CNN is cutting 100 positions across the company as it accelerates its push into digital subscription products that reach beyond its shrinking cable TV audience.
In a lengthy Wednesday memo, CNN Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Thompson told employees that the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned unit “will lean more heavily into digital products.” He said CNN.com will offer its first digital subscription product by the end of this year, but did not specify what the new offering will carry.
Thompson, who joined CNN from the New York Times Co. last year, has focused on how to strengthen the news operation’s business while its chief source of revenue, pay TV subscribers, is in steady decline. The network’s prime time TV ratings are down dramatically from the highs reached in 2020.
I know that they have video on their site, but honestly, it seems like website-based news really really leverages newspaper strengths more than TV news strengths. Like, I’ll hit cnn.com when there’s some major national incident happening, but I just promptly flip off whatever streaming video stuff they try to play. I want to use their website more like a newspaper than a cable news channel. I don’t care about their famous anchorpeople or their 3d transitions or whatever.
I think that at the end of the day, there are going to be some online subscription news stuff there for the long haul, but I’m a little skeptical that it’ll necessarily be the TV news guys that survive, rather than the newspaper guys.
For a while, I’d say starting really with the 1991 Gulf war but peaking at 9/11, the 24-hour TV news watching fanatic was a prime audience that you knew you could rely on.
But now between internet news and social media, it’s basically become a relic.
My father and father-in-law were that prime demographic. They both watched 24-hour TV news constantly. They were both born in 1931. They’re both dead now. CNN’s audience for this is gone.