Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: 20 years ago, a tech-savvy college student pursues a seriously extracurricular activity by launching a small-scale webpage in between classes. Noticed by only a select few at first, the one-man operation spreads across the early-aughts internet, steadily gaining more eyeballs, clicks and followers. Soon, the college kid is being wooed by some of the biggest, most boldfaced names in his industry, all of whom have a million… no, make that a billion reasons for wanting to see his start-up venture attain maximum coolness.
Think we’re talking about Facebook? Think again. On Jan. 1, 2004, TVNewser flickered to life on a computer screen in Brian Stelter’s Towson University dorm room. For the record, that’s one month before Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com at Harvard, some 400 miles northeast of Towson. It’s a Web 2.0 origin story that Aaron Sorkin might have dramatized in screenplay form—if he hadn’t done that already.
Brian Stelter created TVNewser in 2004. (Courtesy CNN)
Naturally, Stelter isn’t waiting around for a phone call from the Oscar-winning writer/director pitching The Newser Network. “I don’t think I’m Aaron Sorkin-worthy,” he says on the phone from his home in New Jersey.
“But” Stelter adds with a hearty laugh, “I love the way you think!”
A Sorkin-penned biopic may not be in the cards, but TVNewser remains a must-click destination for the news industry at large. That’s a testament to Stelter’s idea behind the site—creating a virtual bulletin board that tracked the latest developments in broadcast and cable news at the speed of the internet.
“Nowadays, that energy would go into something like a Facebook group or a Substack,” he notes. “But in 2004, it was WordPress, it was Blogger—it was these simple internet publishing tools that allowed anyone to join the conversation.”
Even before TVNewser transformed him into a mediasphere someone, Stelter was hardly just anyone. Growing up in Maryland, he developed a passion for TV news at a young age and held anchors and reporters in higher esteem than movie stars or pop music sensations. His close attention to all things broadcast journalism-related clued him into a trend that other outlets overlooked as the calendar flipped over to the 21st century—the rise of cable news as the industry trendsetter.
“The news coverage about media in the early 2000s was way too concentrated on networks news, not cable news,” Stelter says now. “I focused on where the puck was going.”
In fact, TVNewser originally launched as CableNewser—an anonymous blog focused on outlets like MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, which Stelter felt were too often treated as the B-side versions of ABC, CBS and NBC. Within a few years, those sides flipped, and he documented the sea change in real time on the site, which was renamed TVNewser after being acquired by Mediabistro in late 2004. By that point, Stelter had revealed his identity to an industry he devoutly chronicled and often scooped.
“The site did have an impact,” he recalls. “There were occasions where the New York Times had to follow up on a scoop from TVNewser. That was a disruptive moment.”
It’s only appropriate, then, that Stelter ended up graduating to the Times newsroom himself in 2007, followed by a nearly decade-long run at CNN as the host of Reliable Sources from 2013 to 2022. Since then, he’s been contributing articles to Vanity Fair and makes regular cable news appearances on such reliable sources as the BBC and MSNBC.
TVNewser, meanwhile, joined the ADWEEK blog network in 2015 and has featured its creator’s news hits on more than one occasion. And don’t think he hasn’t noticed.
“When I’m on one of the networks, what I’m thinking in my head is: ‘What can I say that’s going to get posted on TVNewser,’” Stelter says, chuckling. “How can I earn a TVNewser headline out of this live spot?”
To celebrate TVNewser’s 20th anniversary, dive into our three-part conversation with Stelter about where he, the blog and the news industry have been… and where things are headed next.
Stelter hosted Reliable Sources on CNN from 2013 to 2022. (Courtesy CNN)
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
You started TVNewser before the “disruptor” label came into vogue with the big tech era. Do you think that term applies to what you were doing in 2004?
The term is accurate; I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but it’s accurate. I could tell at the time that cable news was increasingly driving the conversation, and I was motivated to launch the blog because I felt like traditional media was missing that story. Cable news even has demographic groups now—we talk about Fox’s America and MSBNBC Moms. That wasn’t true in 2004, but if you squinted you could see that we were moving in that direction.
In 2006, the New York Times wrote a story about you and TVNewser while you were still at Towson. Reading it now, it’s interesting to see how they describe the blog like it’s a novelty.
I haven’t read that piece in a long time. I did recently re-read Lisa Napoli’s shorter article in the Times about me from May 2004. That’s when I revealed my identity, because I knew I couldn’t stay anonymous anymore. It just wasn’t possible: Cable news PR people were trying to call my cell phone and sources were mad when I was busy in class and unable to post for hours at a time!
