How I would handle CNN's digital transition

If the network is to succeed in its pivot to digital, it’ll be on the back of its original reporting, not talking heads.

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Back in January 2022 I wrote a piece titled “Why I’m betting against CNN+.” As I argued at the time, CNN serves as a sort of “ambient television” that people watch during commercial breaks or when they’re waiting for a show on another network to start, and as such it doesn’t have much value outside of some larger bundle. I was highly doubtful that a substantial group of CNN “superfans” would follow it to some standalone streaming app.

I wasn’t the only one who thought this; in a relatively short period of time after I wrote that piece, the company now known as Warner Bros Discovery fired CNN head Jeff Zucker, hired Chris Licht as his replacement, and then shuttered CNN+. To be fair to Zucker, we can’t declare CNN+ a failure since it never had the opportunity to truly get off the ground.

Either way, I think most people can agree that the next year was pretty disastrous for the network. Not only did Licht alienate the staff with his mix of arrogance and aloofness, but he also doubled down on CNN’s linear TV offerings at the expense of its digital transition. In the Atlantic profile that ultimately led to his ouster, he was depicted as having a constant obsession with Nielsen TV ratings and devoting nearly all of his energy to shuffling around the hosts and segments of various CNN shows. Nowhere in the 15,000 word article does he even acknowledge that the internet exists. That’s crazy!

Now, we’re firmly in the Mark Thompson era of CNN, and there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about where it’s headed. Not only did Thompson play a vital role in the growth of the New York Times’s massive subscription business, but he’s also issued a series of memos that actually acknowledge the decline of the linear cable bundle and that CNN’s future is dependent upon the company fully embracing the internet for both distribution and monetization.

But as for how this strategy will actually play out? We’re still mostly in the dark. Puck’s Dylan Byers reported on the growing agitation among the CNN rank-and-file over Thompson’s vague statements about what this digital transition will entail:

The network veterans are also growing increasingly dubious about Thompson’s ability to guide them out of this morass, and anxious about the speed at which he seems to be abandoning the core linear product before standing up these to-be-determined digital revenue streams. In fact, the philosophizing inside CNN seems to coalesce around a sort of riddle, and one that profoundly reflects their own vulnerability and loss of confidence. Yes, yes, linear is in retreat, but CNN’s decision to accelerate its demise by not investing there could backfire and capsize the whole enterprise. Thinly veiled beneath employees’ outward pride in their historic enterprise is that it’s potentially a few strategic misfires away from becoming Yahoo.

Mark Thompson has a delicate balancing act ahead of him; he can't jeopardize the lucrative cable TV product that provides CNN with all its profits, but he also has to set up the company for its post-TV future. Whatever the solution is, it’ll likely involve a major restructuring of the organization that will cause some amount of pain, and so I don’t blame him for being intentionally vague until he’s actually ready to pull the trigger on the changes.

Luckily, as a media analyst with virtually no influence over his decisions, I don’t have to be as delicate with my prescriptions for how to fix CNN and prepare it for its digital future. Here are some major initiatives I would push through if I were in Thompson’s shoes:

Stop the obsession with linear TV ratings

If you’re a journalist who’s covered the media industry at all over the past 20 years, then you probably can recall the experience of being inundated with press releases from every cable news network, some of which will pump them out on a daily basis. These releases are peppered with jargon about various “demos” and “household penetration,” each metric cherry picked to denote one network’s dominance over all the others.

CNN needs to simply stop using these ratings as its north star metric. Not only are they tied to a declining medium — the cable news bundle — but CNN will always be destined to lose out against its competition. Fox News and MSNBC have perfected the art of doling out partisan catnip, and Fox especially has an unfair advantage in that it appeals to an older, conservative base — the very demographic that over-indexes on cable subscriptions. CNN can’t reach its target audience on cable because its target audience is no longer subscribing to cable!

Halt the anchor talent wars

A few weeks ago, The Wrap reported that Thompson is currently negotiating down the salaries of CNN’s star anchors so that he can free up some overhead to spend on other endeavors. The article revealed that Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, and Chris Wallace make $20 million, $15 million, $8.5 million, and $8 million, respectively.

These are the types of salaries you pay when your network is subsidized by lucrative cable carriage fees. They’re not reflective of the market value for these hosts. I’m highly doubtful that huge audiences are showing up simply because a program is hosted by Wolf Blitzer.

Let’s say you were to cut each of their salaries in half;  that would free up $25.75 million, enough to hire 171 beat journalists if you pay each about $150,000 of salary + benefits. Assuming that you’re strategic in your hiring, I believe those 171 journalists would provide much more long term value to the organization than a handful of overpaid hosts.

Increase digital distribution of CNN programming

So I actually think Thompson has a huge leg up in his mission simply due to the fact that CNN already has a massive web audience. It boasts nearly twice the web traffic of both Fox News and MSNBC, and it’s second only to the New York Times in terms of US visits.

That being said, it does a relatively poor job of repackaging its on-air programming for a digital audience. Most of its individual shows don’t have their own respective YouTube channels, for instance, and its main channel only publishes a handful of clips per day. On the website, the clips are put up kind of haphazardly. While browsing the clips on the page for Jake Tapper’s show, for instance, I could find little context as to how recently they had been created — whether a clip was from last night or four months ago. It’s clear that they’re mostly posted as an afterthought.

There should probably be an option to watch full episodes online, even if it’s delayed from the live broadcast. Why not squeeze additional value out of shows that will never be broadcast again on cable?

Diversify beyond political coverage

This is something that’s irked me for over a decade: cable news seems singularly focused on its political coverage. Flip on CNN or MSNBC at any particular hour — especially in prime time — and politics fill up more programming than virtually every other subject combined. Not only that, but these networks will often focus on a handful of the same political narratives for hours at a time.

Maybe this can be justified at the height of a presidential election year, but otherwise the vast majority of Americans are typically checked out of the day-to-day goings-on in the nation’s capital. I’ve never understood why it doesn’t occur to any of the executives of these companies that they could grab a larger audience share by simply diversifying their programming into other subject areas. Mark Thompson of all people should know that much of the success of the New York Times’s subscription efforts is due to its massive investments in categories like cooking, games, sports, and tech products. 

Less punditry, more original reporting

We live in an era when virtually anyone can launch a podcast, blog, or YouTube channel and immediately start offering up the same kind of political punditry that’s found on cable news. In fact, I think the value of opinion journalism is at its lowest in media history simply because there’s no scarcity to it.

If CNN is to succeed in its digital transition, it’ll be on the back of its original reporting, not the talking heads that dominate its current programming. As Thompson frees up overhead from the network’s overpaid anchors, it’s crucial that he redeploys those funds to pay for beat reporters who can engage in the meat-and-potatoes journalism that provides real value to online audiences.

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You’ll notice that none of these suggestions focus on CNN’s business model. That’s because so much still needs to change in the network’s approach to content creation and distribution before it can even begin capitalizing on new revenue streams. Thompson has hinted in interviews that he’s considering some sort of paid subscription offering, but he also knows the economics of subscription models are fairly brutal. If such a product has any hope of succeeding, then CNN needs to discard most of the institutional practices that allowed it to thrive for its first 40 years and embrace new ones that will set it up for a post-cable future. Thompson certainly has his work cut out for him.