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The chaotic collapse of CNN+
- elicash 5y agoOne thing that I haven't seen discussed is that the average age of a CNN viewer is 64. Building a streaming service around an elderly audience seems like it'd be tricky. That doesn't mean that it is impossible -- Fox News has done it reasonably well with Fox Nation and Fox News viewers have an average age of 68 (just like MSNBC). But was this programming built for their elderly audience, or was it supposed to be an attempt at picking up a new, younger audience? Who was this for? You watch a program like CBS Sunday Morning and it's clear they know who their audience is. Each week, they feature who passed away. They feature anniversaries of things like the Godfather and other stuff that their audience will like to reminisce about. A comedian talking about aging gracefully. Etc. But I don't think CNN did any of that with CNN+. (Source for age claims: https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/24/msnbc-rashida-jones/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/24/msnbc-rashid... )
- hdesh 5y agoGreat analysis, thanks. A question is: Do the younger audience rely on streaming platforms/news channels to get their news? Anecdotally, everyone I know in the young age group relies on social-media or web-based portals for their news.
- brimble 5y ago"Elder Millennial" checking in. Since moving out on my own (quite a while ago, at this point) I've never had cable at all. Nor have any of my friends, who span from about my age down to the oldest edge of Gen Z. Nearly all my news is radio in the car (NPR—ugh, but at least sometimes they rebroadcast BBC News and that's decent) or from web sites. Practically all video news I watch is either raw footage, or (similarly) C-SPAN. John Oliver on HBO Max if it's late and I've had a few and I'm bored—that's about it for actual "news programs", if that even counts. [EDIT] I take back part of that—I think one guy has cable. He's into football. He's also the only right-winger in my circle. Maybe a coincidence? Wouldn't be surprised if a fair bit of his "vaccine hesitancy" (to put it in mild, friendly NPR terms) came from watching Fox News, now that I think about it.
- kansface 5y agoPodcasts have completely replaced NPR for me. I’d highly recommend it.
- brimble 5y agoSomething about most podcasts make them really hard to listen to, for me. Not sure why. Among all media I find them uniquely difficult to follow. My attention wanders and I end up missing most of it. Radio-news-style programs are fine, for some reason. All I can figure is it's got something to do with the pace, and the way the hosts speak. I can even tune into weird religious talk programs on the radio, and mostly be OK, but podcasts as a medium just rarely work for me. Which bums me out, because I'm assured there are tons of good ones, but I just can't handle them. Similar formats with video are fine (on e.g. Youtube).
- sephamorr 5y agoI used to feel similarly about audio but have figured out the right settings for acceleration (1.2-1.4x) and silence trimming in pocketcasts to increase the informational content and keep it interesting - it works for me now. (that and finding the most interesting content for me)
- brimble 5y agoI'll try that! Dan Carlin's works are some of the ones I find easiest to follow, but still too difficult, so maybe I'll try it on him first.
- weberer 5y agoFox News is pretty pro-vaccine. I just looked through their website and couldn't find any stories against vaccines themselves. Several stories saying they're safe and effective. https://www.foxnews.com/health/us-covid-19-vaccine-boosters-ready-september-rollout https://www.foxnews.com/health/us-covid-19-vaccine-boosters-... https://www.foxnews.com/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-more-than-90-effective-kids https://www.foxnews.com/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-more-... https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-vaccination-kids-severe-illness https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-vaccination-kids-sev...
- bombcar 5y agoI'm not significantly "young" but I get most my "news" from links in telegram chats and places like this. If it's huge news, I'll hear about it (you can't avoid it) and if it is not huge news, why do I care?
- Pxtl 5y agoThe only "news" I get from modern streaming is the Youtubes of Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight on HBO/Crave, I get the rest of my news from Twitter (where I follow various local journos and CBC). Which I know isn't ideal and I should pay for a proper news source but the state of "print" journalism in Canada is really, really bad right now since all the non-government-run services are being bought up by ideological conservatives.
- hef19898 5y agoI secind late night shows to get news. They have a bias that is totally clear (and one I share, most of the time), are well curayed and researched (so I don't to have news all day) and are presented in a non-so-serious way (making digestion easier). In additiok to that we have dogital subscriptions to NYT, WP and physical ones for Wired and our local newspaper. Anytheing else is the non-subscription stuff from reliable news papers. I did reduce news consumption a lot so since the Ukraine war started. Oh, and not to forget: HN.
