CNN does not get it
CNN is undergoing vast changes, but they fundamentally misunderstand how the business has changed.
Last week, CNN fired Brian Stetler, their political commentator and host of one of their most popular shows, Reliable Sources.
The reason to ditch Stetler was not bad ratings. Reliable Sources was, in fact, one of their top rated shows.
The decision to fire Stetler and cancel his show was not based on ratings, it was a political decision. Stetler’s show was decidedly ‘left;, spending a great deal of time skewering the opposition Fox News and the GOP.
But CNN is undergoing vast changes. New CNN President, Chris Licht has decided to move CNN to ‘the center’, and recently met with Republicans in Congress to see how the news service can be improved. Licht takes his orders from David Zaslav, the CEO of the newly merged Discovery Warner, but Zaslav takes his orders from John Malone, the leading shareholder not just in Discovery Warner but also in Murdoch’s News Corp.
The decision to let politics play the lead here is an attempt to move CNN closer to ‘the middle’ and try and get more viewers.
This kind of triangulation of content to improve ratings is very old thinking. It’s a product of a linear world — a time and place in which you had a very limited shelf space for programming or news and you had to decide what to run in what time slot. What would go best at 8PM? What is the competition running? What is rating and what is not.
But the world of linear television is dead, or at least dying, and along with it, those limitations and that kind of thinking.
The future, clearly, is non-linear — whatever you want, whenever you want it. I am a bit surprised at Zaslov, as he is busy transiting his flagship Discovery from linear cable (which he seems to understand is dead) to non linear digital on demand, like Netflix. When it comes to news, in the non-linear world, there is no need to try and re-position your news to match some perceived understanding of the audience. Rather, a non-linear world allows ALL voices to be heard, all opinions, the entire spectrum of politics and opinion.
In the linear world of TV and cable news, there is actually very little ‘shelf space’ for content. There is the morning slot, maybe 7–8 AM. after that, most people are at work. Then there is the evening, say 7PM -11PM, after which most people are asleep. That’s it. Not really a lot of time or a lot of content, so in point of fact, most news is simply never covered or seen or reported. The pressures of ratings are simply too demanding.
But in the non-linear world, shelf space is limitless. You may run everything — the full spectrum of politics. And you don’t have to worry about the politics of the viewer because you are providing every opinion and every point of view.
People who have grown up in the linear world have a hard time thinking non-linear,
But look at Amazon.
If you are running a Barnes and Noble bookstore, you spend a lot of time agonizing over what books to carry in the store. You only have so much space. More fiction? More science fiction? Less classics? Less history? It’s endless.
At Amazon, no one has to worry about that. No one even thinks about it. And Amazon carries 33 million books. No one says “that is too many”. When will news go to non-linear? Well, funny you should ask. That is exactly what we are going to do at UnPress.
The Amazon of news.