the same, are people on streaming watching it, whenever it's convenient? Or, I mean, is there a synchronicity that is involved in streaming at all?
Cory Barker: I think there's certainly less. It's a big question as far as, have there been—is there a way to understand what people are doing in mass in these streaming areas related to news? That's still a little bit of a missing piece from a research perspective. I think we see, oftentimes in big breaking news events, there is a lot more viewership even on their YouTube channels. Before I record, I went on to all of the network YouTube channels where they have their 24/7 streamer. And they all—on YouTube, it said somewhere between 1,000 to 3,000 people were watching live, which is not a lot. But I've seen just anecdotally in major news environments that number into the mid six figures when something major is happening. So, what's interesting is obviously there is a preponderance of asynchronous consumption of media in our current environment. But when we do have breaking news, there still is, among a certain subsection of the population, no matter what platform they're using, a desire to figure out what's going on and to figure out as much information as possible. I think what's challenging is, again, we just have so many options that if you're one of these companies, you're having to not only figure out how to cover it in the moment. But then from a financial standpoint after the fact, you're trying to justify or tabulate total impressions or total viewers when you're bringing in data from all of these different centers of consumption. I think that can be difficult to try to interpret, to figure out for them, how successful these things are, and certainly from our standpoint, how much are people consuming these things.
You can go to some of these big broadcasters' Instagram or TikTok accounts. And some of the videos have millions of views. And then some of them have 96,000. And there's a huge scale of difference. And in certain cases, you can see why. Something that might have Taylor Swift or Donald Trump in it does a little bit better than something that has Marco Rubio in it or whatever. But in other cases, you can't quite tell the difference or the reason why this video didn't do quite as well as that other one. So, in the streaming environment in general, Netflix has had some successes with their push to more live programming. Some of the big sporting events have done really well, most notably the NFL ones. But the Mike Tyson boxing event a few months ago was a huge deal as far as the number of people who were checking in and then talking about it on social media. So, there's potential there. But I still am suspicious or would have questions about how many people would do that in a news environment. If Netflix created a nightly news product, how often are people going to check in with that? I don't know. But in a breaking news environment, they might more explicitly.
Matt Jordan: So, it sounds like you're saying that they're all doing these centers. Whether they be legacy media, whether they be cable, they're all doing a similar type of programming. It's just they're finding different means of distribution, like you were saying, YouTube being a big one. When they're on a platform of distribution like a social media platform or a YouTube or even Google, through the search function, which determines a lot of what we get in terms of news, that also means they're losing a cut of their revenues, right?
Cory Barker: Yeah. And that's certainly something that I think they're really thinking through from an experimentation standpoint. How much do you want from a production cost, from a talent cost? How much content are you willing to put in a 24/7 streaming channel on YouTube as a loss leader to try to get people in the door eventually hoping you can turn that casual interest or asynchronous clicking on a few videos into something that's more consistent that can help capture eyeballs for ads but also then to leverage down the road for something else, whether that's the broadcast products or it's eventually subscriptions on nbcnews.com, trying to figure out how all of these different new media platforms can serve as useful tools to get people down the funnel into something that you think is most lucrative?
I think from my vantage point, the challenge is figuring out, what is that? Because when we look at the data, obviously, younger people are primarily not getting their news on television, whether that's broadcast or cable or even through a streaming television cable replacement like YouTube TV. They're mostly getting it on a digital device. And so, from the newspaper standpoint, all of this makes a little bit more sense because you're trying to drive them to the website to eventually pay for a subscription. When you're a national broadcaster and that's how you present your news, primarily on television, historically, the end goal is a little bit more confusing, because if you get someone who's really a big fan of NBC News content on TikTok and then subscribes to the YouTube channel, it's still a huge barrier then to convince that person to pay a minimum of $82 a month to then watch NBC Nightly News or watch The Today Show. Maybe that person gets an antenna and accesses that information or those channels for free. But those are a lot of steps in a way that even newspapers are not having to deal with. Different economics, different situation. But you can see why a news company that primarily wants to drive people to their website for a subscription has an Instagram account or has TikTok. When you're a broadcaster, it makes sense to be there, which is, I think, what all these companies have decided. We just have to be there. And we have to figure it out. But how we get them from these social spaces or YouTube to what we might historically think of as our primary distribution mode of news—and if that's valuable, if the younger generation doesn't even subscribe to the way in which they would get that news, I think, is really, really curious and a question that all of these companies are asking themselves.