I knew Lisa because we were online pen pals, so when it was time to reveal my identity, it was either going to be to her or to Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post, who I was in touch with as well. Reading Lisa’s story now feels like a flashback to a more innocent time. There’s a quote where I say that all three cable networks basically cover stories the same way and, as we know, the world has changed drastically since then.
How did your voice change as a writer over the first year of writing the blog?
I cringe when I read the old anonymous posts from early 2004. Readers maybe couldn’t tell how young I was, but I certainly can! CableNewser was initially filled with observations, critiques and opinions about cable news, but within a couple of months I realized that the real opportunity was to report, analyze, get scoops and publish ratings data. So I pivoted from what I thought about to cable news to what was actually going on in the industry.
The best thing I ever did was put an anonymous tip box in the right-hand corner of the screen. It was a simple e-mail form letter that encouraged people to send me criticism, complaints, tips, ideas, feedback—anything. Most of it was trash, but amidst every piece of spam was a valuable tip and that was critical in moving the blog from aggregation and opinion to real reporting and curation. That’s something I still feel is needed today: There are a lot of people opining and too few people reporting.
What kinds of feedback do you remember getting from the personalities and networks you were covering?
Two things mattered most when I was running the blog. Number one was the ratings scoreboard; that was the single most important feature because it gave producers, hosts and technicians a reason to come to the site every day. Fox News PR deserves a lot of credit for that, because they realized early on that they could send me the ratings and I would publish them every night. Basically, the blog became a conduit for the daily cable news race that hadn’t existed before and that fulfilled a unique need.
The second thing was covering the personalities on cable news. What did Bill O’Reilly say last night? Why is Anderson Cooper on vacation? The daily drip of television news is something that people care about. So those were the reasons why hundreds of thousands of readers flocked to this little blog within a matter of months.
Once you revealed your identity, the networks started coming to you with offers to meet their executives and tour their facilities. Did you feel like you were able to retain your independence when presented with those kinds of opportunities?
Someone recently asked me if I was a useful idiot for Fox News PR, and I said that I wasn’t an idiot, but I sure was useful! [Laughs] And I think that was true of the other networks as well. The blog was a strange form of on-the-job training, I was learning about the industry as I wrote about it. As a result, there are posts I now regret—posts that were thinly-sourced or hurt people or caused anxiety in newsrooms. I have different standards now and I learned them the hard way.
Looking back, it’s surreal that network PR departments and executives felt the need to court an 18-year-old college student. I mean, that’s just weird! But it happened and it ultimately wasn’t about me or the fact that I was in college. It was more about the blog becoming a bulletin board for the industry. Television news is a tight knit community where people want to know what’s happening with their friends, competitors and rivals and TVNewser fulfilled that need for them.
Probably the strangest thing was being wooed by people like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity now that we know the trajectory of their stories. Hannity was a wonderful pen pal of mine and gave me great advice when I joined CNN. But the Donald Trump era destroyed that relationship just as it destroyed a lot of other relationships.
Carlson took me out to dinner and donated $100 to the blog when it had a donation box! That kind of relationship is unfathomable now and speaks to something that’s important about the era we’re talking about. If you go back and watch cable news from 2004, the topics are serious and the coverage is sometimes sensational, but the stakes don’t seem as high. The networks all existed in the same reality and people could agree to disagree without getting into verbal fist fights. Cable news is very different these days in that regard.
As you said, that’s partly because of the Trump era, but I also wonder if it’s just a side effect of success. When you started chronicling cable news, those networks were trying to establish themselves. Today, they are the establishment and that means they potentially have more to lose.
That’s a really interesting point. And, by extension, do they maybe take fewer risks than they did 20 years ago? The cable networks definitely feel more firmly rooted and sure of themselves comparted to 2004. Right now, cable is more influential than broadcast—not every day of the week, but certainly many days of the week. And we’re also seeing YouTube, TikTok and Instagram may be disrupting cable in the same way that cable disrupted broadcast 20 years ago.
Still, I do bristle a little bit at any coverage that assumes that TV news is walking the plank. Producing a newscast is a daily miracle and a team effort, unlike, say, a YouTube creator making content at home. TV news is a team sport and you’re not getting on the air without at least a dozen other people helping you. I get a lot of inspiration from that, and it reinforces my love for the art and craft of television news. And I say that now as an outsider!
Part 2: “I Sold the Blog for Beer Money”
Part 3: “I Still Have a Lot of TVs in My House”