TV anchors are agitating for side hustles as the cable cash dries up

Business Insider

5 hours ago

TV news anchors and contributors have been watching the walls slowly close in on the cable business. Now, they want their networks to let them lay the groundwork for a Substack or podcast exit before the money runs out, talent agents and other TV insiders tell Business Insider.
"We're trying to identify opportunities for people to make money outside their networks," a top talent agent said. "We're having those conversations every day — we all see there's going to be limited upside for these people at the networks."
Networks have historically barred talent from moonlighting on other platforms with their own newsletters and podcasts (with books being an exception).
But five TV news insiders told BI there'd been newfound openness to letting talent establish themselves on platforms like Substack — especially as the examples pile up of TV journalists taking the solo route.
Catherine Valentine, Substack's point person for news and politics, said the platform had seen a surge of interest from TV journalists after it launched a live video feed and Jim Acosta, formerly of CNN, started broadcasting from the platform earlier this year.
Some legacy news organizations, like CNN and MSNBC, are experimenting with letting talent use Substack to distribute clips like they would have done on X (formerly Twitter) in the past.
"They're opening the door because talent who's left had such immediate impact on Substack," Valentine said.
She added that she'd even fielded some calls from legacy outlets about letting their employees establish their own paywalled Substacks.
Agents, with a financial stake in steering clients' careers, are pushing to exploit the shift in tenor at TV networks.
Two told BI they're paying attention to movements like those of CNN's Jake Tapper, who distributes notes and links for free on Substack.
One also said they hoped networks might give more leeway to news contributors than anchors, even if the distinction is lost on the audience.
An example is Steve Kornacki, who left NBC to become a contributor at MSNBC, which will let him do other things outside the network, a person familiar with the matter said.
Agents are also carefully selecting their company targets. One said they considered Paramount's CBS News and Disney's ABC News to be more conservative when it came to letting talent freelance, while they saw NBC and MSNBC as more open.
Chuck Todd, the former "Meet the Press" moderator and now independent entrepreneur, said he'd heard "informed chatter" that news orgs could copy what Disney's ESPN has done with Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee. Smith's deal freed him to appear on more platforms to talk politics, while McAfee's gave him creative control.
"It's likely the future all over the media landscape," Todd said.
The TV business is wobbly
The changing winds come as the
With people cutting the cord faster than expected, media companies can't jettison their cable channels fast enough. Warner Bros. Discovery just announced plans to split its declining TV networks from its growing streaming and studios business. Comcast is also hiving off most of its cable assets, including MSNBC and CNBC.
Meanwhile, the erosion of these news outlets' businesses has left them vulnerable to attacks by President Donald Trump and made it harder for them to fight back.
At the same time, some TV news journalists like Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Megyn Kelly, untethered — whether by choice or by force — from big media companies, are starting to show there's a viable business for established voices in podcasting and on platforms like Substack and Beehiiv.
As agents prepare to go into sensitive negotiations with the networks over talent side gigs, it helps to have examples out there like Acosta, one of Substack's top politics names, as well as less lucrative ones.
Agents said they're also monitoring salaries. Outlets like Puck and The Ankler have reported on various flat or declining star salaries. Despite this economic reality, agents told BI they felt the bottom hadn't yet completely fallen out of the market — think, salaries getting cut in half.
Why not?
Why won't TV news companies just let all their employees have Substacks?
The traditional TV company view is that they pay talent well for exclusivity and can face editorial, legal, and reputational risks if someone reports or comments on another platform outside the network's editorial or legal review.
Some channels, like MSNBC, also stress that they work to create various opportunities for talent in-house.
SVP Madeleine Haeringer said MSNBC is focused on expanding its hosts' reach through audio, digital, and social media, using all storytelling tools to build audiences beyond cable.
Substack and others are beckoning
Valentine of Substack is at the ready with stats: Substack now has 5 million paid subscribers, driven by news and politics; 30 people in news and politics gross $1 million or more.
"This is an area we're happily investing in because this is the future," she said. "If you have spent your career on cable news, there is a clear path for you."
Ray Chao, who leads Vox Media's podcast business — home to tech journalist Kara Swisher and others — said there's a "groundswell" of interest from current and former TV news employees. His pitch is that with Vox, they can build a show that reflects their vision and forge a direct-to-consumer relationship on a medium whose audience is growing.
"You can own a lot of the financial upside," he said. "It can be very lucrative."
The solopreneur route can be a mixed bag, however.
Todd has a podcast and YouTube channel where he interviews newsmakers and gives his takes on the day's biggest stories. He said as an entrepreneur, it's hard to have downtime and not feel like he's missing an opportunity. But he enjoys the diversity of projects he works on and having full editorial control.
John Harwood, a former CNN White House correspondent who's done a podcast and writes for Zeteo, Hasan's new venture, said there are perils in what he called the Substack "hamster wheel."
"People who look at that as a source of income are going to feel a very large amount of pressure to maximize the number of subscribers and deliver content at a pace that satisfies people who are paying to get it," he said.