Matt Jordan: So clearly, television has always been driven by different metrics. Ratings were a metric that once the firewall between news divisions and programming disappeared in the 1970s or so, they were increasingly driven by ratings concerns for news. And we know that on cable, they have a more sophisticated way of doing this. There was a story in The New York Times a couple of years about how Fox News had gone by minute-by-minute ratings to look at when audience dropped off. And then looking at when audience—what types of things they were switching the channel to on cable also gave them a sense of which type of stories to avoid. Fox News called this Moneyball for television news, because it's all analytic driven. Are you seeing any shifts in trends of types of things that are driven by the analytics of digital media consumption?
Cory Barker: Wow. That's a really tough question to answer. I mean, I think from viewing the content and thinking about the strategy that way, you see a big focus on hard news, things that are happening around the world, sometimes even more than you might see in the 30-minute broadcast. But you're also seeing an effort to evolve soft news presentation into things that fit the virality and kind of memeified culture that we see online, where you might see, for instance—I'm just scrolling NBC News's TikTok right now. There's live coverage of Justin Trudeau talking about the tariffs from yesterday. And that's obviously syndicated content that they've picked up because they had national NBC folks there. And now they're turning it into a vertical video. But then just a few videos down, they have a whole package here about a chinchilla that has millions of fans on social media. That's not totally dissimilar to what you would see on a national broadcast. For the last two minutes, they've got a little light-hearted, soft thing. But I think there's a clear effort to do those with trending things that are happening in social media to even just jump on those trends when people might be searching through a hashtag or they're using TikTok and getting similar recommended videos so that you can just capture that attention instantaneously for 15 seconds to 3 minutes. There's also certainly a focus on the use of video footage that can be captured from other people. We see that in broadcast and cable as well. But certainly, the large ecosystem of the internet and social media allows the producers and the folks who are manning these accounts to see other videos that are going viral or weird things that have happened where someone has taken a video with their phone. That type of material transfers pretty well to social media in a way that it's easier to do. You can do it faster. Then you can even translate that to a more horizontal presentation for the television screen. Just the ability to take vertical video and format it with an on-text citation, essentially, or on-video citation and then maybe add a talking head to it or maybe not, there's something there about the efficiency and ease at which you can fill your timeline with stuff that people maybe have already seen, because they're swiping through recommended posts. But you're able to capture just a little bit of that audience, a little bit of that attention for your profile or for your individual timeline.
Matt Jordan: Would you say that the trends are toward lots of little bits, little bites of short-form content, 30 seconds to 2 minutes, something like that?
Cory Barker: It's funny because it's both. In a platform like TikTok, absolutely, of course, limitations of the platform, although it keeps growing in the amount of time. But in spaces like YouTube, the conventional broadcasters are willing to do longer form, documentary-style pieces that might have, even 10, 20 years ago, been something that aired on cable at a weird time but fit—hey, we've got to fill 24 hours of the day. We need 45 minutes to fit 15 minutes of ads around. Let's just put it on at 1:00 AM or whatever. YouTube allows them to do more investigative in-depth pieces that I find to be really compelling and well reported and often are in that space trying to compete with the type of deep-dive documentaries that you see on YouTube that are made by independent creators, independent journalists, just people who are really interested in a topic. So, I think it's representative of each platform, where if it's a platform that primarily is defined by short-form videos and maybe a little bit of humor or trying to fit with viral trends, they do that. If it's a space like YouTube, they might do some of that, but they're also willing to go a lot more serious and somber and more investigative because that type of format and content does really well on YouTube. So, they are responding to the various habits of users across these platforms. And so that's clearly analytically driven. It's clearly responding to trends and genres and formats of the time. And I suspect that will continue to evolve. But that's where you see, news companies are generally reactive. They start accounts on these platforms. People are going to be here, especially whatever imagined idea of young people we have. And then it might take a little bit of time to figure out what is the thing that they do in those spaces. But then if the winds of trends shift a little bit, then you see them shift in the types of content they do. But they're always playing catch-up, which is then hard to capture an audience or monetize in a way that fits a long-term goal of a major media conglomerate.
