CNN will charge six dollars a month for more stuff nobody watches.
CNN will charge six dollars a month for more stuff nobody watches.
C an you feel the excitement? It’s already blockbuster season on the screens. Batman! Bullock! And, um . . . Blitzer!
There’s so much media chatter attending the launch of CNN+ on March 29 that incoming boss man David Zaslav (soon to be CEO of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, today known as WarnerMedia) might as well be Cyrus, warlord of all gangsters, summoning the troops to the park to inquire of all comers, “Can you dig it?” The urgent, let’s-disrupt-the-industry panel discussions have been convened at South by Southwest. The trade papers have printed leaked details. The billboards have sprouted all over Midtown Manhattan. CNN+ stands a chance to be the most dazzling new infotainment product since Ozy Media.
CNN+! CNN . . . plus? As in, we didn’t have enough CNN and needed to plus it up? Does anyone not actually employed by the company agree with this? And unlike the old CNN, which nobody considered himself to be paying for because it was part of a large lineup of cable channels, CNN+ is gambling that people are going to get out their credit card and splash out a dedicated, separate fee for it. On top of all the other things TV watchers are already paying for.
CNN+ is being offered for $5.99 a month. Disney+ charged $6.99 a month when it launched and offered an exciting slate of brand-new and much-discussed series such as The Mandalorian, not to mention a huge library including scores of the most beloved blockbuster movies ever made.
What is CNN+ offering that is remotely comparable? Its Icarian idea is to spend huge amounts of development money and wait for mobs of Americans to pay six bucks a month to watch . . . more of the stuff they aren’t watching now. What are we going to be treated to — Andersonville, starring Anderson Cooper? Blitzkrieg, featuring Wolf Blitzer? I Used to Be on a Channel People Actually Watch, from Chris Wallace?
Fox News gets more viewers for their 6 a.m. show than CNN’s highest-rated star (Anderson Cooper) does in prime time at 8 p.m. I don’t even see how that’s possible since I don’t think I even know anybody who watches TV at 6 a.m. Last Friday night, with an actual war raging in Europe, CNN drew, on average, 973,000 viewers in prime time. Its highest-rated show, Cooper’s, drew 1.14 million viewers, of whom roughly three-quarters were over the age of 54.
If only a million Americans can be bothered to watch CNN’s biggest star in a major news moment, in prime time, for no additional cost apart from the cable bill, isn’t a million the absolute potential ceiling of potential CNN+ buyers? Why even bother launching such a small and doomed service?
Whether Fox News’s streaming service, Fox Nation, will survive, I don’t know. But Fox’s hopes are a lot more understandable given that their top personalities massively outperform CNN’s, they have fiercely loyal fans, and they drive the national conversation to such a degree that attention gets heaped on them even on CNN.
The CNN+ slate is shaping up to be the CNN attic, the land of B-side content, filler personalities, and (I’m not making this up) news reruns. CNN+ is planning to dig into the vault to air yesterday’s news: olds? People are going to pay for repurposed archival footage? MSNBC tried that when it launched. It didn’t last, because people didn’t watch.
WarnerMedia honchos hope the channel will appeal to “CNN junkies.” But CNN is not like drugs, or junk food. Approximately no one is addicted to The Airport Channel. It’s like marketing to “parsnip junkies” or “gravel aficionados.” For all I know, there are people who go around collecting cigarette butts they find on the sidewalk, but you wouldn’t try to build a business model around them. I’m trying to be kind here, but CNN+ will be about as grabby as an empty parking lot on a Sunday morning. It’s going to be as thrilling as the public-access channel that shows the zoning-board meetings, or sleet on a windowpane, or the WNBA.
Chris Wallace? People are going to pay to hear Chris Wallace talk to a political figure of the sort that gets interviewed on the news channels they already have on cable? Will Chris Wallace be able to rope in anybody who matters in the first place? If you’ve got an hour to spare for an interview, why would you appear on a show no one is watching because it’s on a streaming service no one is subscribing to?
Apple TV+ is a buck cheaper, and it has dozens of original movies and big-budget TV series starring top-drawer talent. Tom Hanks! Will Ferrell! Jennifer Aniston! Ted Lasso! And still, not that many people subscribe to it. Meanwhile, CNN+ has . . . a show about Mexican food with Eva Longoria? Another edition of Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, last mentioned by anyone ten years ago, when Zakaria was suspended for plagiarism? A political program with Kasie Hunt? The thoughts of former pro-basketball player Rex Chapman, food writer Alison Roman, and journalist Audie Cornish? Have you even heard of these people, let alone been overcome by the urge to spend six bucks a month to watch them talk? (And shouldn’t Cornish be the food writer and Roman be the politics host?)
Anything that gets dumped on CNN+ is going to bear the implied label “Wasn’t good enough to run on CNN.” Which runs 24 hours a day. So the best CNN+ offering will amount to the 25th-best thing the CNN majorettes of mediocrity could come up with that day. You’re more likely to find delight trawling through the open-mic musings of YouTube.
The CNN suits promise to offer “the video equivalent of the high-quality content one might get from a source like The Atlantic or The New York Times,” reported Variety. Ah, but think on this, geniuses: the NYT and the A, whatever their flaws, have the distinct advantage over CNN of not being television. They do 5,000 word pieces for reading, which if being spoken aloud with lots of dramatic pauses would take up an entire hour on CNN. Reader-centric outlets can also concentrate on the information rather than worrying about jacking it up with moving pictures. CNN+ is no more a competitor to the Atlantic than playing tennis is with playing chess. You can spend time on one or the other, but the one doesn’t give you what you want from the other.
CNN’s major reason for existence is its news coverage, which has usually come to mean manufactured news or manufactured coverage. The former yielded insane frenzied walls-closing-in opining about the Trump administration for four years; the latter meant Anderson Cooper’s filibustering his way through a hurricane. Trump haters enjoyed the feeling of hating Trump and drew great comfort from seeing CNN “analysts” unloading on him under the guise of “BREAKING NEWS,” of which there was very little; Cooper watchers found it entertaining to watch a Yale-educated Vanderbilt heir get pummeled by weather for attention.
The old CNN brand was “trust.” The new one is “outrage.” But assuming CNN continues to air breaking outrage/breaking news when it happens, and given that you probably can’t watch two news channels at once, why would anyone need CNN+? To watch Jake Tapper host a book club? People who like to read books are ordinarily able to do so without turning on the television. And the whole point of a book club is active: You get to speak out. TV is passive: You absorb it. If watching somebody else discuss books were an attractive programming option, somebody would have noticed by now.
Remember Pivot to Video (™), the Obama-era strategy in which magazines and newspapers would magically master an entirely new business model to save themselves? Today everyone’s sticking a + sign on their brand and promising a Pivot to Streaming. The backlash is going to be the Pivot Back to Reality, when execs discover it’s difficult to make people pay six bucks a month for something they don’t actually want.