CNN to Launch Competitive News Wire
Important Details: In December, CNN will host a three-day meeting at its Atlanta headquarters for newspaper editors. The goal: sign them up for the cable network’s new wire service. CNN, in its letter, to editors emphasizes its global reach:
“Like most major news organizations, CNN has its own internal wire service to provide original reporting on world news. With a worldwide staff of 3,800 people, 22 international bureaus, soon to be 15 domestic bureaus (including Seattle), 900 North American TV broadcast affiliates, a Web site, and a radio network, we are able to maintain a strong flow of up-to-the-minute stories. We now believe we have the base to offer this service to other news organizations.”
CNN, the leading cable news network in the US, has been moving toward its goals for awhile. In September, 2007, it terminated its longstanding relationship with Reuters, believing its annual fees could be better purposed in hiring its own staff and expanding its own reporting. Then, in August, it announced an expansion (Insights, CNN’s Staff Expansion and Print Forays Blur TV/Print Lines, Sept. 3, 2008) of its bureaus within the US, doubling from 5 to 10, as it reassigned reporters from Atlanta, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco to Columbus, Ohio; Denver; Houston; Las Vegas; Minneapolis; Orlando, Fla.; Philadelphia; Phoenix; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Seattle. In that announcement, it made a point of saying the new bureaus would feature “all-platform” journalists, enabling “one-man bands” to utilize the cheaper and more flexible technologies of the day, in place of centralized, expensive traditional TV studios.
The new wire’s launch date is uncertain, as is its business model, though sources tell Outsell that CNN will rely on a traditional license-fee-for-service model, rather than engage in an advertising revenue share model. Also uncertain is how much CNN plans to incorporate content from the hundreds of local broadcast stations that participate in its Newsource affiliate program, which has existed more as an internal wire.
Implications: The wire and syndication business has been changing slowly over the past couple of years. Such aggregators as Newstex, Mochila, Voxant and Critical Media have all brought newer spins to it. Just this fall, start-up Politico.com started offering both national political content and ad syndication to local newspapers. CNN’s new wire, though, is a potential game-changer, given the size of its organization (3800 staffers), the weight of its report, the equity of its brand and its video legacy, just as web users get used to watching news online.
The CNN wire move also appears aimed squarely at the Associated Press, coming at a vulnerable time given the budding newspaper revolt over AP pricing (Insights, AP: The Price of Dismemberment, Oct. 30, 2008).
At this point, we have more questions than answers about the new CNN service. (The news company, ironically, hasn’t been granting interviews about it.) For instance:
- Will the wire offer local broadcast station text and video from its Newsource affiliates?
- How strong will the company be in text; how strong in non-national/global video?
- How will it price its service, at all-you-can-eat pricing, or a la carte?
- Can it match the timeliness and breadth of AP, Reuters and AFP?
- Most essentially, is it really prepared to move from being a news medium to becoming a vendor, with all the to-be-built-out infrastructure and ongoing customer service that requires? (Its current wire is more blog-like.)
All big questions. What is unmistakeable, going into 2009, is that lines among broadcasters, cablecasters, newspapers and wires are getting blurred very quickly. The new business is all about multimedia content, multi-platform distribution and competing in areas that used to seem like the other guys’ businesses. Now the news business is becoming global, with the spoils going to the strategic, the well-funded and those that can execute.