Matt Jordan: So right now, we're really just seeing a "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" approach to this, just trying everything?
Cory Barker: Yeah. And I mean, I think some of it definitely does work, relatively speaking. When you see videos on their YouTube or their TikTok or their Instagram that get millions of views, are they the most successful videos on those individual platforms? No. But certainly, seven-, eight-figure view counts, that's pretty good. But then you also see things that feel a little bit more experimental that have a much lower viewer count. And what's interesting is—the experiment that's the most connected to what they do primarily, the 24/7 streaming channels, those appear to be the least successful, whereas chopping up news for short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram does pretty well. Or doing maybe some long-form documentary pieces, those can do really well, although those are more labor and cost intensive, I would guess. So, there's a trade-off there. But that's when we see those streamers that are 24/7 on YouTube or on some sort of app on your Roku Stick, whatever, if those are only getting the best one—NBC News Now is only getting a million viewers a week total, I mean, that's far fewer than the number of viewers that are watching a random TikTok with President Trump in it. So that's not inherently bad. You're reaching a different audience, in theory, a younger audience, almost certainly.
But I'm sure that they're making calculations about, what is the cost of this? If we can do a chopped-up video on TikTok and it can get 1.6 million views, no matter what the views are and what the engagement is with that, versus a 24/7 news channel, even if we're repeating a lot of the same packages over the course of the day, and that gets 200,000 views total a day, best case scenario, that's tough.
Matt Jordan: We started out by talking about how the shift in the anchor and the disposition and these kind of old mandarins of the news and their trust level. One of the things we've talked about on this show a lot over the last two seasons is trust waning in this. Do you see people who are harkening back to that early era of broadcast, where they're the kind of staid presenters of news that people trust? Or are people chasing clout and chasing ratings and chasing engagement in an attention economy that makes that more difficult?
Cory Barker: Yeah. To reiterate a point we've made a few times, I think the big broadcasters have done a little bit of both. I think that there is an effort, especially in a space like TikTok, to treat news as seriously as possible, to underline this is something you should pay attention to. There's a process that goes into how we make this, et cetera. And so, it's credible just by showing you a news presentation. When I taught journalism classes at my prior institution, we would do a lot of analysis of news companies in these different spaces. And it's anecdotal, but my students responding to those news content formats on a place like TikTok because they didn't see someone talking in front of a green screen, so they were like, oh, OK, so this is a more conventional type of news presentation. And if I care about the topic, I might pay attention a little bit more. But all of the research and the data related to—let's use Gen Z for an example. They say that they want human-focused news presentation. They want it to feel authentic and relatable. So that's not really the type of thing that you're seeing from NBC or from ABC, in these social spaces at least. And so, I think there's a challenge there of how far you go with that kind of personality-driven, maybe humor-driven approach. All of these companies have done various internship programs or Gen Z-oriented programs where maybe they have a separate account that doesn't have as many followers that's more youth oriented, that tries to do some of the stuff that fits in- fits on trend for whatever the trend may be at the time. We've seen, especially in the newspaper side, The Washington Post has been way more out there on TikTok, since 2020, in presenting news in the form of skits and comedy and performance and is often regarded as the news company that's doing TikTok right. But we also know that The Washington Post has lost tons of subscribers in the last couple of years, is internally, by all reporting, a mess. So, it's not as if the approach at trying to be more like what's already happening on TikTok, but from a news standpoint, is driving people to pay for The Washington Post. So, I think that's why some of these broadcasters are thinking, we need to be in the space. We can reuse material. Let's reformat it for vertical video, whatever. We can tap into some of the memes and trends that are going on. But maybe we don't push it all the way to it being so jokey or so meme-y or so—we've got one of our Gen Z interns standing in front of a screen and making dry or Daily Show-esque jokes about what's happening in the political sphere. So, I think they're cautious in a way that makes sense. But also, you always wonder of whether or not then it pays off. And that's the biggest question. It's just if you don't push all the way into the realm of things that are doing well, then does all of the work that you're doing in those spaces ultimately pay off? Does it serve your greater good, whether that's subscriptions, ad support, ratings, whatever that may be?
