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.
Well sure the first thing you want to do with a new product launch is to fire a bunch of people. That’s just common sense.
Might boost quarterly earnings for the first quarter of implementation. It’s almost like a pre-enshittification.
MBA = my balls ache
I’d be happy if CNN went out of business, same for Fox and all the shitty 24 hour news cycle shit that exists to sell more ads.
Maybe they could start an online streaming service? CNN+ might work as a name for it.
Ooo can I watch Stanley Tucci take a vacation for some reason??
🥹
This will be at least the third time CNN is going to try and fail to make people pay to watch them online.
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.
I remember the failure that was CNN+ but I don’t remember the other attempt.
I don’t remember what they called it (maybe CNN Premium?) but for a while, they put their live video behind a paywall. Then that ended and then they did the CNN+ thing.
I hope they call it CNN Plus Two
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Who would subscribe to this trash???
Probably a lot less than even the last time they tried this, back in 2022. But if it lasts longer than a month, then they will have made progress.
