With heavy capital investment from parent companies Univision and Disney-ABC Television Group, Fusion launched in 2013, and celebrated its first anniversary on television and the web last October.
But the news operation is struggling to find, let alone measure, its audience.
Fusion relaunched in February after just 16 months on the air. It is not yet clear whether last month’s changes will be the charm, but the web, cable and satellite originally aimed at young English-speaking Latin customers is in a weird place. Univision is considering putting itself up for sale and sources inside ABC’s news division scratch their heads over Fusion.
ABC News contributes office space, on-air news staffers and other resources to the fledgling network. But it’s not clear whether these contributions are paying off for a news operation that has very little to report in terms of ratings, traffic or sales.
“Whenever I ask anyone there [at Fusion], they tell me it’s going great,” said one ABC News source. “But I’ve yet to meet one person who tells me they watch it.”
Several TV service providers, including Direct TV, Dish and Cox now carry Fusion, but ratings for its programming — original content is currently limited to primetime, with syndicated shows playing during the day — are too low for Nielsen to track. The same is true for Fusion’s website. Online analytics company ComScore only tracks websites that garner at least 40,000 unique visitors per month. ComScore does not track Fusion.
By comparison, Mic.com, which produces similar content, gets about 4 million unique visitors per month, according to ComScore.
The original concept was for Fusion to be entirely focused on young adult Latinos in the U.S. who speak English as a first language. The idea fizzled among executives who decided the approach was too heavy-handed. “What we learned at launch was that if you’re trying to serve and speak to a young Latino, the last thing they want you to do is put them in a box,” said David Ford, a spokesman for Fusion. He said Latinos don’t want media content that can be perceived as “pandering.”
Fusion’s executives changed course to attempt a news operation that would appeal to all “millennials,” the catchall term for Americans who grew up in the digital age and show little interest in party politics. Fusion aims to provide an alternative to the highly engaged styles of Fox News and MSNBC while avoiding CNN’s focus on Washington-centered news.
The problem is that fewer Americans are watching TV at all, especially young people. Television is one of the last places young viewers get their news.
A 2013 Pew Research study showed that in 2012, 43 percent of millennials used the Internet to access news. Only 35 percent said TV is their primary source for news, which follows a downward trend from 50 percent in 2006.
A new study by the American Press Institute showed that among millennials who wanted “more” news about a specific topic, 77 percent named an online source, including search engines and social media. Only 3 percent said national TV.
The trend is not unnoticed at Fusion. “We understand on a very fundamental level that you cannot expect a young, ultra-connected generation to rely on cable news the same way their parents did,” said Ford. “We cannot focus on daily, incremental news coverage — that’s not what our viewers want, and frankly, they get that from other places. You cannot compete with Twitter when it comes to breaking news. Instead, we’ve seen great success when we take our viewers on a start-to-finish journey into a specific issue or story.”
But ABC News insiders express doubt.
“The whole trying-to-attract-millennials was not really going to work, in my opinion,” said another ABC News source. The source noted that Fusion had canceled “Open Source,” a short-lived news program, and laid off production staff.
In the time Fusion has been on the air, it has had several programming shakeups and cancelations. Three months after it launched in October 2013, the show “DNA” was canceled. A separate morning news show was moved to evenings. That show, too, was eventually canceled at the end of 2014.
Even Jorge Ramos, a well-respected anchorman in both English and Spanish-speaking U.S. news media, had his program “America” on Fusion scaled back from nightly to weekly in March 2014.
“Fusion was trying to be too many things at the same time,” said the second ABC News source. “An entertainment, news and sports channel without really excelling at any of them. They even have a show with puppets which helps people not take Fusion seriously.”
The “show with puppets” is a reference to “No, You Shut Up,” a program hosted by comedian Paul Tompkins, which is mocked both inside and outside ABC News.
“They did something with puppets on election night,” another ABC News source said in a recent interview. “Maybe that worked for them, I don’t know.”
An article in the New Republic summed up Fusion’s November midterm election night puppet coverage: “[T]he cynicism here was empty, borne of the idea that young people want their political coverage with as little politics as possible,” wrote Esther Breger. “If that’s the case, they’re better off watching sitcoms on election night.”
Comedy is something Fusion is trying to capitalize on in the spirit of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” Fusion’s own tagline boasts that it’s a place for “Pop culture. Satire. News.”
But Fusion’s most memorable attempt at comedy fell very flat. In late January, Fusion posted an animated video under the headline, “20 reasons you shouldn’t work at Buzzfeed.” The video mocked Buzzeed as a perpetually silly website governed by the need to produce moronic content that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Journalists online, including some at Fusion, interpreted the video as a distasteful jab at Fusion’s far more popular competitor. After some criticism over Twitter, Fusion changed the headline on the video to, “A day in the life at Buzzfeed?” and added a craven editor’s note.
“We changed the headline on this post because we realize the previous version was lame,” Fusion announced. “We love our friends at Buzzfeed and the work they do every day.”
Syracuse University TV and pop culture professor Robert Thompson said Fusion’s rocky start isn’t surprising. “Launching a new news channel is difficult in a saturated market,” he said. On Fusion’s targeted audience, he said, “Aiming at millennials is easy; actually appealing to millennials isn’t.”
Another ABC News source, however, said Fusion is simply finding its footing. “It took CNN ten years to catch its stride,” the source said. So Fusion just needs time.”
Though there is no data on Fusion’s web traffic and TV ratings, a spokesman said they will release internal numbers sometime before 2016.
