NBC News president Noah Oppenheim was among the many high-profile media figures to speak at the FT Future of News virtual event on Thursday morning, an event which also featured White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones, BBC director-general Tim Davie, and more.
Oppenheim touched on the evolving business model of TV News – talking about streaming, the linear business model, post-Trump, networks being held accountable and them holding administrations accountable.
When asked about new platforms and how NBC News is approaching the increasingly fragmented audience, Oppenheim mentioned having one of the first news shows on Snapchat, Stay Tuned, and their two streaming channels — News Now, which is the network’s hard news streaming platform, and Today All Day, which is softer with content more in line with the morning franchise’s later hours.
“What we’ve seen is the audience is migrating to those new platforms,” said Oppenheim. “They are consuming news in different ways, but what has remained the same is they want their news from credible sources, and they want great journalists and they want journalists they recognize, that they trust.”
Oppenheim also addressed the polarization of the news media business and the challenges disinformation pose.
He remarked that disinformation is in fact a “challenge for our entire society,” and asked rhetorically, “How do we persuade people who have already kind of wandered into the fever swamp of conspiracy theories and falsehoods?” He feels this is “a quandary that I think all of us are going to be grappling with for a long time to come. I don’t know what the solution, what the fix is for those who have already kind of fallen prey to that, but I think it’s something we all have to work hard on.”