- throwaway894345 5y agoThis is kind of crazy. I always think of CNN (at least in its recent form), MSNBC, and Fox as the most unhinged, sensationalist, rabidly partisan of the mainstream networks. I didn't realize they also had quite old audiences--I wonder if this is just a coincidence or if there's some generational or age-related reason? EDIT: To all the people saying that younger people get their "unhinged" through social media and other platforms, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation.
- mountainriver 5y agoI think partisan and sensational is just a human thing. Those particular networks are definitely a generational thing
- brimble 5y agoGenerational. Younger generations get their unhinged "takes" from Twitter and podcasts.
- diogenescynic 5y agoI wonder which is worse being uninformed or misinformed. I feel like both are pretty bad, but somehow the misinformed seem worse because people are often unable to reject or form a new idea once they latch onto something.
- adamdusty 5y agoWhat's wrong with being uninformed, especially when it comes to "news"?
- u2077 5y agoI agree, very rarely do I actually need to know so-called “news” when you turn off the TV, the sky is no longer falling and the world is (mostly) fine. Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
- ajross 5y agoFWIW: Fox Nation is much smaller in scope. It's basically a bunch of opinion shows (barely more than podcasts, honestly) designed to feed into a cyclic link sharing ecosystem that already exists and is somewhat starved for "legitimate" content. Basically these are links that people who are being fed Breitbart and InfoWars stories click on, because they're "serious news" they can't otherwise get on the internet. (Also, IIRC most of their revenue is still advertising from freely distributed content, not subscriber fees.) CNN+ was instead trying to do all this from the ground up, while competing with a much more robust existing ecosystem. Centrists and lefties already have Slate and Vox and Politico and of course all the existing "print" media sites to fill their "legitimate" news needs. What was CNN going to give them that they didn't already have?
- Vaslo 5y agoVox, Politico, and definitely slate are not centrist
- krona 5y agoMaybe this partly explains why some of the CNN+ YouTube clips were getting orders of magnitude more views than the channel itself.
- barbacoa 5y agoYouTube artificially promotes CNN content. I suspect their content on YouTube would have similar number of views to CNN+ otherwise.
- crate_barre 5y agoIt’s the median, not the average. And I think for CNN the median is definitely lower than that, but for FoxNews it’s about right.
- bena 5y agoOf course they want a new, younger audience. Because in order to be 64, you first have to be 63. It's not like you wake up one day and say, "Well, looks like I have to watch news all the time". These habits accrue over time. Especially as you get older and you get more involved and have less to do.
- brewdad 5y agoI'm a solid middle generation GenX. I rarely watch cable news anymore. When I was younger and had actual cable, I'd channel surf and often end up on one of the news stations if nothing else was on. I still have access to the same channels through YoutubeTV but it's far less conducive to channel surfing, so now if there's nothing on I want to watch, I turn off the TV or pop over to Netflix or whatever. The old habits are pretty much gone.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoI pull up a few news sites twice a day and read a few articles, but I don't watch anything and I rarely listen to anything either. The written articles are usually more informative and contain less partisan stupidity. I can't do podcasts, because I'll inevitably tune them out, hear something important to the presentation, and then spend my afternoon rewinding. Also, the need to be sensationalist is vastly stronger for podcast creators than it is for major media orgs whose networks have cable contracts.
- bena 5y agoRegardless of what you do, you're not only a sample size of one, but it doesn't mean they're not going to try. The person I responded to was musing that CNN was doing this to try and crack into a younger audience. And it's like: no shit. They want to either find ways to integrate into more youthful demographics or get more youthful demographics to integrate them into their habits. Joe Camel wasn't made to appeal to adult smokers.
- bastardoperator 5y agoThe 64 year olds used to say TV rots your brain, apparently it's true!
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- listenallyall 5y agoSomehow the article fails to mention the weak subscriber numbers and lack of customer demand. Or full CNN's ratings, which would make a logical executive wonder how many people would pay for CNN when it can barely attract viewers for free.
- elicash 5y agoThis was already mentioned in previous Axios articles. This article is NEW info.
