Yahoo Autos Agency Dealmaking for Journalists Goes Into Overdrive
With the 2022 midterm elections kicking into gear, and what is sure to be a heated presidential election cycle just over the horizon, star journalists are in high demand. But while TV anchors and correspondents have seen their profiles (and compensation) rise for decades, the past few years in particular have turbocharged that shift.
“News talent in the last five years have become stars in their own right,” says UTA co-president Jay Sures, noting his agency’s clients: “The likes of Don Lemon, David Muir, Anderson Cooper, Bret Baier, Jake Tapper, Norah O’Donnell. They are stars. They are walk-down-the-street stars. And as a result of that, they are compensated in a commensurate way with what they bring to their respective employers, which is a real trusted source in news — people enjoy watching them for different reasons.”
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Those high-profile anchors can now reasonably expect deals that total in the eight figures annually, especially if they include other projects like podcasts or development deals. And with a fresh election cycle nearing, these journalism stars are gaming out ways to make sure they are part of the conversation and remain top of mind for news junkies and casual viewers, whether they pay for cable TV or not. It helps that news is some of the only programming that consistently does well on linear television, even as consumer viewing habits (not to mention corporate business models) have shifted toward on-demand streaming.
“There is a reason that ABC’s World News Tonight With David Muir is the most-watched show in TV outside of sports,” says WME partner Bradley Singer. “That says a lot about viewer behavior and the value of television news.”
The crowded media landscape of 2022 looks vastly different from the way it did during the 1980s and early 1990s, when a seat behind a network morning or evening anchor desk was a journalist’s only real hope for a million-dollar payday.
But it was the rise of cable news — notably CNN during the Gulf War and Fox News after 9/11 — that dramatically expanded the landscape for anchors, and for their agents, who cannily recognized that A-list anchors could turn around a news broadcast just as effectively as an A-list star could turn around a fading network series.
It was that media universe that helped turn firms like N.S. Bienstock, led by Richard Leibner and Carole Cooper, into powerhouse agencies in the news and information space. UTA acquired Bienstock in 2014, which, as THR noted at the time, instantly gave the agency “leading market share” in the broadcast news business.
With the rise of streaming video, the emergence of podcasts as a viable business, explosive growth in digital media and, in the words of Sures, an “insatiable desire for fresh content,” the past eight years may have seen as much change in the news business as the previous 80.
“The last several years have shown that the only thing that is constant is change,” says CAA agent Rachel Adler.
So while Edward R. Murrow, Barbara Walters and Dan Rather paved the way for today’s journalists not only in fame but also in fortune, the opportunities today are far greater than they were back then.
“To be a journalist right now, to be a broadcaster right now, does not mean you have to have a broadcast television deal,” Singer says. “It means you can be doing streaming news, you can be doing podcasting. Maybe you are a correspondent at a broadcast network, maybe you’re at cable, maybe you are making things for Netflix.”
Among the superstar journalists and hosts, that increasingly means production deals. Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Jenna Bush Hager, Rachel Maddow, Sunny Hostin — all have inked deals to produce specials, documentaries, podcasts and other fare for their corporate parent companies.
Maddow, MSNBC’s most-watched host, is transitioning from hosting five nights a week to one night a week so that she can work on outside projects, including a scripted film directed by Ben Stiller based on her book and podcast Bag Man. (WME negotiated the megadeal last year.) “They like it because it is entrepreneurial and it gives them another outlet, but it is also good business,” says Singer. “If you are paying these people a lot of money to be stars inside your corporation, why not have them produce other types of content?”
