News Broadcasting
ABC News to shorten staff by 25 per cent
MUMBAI: ABC News, a Walt Disney Company, will shortly reduce its news-gathering staff through buyouts and layoffs.
Employees of the company fear that the cutbacks would affect 300 to 400 people of the news division.
A spokesman said that the cuts at ABC are among the steepest ever made at a network news division. The current workforce of ABC News is roughly around 1,500 people.
Said ABC News president David Westin in an interview that the reductions were an effort to get ahead of economic pressures squeezing the broadcast business.
Calling the cutbacks as a “fundamental transformation”, Westin said, “The time has come to rethink how we do what we are doing.”
Westin also said that the news division was not in extreme economic duress. “ABC News has always kept its head above water, even in really bad times,” he said.
He, however, did not comment on reports that the goal was a 20 per cent cost reduction across the board at ABC News.
For decades, the network news divisions have suffered audience erosion, the result of competition from cable, the Internet and changing consumer habits.
Earlier this month CBS News, said that it was laying off dozens of employees.
ABC plans to combine its weekday and weekend staffs of “Good Morning America” and “World News,” and rely more heavily on freelancers for newsmagazines like “20/20.”
The network will also further reduce its news bureau structure by replacing some bureaus with more flexible so-called digital journalists who work on their own in foreign capitals.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