- listenallyall 5y agoThat isn't true. The first block rehashes quotes from Feb 4th, Jeff Zucker's resignation, and Chris Licht taking over. Thats all very old news. And the previous article buried subscriber counts in paragraph 14, and never mentions CNN's ratings or viewership, or CNN+'s viewership per show. Instead, both this article and the previous one is an attempt to obfuscate the reality of awful viewership as just a victim of executive realignment: It's being shuttered due to a strategic misalignment between Discovery executives and CNN executives. and The service was shut down because CNN and its new parent disagreed over whether the investment made sense long-term. But not, "CNN shut down the service when it became obvious virtually nobody was willing to pay a non-promotional price for the product."
- radiospiel 5y ago~~~"...Inside CNN, executives saw the launch as a success. As of Tuesday, CNN+ had roughly 150,000 subscribers...."~~~ ups, sorry. As the sibling states this is in the other CNN+ related article
- listenallyall 5y agoSubscriber counts are the #1 most important metric for any streaming service. Did you see what happened to Netflix the other day? Axios buried CNN+ subscriber counts in paragraph 14 of the earlier article and doesn't mention them at all in this one. The entire series is an attempt to blame corporate mergers and lack of executive leadership rather than the fact that CNN has terrible viewership and brand equity. You need to learn to be a more critical news reader.
- jaywalk 5y ago> A Discovery executive referring to CNN+ as "CNN minus" particularly rubbed people the wrong way Sorry, that's pretty funny. It seems like everyone outside of CNN could see that CNN+ was doomed to fail, but the Kool Aid was flowing freely inside.
- bombcar 5y agoIt literally WAS CNN- - it didn't even carry CNN, because they didn't want to fight the cable war.
- padobson 5y agoThis seems like it would happen a lot at corporations that deal in propaganda. Once you abandon truth as a value, how do you stop the culture in your content creation from infecting your business decisions? I guess Fox News has figured it out. I'd be curious to see more examples of both success and failure.
- bredren 5y agoI led a team that did very early work designing iPad apps for Discovery. We are talking iPad gen2. Back then the entire project was designed to appear like it was a serious look at investing in digital for the channel when the goal was actually to slow down the shift from linear cable subs to apps. It was bizarre then but today it looks like the bread and butter of traditional media company politics.
- krallja 5y agoI've been trying to get people to pronounce it as "positive," like a disease. "Yeah, I'm Disney positive. I was Apple positive, but got over it in February. Don't hardly know anyone with CNN positive."
- gsibble 5y agoAll CNN basically produces is Kool Aid so I'm not surprised they were all drunk on their own stuff.
- ecshafer 5y agoThis whole thing just makes no sense from a business perspective. Who would want this? Who would pay money for this? It just seems like it's an idea that some executive got, and no one was willing to tell them that it sounds like a horrible idea until it went too far and it collapsed. Did they do any marketing research or even a gut check? This seems pretty normal for the type of companies that just hire McKinssey for strategy and neglect and sanity checks. The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to pay for the news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers have enough trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN needs to compete with other streaming services, and all of the free streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher quality than CNN ). It's all baffling.
- grendelt 5y ago> Who would want this? Who would pay money for this? Who?! Why, all those countless streaming service customers, of course! I mean, have you seen how much Netflix and all these others are bringing in?! Surely if we launch some sort of streaming service they'll throw that money at us too! Right? Right?
- ollien 5y agoThere was someone I saw on Twitter (which I can't find now) who kept a tally of all the sites that asked them to subscribe when they visited them. The total amount they'd need to spend to subscribe to everything they saw was something crazy like $350/mo.
- jmull 5y agoI would guess that was the narrative: that a streaming service with a new tone would appeal outside their existing demographic. Not that I buy it, but that had to be the idea: not to reach CNN viewers, but new viewers.
- tablespoon 5y ago> The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to pay for the news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers have enough trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN needs to compete with other streaming services, and all of the free streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher quality than CNN ). > It's all baffling. Not really. If they thought cable is in long-term (perhaps terminal) decline, they've really only have two choices: let the business wind down or try to pivot into something that's perceived as not dying. Starting a streaming service seems like an attempt at the latter. A lot of newspapers (especially ones owned by private equity) are doing the former.
- nickdothutton 5y agoReminds me vaguely of some of the collapses the existing media giants experienced when first dipping their toes into the Internet in the mid to late 90s, thinking it was a new medium they could just flow info.