Matt Jordan: When we're talking about television news, obviously, we talk about local news and national news. And we've mostly been talking about national news, because that's what the big broadcasters did. But there's also the affiliates and whatnot. How are we seeing streaming working on the local TV news sector?
Cory Barker: Less experimentation. But mostly because there are fewer resources. In certain areas, you have local affiliates that have their own little streaming channel as well. It often depends on who their owner is. So, a lot of the Nexstar and Gray-owned local stations, if you search on Apple TV or your Amazon Fire Stick or your Roku Stick, you'll be able to find a dedicated app that has morning and evening coverage and sometimes even 24/7 coverage if it's a big market. But that is essentially just replicating what's happening on television in a new platform. But they're obviously trying to combat the declining numbers of viewers that they—that the overall ecosystem has, because most people are still getting local television news through a cable or satellite subscription. Some people do have an antenna but not a huge amount. What's also happening there is, as more of those stations get bought up by basically the big three—Sinclair, Gray, Nexstar—you're seeing different types of effects. So, I think the immediate thought would be, as soon as a station gets bought up by one of these companies, they're going to do less local coverage. And in certain cases, that does happen, especially in a Sinclair bought market. But in Gray-owned markets, there's actually a little bit more local coverage. Across the board, though, what you're seeing is more space taken up for advertising. And I think that's obviously an effort to try to fill the void that is present by potential declines in viewership or the speed bumps in migrating to a streaming or digital world where you can promote yourself as having an app on Apple TV or Amazon Fire Stick. But if people aren't really making that transition, you're going to have to fill the void somewhere. And more often than not, a lot of that promotion for, hey, we have an app now, is happening on the local broadcast. So, there's not a lot of money or effort being put into, hey, you can stream your local news on a separate dedicated app, unless you're already watching your local news. So, it's kind of self-defeating in that way.
Matt Jordan: So, we've been talking a little bit about—a lot about the history of this. Put on your prognostication hat for a second. Where do you see this going in the future?
Cory Barker: I think we have more experimentation. And as there are more apps or more revenues for—or avenues for potentially putting news programming on a platform, that's going to continue. I think the challenge is finding a way to be in spaces that people want to pay for. And I think broadcast networks are really going to think about partnerships with Netflix, with Amazon, with Apple, the tech holders on this side of the equation, to figure out, how do we get programming produced or licensed to us more visible in some of these spaces that don't require cable, don't require even YouTube TV, as the prices continue to go up there? It wouldn't surprise me if some of these 24 streaming—24/7 streaming channels or apps just went away as part of a reconfiguration of what we want that to look like. Or it becomes part of some new agreement with an Apple or an Amazon or a Netflix, because this system can't continue this way. They can't just keep repopulating the same news in different visual orientations or with a different voice every time there's a new social platform. We see, obviously, the digital graveyard of these companies spent way more time on Facebook for a certain amount of time, then on Twitter. And now it's more TikTok and Instagram. All of them put millions of dollars into Snapchat experiments that basically went nowhere in mid 2010s. So there has to be a point where a strategy exists that they can leverage their audience into something that's more financially valuable. The only reason that wouldn't happen is that there's a collective delusion in the media industry that live programming, is the one thing that people do care about. Even if they watch it far less than they did 5, 10, 50 years ago, live programming, award shows, news, sports continues to get huge ad buys and generally better ratings than other things on television. So, I'm imagining they'll stay afloat in that regard for longer than we might suspect, because advertisers and sponsors just keep throwing their money at it, thinking that that's still better than being online. But I think there has to be some consolidation and more experimentation with the tech players on the side of this equation.
Matt Jordan: So, I guess, as they used to say in television, tune in to see what happens next. Cory, thank you so much for being with us. And we'll hear from you more.
Cory Barker: Thank you so much. Looking forward to it.
Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Cory Barker, an assistant teaching professor at Penn State and the incoming cohost of this podcast. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan. Until next time, stay well and well informed.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]