Few people have their lives scrambled at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning, but for Jon Schlossberg, such stuff can be quite routine.
Not too long ago, Schlossberg, still only a few months into his tenure as the new executive producer of the ABC News Sunday public-affairs program “This Week,” found out in the wee hours of a Sunday morning that Senator Lindsay Graham has passed away. Suddenly, the lineup of the show he oversees needed to be redone – and quickly.
“It’s our job on ‘This Week” to follow the news. That can lead to some very exciting last-minute decisions,” confesses Schlossberg, who took the reins of the program. “We enter the weekend with a plan and wake up early Sunday and see where we are.”
As “This Week” finishes the 2025-2026 season, the program kept its status as the nation’s most-watched Sunday public-affairs show for the fifth consecutive cycle, according to data from Nielsen. “This Week” commanded an average of 2.726 million viewers for the cycle, compared with 2.634 million for CBS’ “Face the Nation” and 2.588 million for NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The NBC program leads among viewers between 25 and 54, the age demographic most coveted by advertisers in news programming.
Schlossberg is increasingly focused on the run-up to the midterm elections in November. He believes the rotation of three moderators at “This Week” — George Stephanopoulos, Jonathan Karl and Martha Raddatz — lends the program a distinction against rivals.
Stephanopoulos is “keenly interested in impactful investigative work,” says Schlossbrerg, looking at “money in politics, and how it affects power in Washington and doing big interviews.” Karl “loves to do big interviews on the road,” talking to people across the nation about their view on data centers. And Raddatz is “first out the door many times for breaking news. She will travel around the world for our show,” and her background in foreign affairs and national security gives the program an edge.
Before joining the Sunday show, Schlossberg, who has been with ABC News since 2018, spent five years as the senior producer for “Prime with Linsey Davis,” ABC News’ nightly streaming program. He has also produced local news at ABC-owned stations in San Francisco and New Orleans.
“This Week” will focus “on the sprint to the midterm” in days ahead, he says, but the show is also working on some enterprise reporting, including investigations and, hopefully. What will be some surprise guest bookings.
And Schlossberg is eager to find ways to get “This Week” content in front of larger audience, whether that involves TV or other means of distribution. “We need to keep evolving,” he says, so the show can “meet our viewers where they are, which is all over the place.”
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