Among the rank-and-file inside CNN’s Hudson Yards headquarters, the mood these days is unsurprisingly grim. Ratings at the news network, for one thing, have slumped for quite some time now. A president who despises the network was just re-elected. Jobs at CNN are also being slashed, with a 6 percent reduction in headcount (about 200 people) announced today, per a memo today from CNN CEO Mark Thompson — who previously led The New York Times through a digital-first renaissance — which also explained that the network is restructuring to launch a new streaming service and double-down on digital.
Thompson’s memo read, in part: “Our objective is a simple one: To shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
His memo goes on to distinguish between the presence that CNN now has on the Max streaming app, and the new CNN streaming app to come (which presumably won’t be a copy of the aborted CNN+ from 2022 or replicate its mistakes). “Today, I can announce that we plan to develop a new way for digital subscribers at home and abroad to stream news programming from us on any device they choose.
“It’s early days, but we’ve already established that there’s immense demand for it not just in America but across much of the world. We’ll have more to say about this new digital product in the coming months, including content plans and how we will work with our existing and future distribution partners to bring this to market.”
I’d probably quibble with his “immense demand” choice of phrasing, given that rivals Fox and MSNBC continue to run rings around CNN viewership-wise. That’s one reason, a big reason, why any standalone streamer from the network automatically faces significant headwinds. It seems to me that if you’re a network like CNN and you want to launch one of these things, you do so from a position of strength. Noah, in other words, built the ark before it started raining, not after.
Furthermore, the lay of the streaming landscape is kind of established at this point.
If Apple TV+, with its many billions of dollars and a library of best-in-class content like Slow Horses and Severance, is still a relatively small player in terms of the streaming market share it’s able to grab, why does CNN think it can fare any better than the home of Ted Lasso? With the minimal customer uptake for CNN+, we saw that consumers by and large didn’t want to pay for extra lifestyle programming from the network. So does that somehow mean … they’ll pay for news content from a network that most news consumers aren’t watching now? A lot of jobs, millions of dollars, and the legacy of a major news institution are riding on the answer to that question.