- diogenescynic 5y agoReminds me of Meg Whitman and Quibi.
- olivermarks 5y agoCNN's arc has been interesting to say the least. Widely lampooned as 'Chicken Noodle News' when it launched in 1980 as a lightweight 24 hour cable channel in the style of the broadsheet 'USA Today' newspaper it gradually became more and more top heavy with pompous oped bloviators, pretentious 'situation room' shows. A minor part of inexpensive cable packages in 1980 alongside MTV, it somehow became very expensive to buy despite running endless ads. CNN's current Neilsen numbers are abysmal, it's hard to imagine why they thought people would pay even more for 'plus' content, especially given their predominantly retirement age+ demographic. Meanwhile Joe Rogan is averaging 11m views per podcast with Tucker Carlsen and his script writers a very distant second at around 3.2m. (CNN got .8m fpr their most viewed primetime show Q3 2021)
- toyg 5y agoThe making of CNN was Desert Storm. They covered it better than anyone else. There and then they hooked the 30-40 demographic of the time and exploded. They've lived off that reputation for decades at this point.
- matwood 5y ago> They covered it better than anyone else. Doesn't CNN still have more reporters world wide than any other US based news org? I imagine the BBC has the most when comparing news orgs around the world. I think this is why CNN still gives better news coverage than other stations, but the opinion shows drown a lot of that out.
- protomyth 5y agoCNN had reporters hanging out a hotel window reporting live, and then basically did the absolute funniest con at the door while one of the reporters hid in the bathroom. I remember watching it at my friends during the first night of the bombing. They were the only network with any clue. As a 20ish year old those were reporters I could respect.
- olivermarks 5y ago@toyg so true, they were 'young', fresh and growing in credibility in that era compared to the crusty old network free terrestrial TV news anchor shows. They sold shock and awe really well for the MiC. https://youtu.be/oPNHYi0x2Mk https://youtu.be/oPNHYi0x2Mk
- a4isms 5y agoIf I read the article right, with a merger in the offing, they realized that the entire project was likely to be cancelled before launch when the reconstituted executive team performed a thorough review of every line of business. It's quite common for ventures like this to be put on hold while a review is conducted, and even if the venture is sound, such things often wind up dying because of infighting over the review or loss of momentum. The article suggests that the team, anticipating this outcome, rushed the launch to make it more difficult to cancel the service. As it happened, the launch fizzled. But if I'm reading it right, the service was doomed from the moment the merger was finalized. Perhaps if the launch was a surprise success, it might have survived the merger. So perhaps the rushed launch was a "Hail Mary," and while it seems embarrassing, it's no more embarrassing than launching a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of an American football game and seeing it picked off and run back for a touchdown. Such things are of no real consequence, because the game was already lost.
- Traster 5y agoIt's not only that, Jeff Zucker, who ran CNN was forced out in February, so the big executive sponsor of this project disappeared. That's quite likely to have had a big impact too.
- cmckn 5y agoI got the impression that Zucker was advocating for the streaming service in part to pad his own resume and gain a tactical position at the merged company.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoOr, it really was that bad and flopped so hard out of the gate that it was better to cut the losses.
- a4isms 5y agoI was speaking to why they rushed the launch. CNN+ being intrinsically bad as a service and/or a terrible fit for their built-in market can also be true, and the two reinforce each other: This is 100% unadulterated speculation on my part, but if the executives still in charge of CNN+ thought it had problems, they'd be doubly fearful of the axe coming down when the business was reviewed, so they may have been motivated to get it launched whether they were ready to launch or not. If they had no fear of a business review and possible cancellation, they might have decided to delay the launch and try to fix the content/market problems.
- diogenescynic 5y agoGood riddance, CNN is horrible and deserves to fail. CNN's false equivalency, "both sides" reporting a la CrossFire has done untold damage to our country and greatly contributed to political polarization. I want objective news--not something that's just giving air time to lobbyists from two different political factions to give their spin. CNN always hired laughably awful people like John Bolton Andrew Cuomo. Jeff Zucker really destroyed credible news programming and hurt America.
- InfiniteRand 5y agoI actually was planning to get CNN+, but only after cancelling my basic cable subscription. CNN was one of the holes in the channels I occasionally watch but could not find good streaming options for
- diogenescynic 5y agoCNN+ didn't even have CNN the cable channel, so it wouldn't have worked for what you were thinking of. It had totally different (worse) content...
