Westin at Media Institute: ABC Cuts Were Symptom of Deeply Troubled News Industry

Said he was not against aggregation, but that there needed to be a business model that supported investing in reporting

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/8/2012 5:47:07 PM

Former ABC News President David Westin says that by the time he left at the end of 2010, he had had to cut 25% of that organization "to ensure its ongoing financial health."

That came in a speech to the Media Institute in Washington Wednesday, according to a copy of his prepared text. Westin said that budget cutting was "about the most difficult thing" he had had to do in his professional life.

Westin, who now heads online news registry and rights clearinghouse, NewsRight, said he was not cutting at the behest of "some corporate overseer trying to extract greater profits from a strong and growing business." Instead, he said, it was because of a deeply troubled news business.

Westin said that all the new digital news sources do not equate to a golden age of news. "[T]hat's because for the most part all the growth has been in the distribution of news -- not in investment in the news being distributed," he said. "Even as there are more and more outlets for news on the Internet, over the past decade we've seen a steady decline in the investment being made in reporters who are paid to spend their professional lives learning the craft," he said.

Westin said he was not against aggregation, but that there needed to be a business model that supported investing in reporting. "[I]f traditional news providers are always competing with companies that are using some of their own content -- and getting it for free -- then it will be difficult to restore true health to the news industry, no matter what other improvements they make in their businesses," he said.

It is not the first time Westin has taken that message to a Media Institute audience. Back in 2009, in a keynote speech at the institute's annual awards banquet, Westin told the audience that in some ways ABC News' biggest competition was ABC News. "Each of us has ended up competing against even ourselves," he said at the time. "Aggregators and search engines patrol the Internet, looking for bits and pieces of our reporting to post in short form on their sites. Some of the small ones simply take our reporting and reproduce it - at least until they're discovered and forced to take it down."