The CNN+ Catastrophe Who could possibly have seen this one coming? Charles C. W. Cooke
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-cnn-catastrophe/
The funny thing about markets is that they need both supply and demand to work. CNN+, America’s newest streaming service, certainly has the supply part down. It has been heralded by a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign and pushed relentlessly on CNN’s cable channels, and it is available on the web, on iPhone and Android, on Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV. What it doesn’t have, it seems, is the demand — the customers. Per CNBC, “fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, according to people familiar with the matter.” And this is after CNN announced The Don Lemon Show would be featured on the service. What gives?
Wouldn’t you just have loved to been in the room when CNN’s leadership met with the enablers at McKinsey and told them that the network expected its new streaming service to have 15 to 18 million subscribers by 2026? What McKinsey’s consultants should have said in response to this — what McKinsey’s consultants would have said had they been doing their job — is, “Are you joking, you delusional lunatics?” Their reaction should have been shock and embarrassment, followed by a cacophony of derisive laughter, and at the end of it all, the delivery of some tough love. What they seem to have done, instead, is jumped up onto the table like Stephen Glass describing his fictional Jukt Micronics meeting and shouted, “Yes, yes — a thousand times, yes.”
In theory, at least, the role of an organization such as McKinsey is to ask, “Why?” Everyone wants to start a streaming service. Why does yours make sense? If CNN were run by thoughtful people, it might have taken the opportunity to ask some fundamental questions of itself before procuring a new toy: “Who are we?” “What do we do?” “Are we good at it?” “Why do our staff keep getting themselves embroiled in scandals?” “Has anyone heard Brianna Keilar utter a single sentence that might be termed useful?”
Had these questions been asked, it might have dawned on CNN’s leaders that the way in which Brian Stelter sees the network is not, in fact, the way in which anyone else sees the network. Had these questions been asked, it might have become apparent to CNN’s leaders that Americans do not regard CNN and its staff as brave, diligent, indispensable firefighters, that consumers do not believe Jim Acosta to be a hero, and that, when people think about America’s turbulent democracy, the last person who comes to their minds as a fix is Jim Sciutto. Had these questions been asked, CNN’s leaders might have learned that the network’s obsession with Fox is annoying to viewers, and that launching CNN+ with a flagship documentary, The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, would probably send the wrong message. As for the network’s slogan: “The Most Trusted Name in News”? One might as soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.
Thus, the entirely predictable disaster that is unfurling before our eyes. And, thus, CNN’s bafflement that it has become a joke. And what a joke! 10,000 people a day? That’s the size of the home crowd at a Durham Bulls minor-league-baseball game. It’s the number of people who attend “MerPalooza,” a “celebration of mermaids and mermen,” or the international UFO convention and film festival, or BronyCon. It’s as many people as sent in submissions last year to the Internet Cat Video Festival. Even the Edsel, that byword for commercial failure, did better than CNN+, with 63,110 models being sold in its first, ill-fated year. A cable network that cannot break a million viewers in prime time was never going to cajole 15 million people into paying to watch its content online. But this?
Will things improve? Not at this rate, no. Without a dramatic intervention from a dispassionate and blunt third-party, CNN will limp on as it has before — devoid of purpose, bereft of understanding, confused by its situation, blinded by hubris, the last man in the room to realize that he is slowly destroying himself. The harsh truth is that CNN needs to go back to basics. It doesn’t need a plus, but a series of minuses — minus the sanctimony, minus the bias, minus the self-rationalization, minus the witless caricaturing of its rivals.
Not everyone remembers this, but, once upon a time, one of those “N”s stood for “News,” you know.
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