- MBCook 5y agoAnd that’s what really confuses me. Why not just start with a simulcast and maybe some extra programming available. That would’ve been so much cheaper. Then grow that into what they wanted it to become.
- olyjohn 5y agoProbably because of their contracts with cable companies. The cable companies weren't going to let their own channel compete against them.
- vincentmarle 5y agoThat was the dilemma that HBO used to deal with, but they have seem to found a way out of it..
- jmull 5y ago> About 350 of the 700 people that work for CNN+ will be laid off with pay and benefits for the next 90 days. After that, any employee that doesn't find a new role with the network will be granted at least six months' severance. That sounds pretty good. At least the people who are most affected by the poor leadership and decision-making are getting a decent chance to land on their feet.
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- chasd00 5y ago9 months of pay to find a new job? That’s a little more than “decent chance” to me. That sounds more like 6 months PTO then 3 months of actual job searching.
- olyjohn 5y agoWhat are you saying? That they should have given people less severance?
- _fat_santa 5y agoI think what they are saying is the incentive structure makes it advantageous to not find a job. If they tell you "90 days of severance and if you don't find a job by then, here's an additional 6 months of severance", there's suddenly a huge incentive for you to not find a new job in the initial 90 days.
- perardi 5y agoThis is a wild collapse…but probably still not as big of a flop as Quibi. Or at least, they seemed to have burned through slightly less money, and may be able to renegotiate some of the contracts to get the talent onto the main CNN service. And it’s not a totally bonkers idea to try to move the CNN brand into streaming as cable becomes less and less dominant…whereas Quibi was just madness, through and through. https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21528404/quibi-shut-down-cost-subscribers-content-tv-movies-katzenberg-whitman-tiktok-netflix https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21528404/quibi-shut-down...
- dr_ 5y agoI enjoy Alison Romans content on YouTube, was always disappointed that the Times’ canned her. Her recipes and techniques are great, and IDGAF attitude was refreshing. She seemed like she could at some point carry on with what Bourdain was doing, but with her own flair (and tbh she’s a real cook). It seemed like she was transitioning to CNN+ so I may have subscribed for that reason alone. But I guess it will be back to YouTube (for now)!
- candyman 5y agoI don't know who did it but someone killed CNN a long time ago when they started "reporting" on what was trending on Twitter. I remember the day many years ago and thinking "what the hell are they doing and why would someone sign off on that?" A single person on YouTube could just do this - no need for an organization like CNN. All such "news" sites are dead to me!
- billfor 5y agoNot sure how it could even pass the financial planning stage. More people watch Food Network than CNN on any given night, yet they expected people to pay for more CNN?
- photochemsyn 5y agoThis sort of confirms my suspicion that the major news corporations in the United States are not really in business to make money, any more than state-funded news outlets in China or Russia are. Their purpose is to control the narrative being fed to the general population, in the Orwellian sense. Think about it for a moment - even if unprofitable, would they be allowed to go out of business? Some other entity would step in and buy them up, solely so they could use them to promote their own business/state propaganda agenda. See Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post as a leading example. Does Bezos care at all if the Washington Post turns a profit or not, as long as they can be counted on to spin their news coverage in the direction Bezos prefers, and not cover stories like the nature of AWS contracts with various federal agencies, etc.? Most people are aware of this dynamic at some level and very few would now actually shell out their own money to be fed more of this state-corporate propaganda, which is why a paid subscription service like CNN+ rapidly went belly-up. Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates (i.e. Youtube/Google directs all news inquiry searches to these 'legitimate outlets' like CNN, FOX, MSNBC, blocking any access to a wide variety of independent shows being run by non-affiliated news & opinion content generators, regardless of their popularity).
- cowmix 5y agoFor someone that (in theory) doesn't care about turning a profit, he really loves to put content behind a pay-wall.
- brewdad 5y agoThere may be a paywall but it's one of the cheapest paywalls of any daily newspaper in the US. There are constant, renewable deals for WaPo subscriptions such that anyone paying more than $4 a month is grossly overpaying. In contrast the two daily newspapers closest to me charge $10 a month and $4 a week for online access.
- hackernewds 5y agoMost people will not pay anything for news that can also be consumed elsewhere, so it does play against the narrative of propaganda over profit.
