Changes at CNN and New York Times signal less advocacy, more journalism
The highest echelons of the US media were once again in the spotlight this week, after CNN this week abandoned a newly launched streaming service and the New York Times appointed a prominent Bostonian to lead it.
CNN+ will shut down on 30 April, about a month after it was launched with a $300m investment. The new owner of the network, Warner Bros Discovery – itself the product of a $43bn merger between AT&T and the Discovery Network – decided a subscription-based streaming service was unfeasible. Only 100,000 users had signed up.
The new chairman and chief executive of CNN, Chris Licht, said the decision to dump CNN+ was the product of a uniquely bad situation.
“We have to own what happened, even though it’s not a result of what we did,” Licht told employees at a town hall meeting.
The shelving of the service leaves in the lurch high-profile hires including the veteran Fox News journalist Chris Wallace and Kasie Hunt, formerly of NBC News and MSNBC. It is also the end of a project that encouraged top CNN reporters toward less news-focused fare such as Jake Tapper’s Book Club and Parental Guidance With Anderson Cooper.
At an Oprah Winfrey-hosted company meeting on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, California last week, David Zaslav, chief executive and president of CNN’s corporate parent, reportedly said he wanted CNN to focus on the facts and set itself apart from a cable-news industry monopolised by “advocacy networks”. [Continue reading…]