CNN’s Staff Expansion and Print Forays Blur TV/Print Lines
Important Details: As the run-up toward the US presidential election turns serious, CNN has announced a strengthening of its relationship with Metro newspapers, having its cable news anchors and commentators contribute text columns to Metro free dailies in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. That initiative builds on a relationship between CNN and Metro that is several years old. CNN also recently announced a move which seems unusual these days — increasing its news staffing by placing new “all-platform” staffers in 10 US cities. These moves and others signal that CNN is strengthening its position as a global news player, seeing the advantage of taking branded personalities and branded reporting to every medium. Check out CNN on the television (though oddly not on its website), and you see “TV/web/mobile” splashed in several places. That’s the civilian translation for “multi-platform.”It doesn’t yet say “text,” which might seem a bit retro in our visuals-first age, but agreements like the one with Metro point in that direction.
The move comes the same week as more papers — Spokane Spokesman-Review, (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune — announced moves to eliminate or reduce their relationship with the Associated Press, long the bulwark of most regional dailies’ national and global coverage. As more US dailies contemplate such a move, it’s clear they will be looking for other, cheaper sources of national and global coverage. CNN, which can derive branding and promotional benefits from such provision of coverage, may soon emerge as a competitor to AP — and Reuters and AFP.
Implications: Outsell believes that CNN’s moves are indicative of two major phenomena in the swirling news business:
- It’s more bifurcated than ever before. Local papers used to be the primary conduits for both local and national/global news for their readers. Always-on, on-demand internet news builds on the success of cable news itself, and provides interested readers with direct and immediate ways to find out what’s going on, without the pointers and selection of local editors. Consequently, Outsell foresees the rise of dozen or so vital national/global news players, all fighting over the same turf: becoming among the top three go-to sources for nation and world reporting. Importantly, these companies cross formerly national lines, in finding audiences across boundaries and oceans. Among them are CNN, the BBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Reuters, AP, AFP, the Financial Times and News Corp.
- Ubiquitous, have-it-your-way media make mincemeat of print-based, broadcast-based and cable-based business models. Look at the above group of companies, and you can see their different lineages. In a multi-platform world in which news readers shift through their days from desktop to print to elevator to smartphone to cable, those lineages make less and less difference. Creating and distributing news in text and visual form to any medium is now becoming a necessity. In the new news race, these companies are competing with each other for share, and ultimately ad revenue.
The winners will find substantial business success, able to monetize hundreds of millions of readers. Others will find themselves consigned to niches, or subject to merger or downsizing. This battle is the big one. Regional publishers will struggle to find sustainable and growth-oriented local strategies in this new media world, while for the big guys, it’s a quest for fortune itself.