- smm11 5y agoChaotic collapse? I'd call it doing business.
- aluminussoma 5y agoI am going to post an alternative take to the general sentiment that saw this coming from a mile away. I think it is awesome that an organization as old as TimeWarner was able to launch a bold new product. Yes, it may have failed, but they tried. Launching new products is insanely difficult, if not impossible, in large organizations - even in the most esteemed tech companies. And yet that is how many companies die, because they cannot overcome the internal inertia to launch something new.
- motohagiography 5y agoWhat a rare and interesting view. Most products fail anyway, yes, so that this one originates from a huge conglomerate doesn't do much to change the odds. I'm bearish on legacy media and CNN in particular for other reasons, but other examples would be how Yamaha, Sony, Nintendo, have all launched fresh products that grew from within a legacy org structure. Nice to have my own schadenfreude broken by a thoughtful insight. I'd wonder whether the natural evolution of a succesful large org ends as a ventures group.
- TheAceOfHearts 5y agoAfter the announcement that CNN+ was shutting down I went on their Twitter account (@CNNplus) to get a feel for what sort of content they produced. Maybe it's because I'm from a younger generation, but it all comes off as overproduced and inauthentic media-speak. It's obvious that their demographic is old people, since all of their media personalities are old people. Ben Stiller talking about making new friends in old-age thanks to Twitter. Discussing parenting tips with Anderson Cooper. A bunch of washed-up media personalities with nothing new or interesting to say. The refusal to pass the torch onto a younger generation while clinging to their positions of power becomes a generational plague. CNN is a walking corpse which will pass away with its audience.
- Mongo_Mak 5y agoCNN went from being the premier news gathering/dispensing agency to their present state of a news reporting agency by making the decision to replace their own field reporters with information given them by other agencies. My take, anyway.
- Cyphase 5y ago"The chaotic collapse of Convolutional Neural Networks? Hmm, what's this about? And what's a CNN+? Wait... oooohh."
- tyingq 5y agoFor me, it was as simple as "I already have access to FREE news sources without commercials that are higher quality than CNN" My Roku has channels like SkyNews and Al Jazeera where I can watch both live and pre-recorded stories at no charge. No commercials either. They of course, have their own bias problems, but since I know what those are, I can take any stories on affected topics with an appropriate grain of salt. I don't know why CNN thinks I would pay them when better is available free.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoSky News isn't the best, but Al Jazeera is top notch.
- gsibble 5y agoI'm definitely not Al Jazeera's demographic, but even I find their reporting to be excellent.
- smallerfish 5y ago> What's next: Discovery wants to build one scaled, subscription streaming app based around HBO Max's branding that includes a cheaper, ad-supported tier. It will eventually combine discovery+ with the HBO Max app after initially offering them as a bundle. Much of the CNN+ programming will be reallocated to other platforms. Some features like CNN's "Interview Club" will likely live on CNN's free, ad-supported app. Other shows may be included in HBO Max. Makes sense, but it's astonishing how bad HBO Max's app continues to be, given its strategic importance. The catalog is generally excellent, but the UX and reliability of the app and platform are terrible. I wonder if the new executive team will lop of heads responsible for the current state of the product, or whether they're insulated enough that the dysfunction will continue.
- kurupt213 5y agoI wonder if Chris Wallace feels like a clown after his fox bridge burning.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoI read somewhere that he got a "tramp stamp" style tattoo of "CNN+", which if true has got to be super embarrassing.
- dang 5y agoRecent and related: CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after launching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 - April 2022 (316 comments)
- tatrajim 5y agoI wish there were a channel that highlighted, in revolving fashion, subtitled news broadcasts from major media outlets around the world. Having lived in South Korea for many years and finally learning passable Korean, I was amazed at the quality and depth of reporting on the evening (8 p.m.) news there, essentially 50 minutes of in-depth coverage of topical issues, with no commercial breaks. The sheer amount of quality reporting on the economy, politics, and global events puts the US thin gruel efforts at journalism to shame. Doubtless there are other examples around the globe of excellent news coverage, and it would be a wake-up call to Americans to see how mediocre our own fare is.
- xyzzy21 5y agoNothing "chaotic" about it. It was an ego-driven plan to create it that had ZERO market validation to suggest it would succeed. Basically the same thing as "Quibi" and its failure. 100% predictable.