CNN faces another round of layoffs today, in the midst of the major news cycle of the first days of the new presidency. But it’s not just layoffs–it’s a pivot, which as CNN heads have laid it out might sound familiar.
In an interview with Ben Mullin of The New York Times, CNN boss Mark Thompson said that “If we do not follow the audiences to the new platforms with real conviction and scale, our future prospects will not be good.” What are those new platforms? A new streaming service that I guess is not the brief-lived CNN+. A soon-to-be-revealed “lifestyle” product that Mullin wrote will focus on “food and fitness,” following along after other outlets who seem to have suddenly realized that audiences are real human beings with lives outside of the news.
Mullin wrote that CNN has also been prioritizing vertical video and “eventually plans to publish 50 to 100 of these videos per day.” Mullin wrote that CNN has
also been prototyping a new video news service that allows users to swipe through vertical videos as they do on apps like TikTok and Instagram. Mr. Thompson said it’s not clear yet whether that will exist as a stand-alone product or as a section of CNN’s mobile app.
“You can use your thumb to flick from a CNN news story to a CNN anchor to a reporter,” Mr. Thompson said. “That’s a really interesting experiment.”
Calling the format every floundering legacy outlet is chasing “an interesting experiment” made me scream and run circles around my apartment. It feels to me like every outlet with an aging audience gets as far as “young people are always on their phones” and decides to pilfer the aesthetics of short-form video without ever being able to crack exactly why so many people get their news in those formats. It is, at least in part, the strong perspective of video personalities that audiences come for, for better and worse; outlets brain-pilled by the myth of journalistic objectivity aren’t going to rack up the views by putting their same out-of-touch content in 9:16.
In a memo to staff, Thompson mentioned a “further major pivot to digital video,” inclusive of the lifestyle product, “working with News to innovate in our multimedia storytelling capabilities,” and changes to ads. “Pivot to video” is a phrase that strikes fear into the heart of anyone who’s worked in digital media in the last 10 years, one that saw all of us chasing inflated Facebook video numbers that ultimately crumbled and cost countless journalists their jobs. Thompson has, to his credit, innovated on making the same mistake as so many outlets before him by throwing the words "major" and “digital” into the phrase.
And of course, all of this is requiring layoffs, the oldest play in the media book. CNN projects to cut around 200 roles while also, in another classic move, looking to hire. All of us have been here before, so many times, our livelihoods in the hands of bosses who seem to have no idea what audiences really want, who only know how to chase after tired trends while costing journalists their jobs. As CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote in today’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, “it's the names you don't know – producers and technicians and editors – who really power news networks. CNN staffers have been expecting layoffs for months, so today is going to be an emotional day.”
