Jeff Brogan, the Cincinnati native who has been WCPO-TV vice president and general manager since 2013, was among the 27 E.W. Scripps managers to lose their jobs Wednesday.
“I was informed today by Scripps that my position is being eliminated as part of a broader effort to consolidate general manager roles across the company,” Brogan says. Channel 9 staffers were told Wednesday afternoon.
Scripps on Wednesday introduced a new “Local Media leadership structure” in which the individual station managers were replaced with 11 regional general managers.
Ten of the 11 managers were named by Scripps. The company said a general manager for the Northeast region — for Scripps’ Cincinnati, Cleveland and Buffalo stations — will be appointed later.
Under the new structure, each regional general manager will be responsible for two to four markets. Every Scripps market "will continue to have a local news operation led by the station’s news director, allowing news decisions to remain with the journalists and newsroom leaders closest to the communities they serve," according to Scripps’ announcement.
“As part of the Local Media leadership structure changes, 27 roles across Scripps’ local market and sales leadership are being eliminated,” the company announced.
Brogan, an Elder High School and University of Dayton graduate, had been with Scripps for 26 years. After starting his career at WXIX-TV, he joined WCPO-TV as a newscast producer in 2000. He was promoted to executive producer (2004) and assistant news director (2008) before named news director at Scripps’ WPTV-TV in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 2010.
He returned home in 2012 to Scripps’ Walnut Street corporate headquarters to oversee news strategy. The next year, at age 36, he took over Channel 9.
“I am deeply grateful for the opportunities Scripps provided over the past 26 years. I am also incredibly proud of what we accomplished together with the talented teams I had the privilege to work alongside at WCPO, WPTV and the Scripps corporate office.” Brogan says.
The 11 regional divisions is “the latest step in its companywide transformation to reorient the business around consumers’ changing media habits,” the company announced Wednesday.
The new structure is one piece of Scripps’ proactive transformation plan and is designed to align its local television operations with the way audiences watch, discover and rely on news today, Scripps President and CEO Adam Symson said in the announcement.
“Local television is changing, and the way we operate local stations has to change with it,” Symson said in the release. “Through this transformation, we are rethinking outdated operating models built for a different era while creating a more technology-forward media company to sustain local journalism and bring more consistency, scale and support across our markets.”
The Local Media division changes announced Wednesday “follow other recent changes at Scripps’ stations, including expanded 24/7 streaming news and the use of technology, including AI and automation, to modernize technical production workflows for both streaming and linear news,” the company said.
Last month, Scripps launched plans to do 24/7 local news streams and produce content continuously rather than primarily for scheduled newscasts. The company plans to move from a traditional broadcast-centered organization to one built around streaming, digital publishing, centralized production, AI-assisted operations and expanded local reporting, according to letter sent to staffers at Scripps’ WXMI-TV in Grand Rapids, Mich., as reported by MLive/The Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press.
In some markets — but not all — the news will be delivered without anchors.
In the two-page Aug. 4 memo to WXMI-TV staffers Symson said that “268 colleagues we work alongside are losing their jobs.”
Here’s a link to the 10 new regions and their managers.
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