Blake Sabatinelli

CEO, Newsy

Blake Sabatinelli is CEO of Newsy. Previously, he was Director of Digital Solutions at Scripps and an executive for new media at both WJLA in Arlington, Virginia, and WFTS in Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida.

Quotes

Everyone’s sitting right now at this crossroads of do we stay the same and keep the same business model, or do we change and pivot and try something new. Now, I can’t speak from a local perspective because that’s not my business, but you can’t be afraid to change. Otherwise you’re just going to die.

Our audience is everything. I’ll tell you what doesn’t matter: What a consultant says based on their research generally doesn’t matter. What our audience says matters.

We have a consumer group called the Newsy Insiders; it's over 4,000 people … who are diehard Newsy fans and who get early access to look into everything we do.

I think a lot of local newsrooms are actually doing an OK job at making sure that they get their content deployed on digital platforms, but I think the easiest step that they could take would be, make the consumption of the content fit the platform itself,” Sabatinelli said. “So if you’re developing content and you’re deploying it onto an OTT platform, people that are launching these apps generally aren’t expecting to hunt and peck for something. They’re looking to watch TV.