BREAKING NEWS: CNN Is Still Up To Its Old Tricks
CNN's latest ratings stunt; New journalism jobs at the AP, BBC, FT, GQ, Hearst, ITV, National Geographic, Sky, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post and Univision
Hello folks and welcome to another edition in our brand new Tuesday slot! Today we’ll dig into what CNN’s recent debacle of a town hall with Donald Trump says about its latest attempts to stay relevant. Much of the network’s personnel has changed over the past year, including its CEO, but as its latest stunt reveals, not much has changed at all.
It’s not accurate, or fair, to include the entire 4,000-person newsroom in the mess the network’s past and present leadership has created, so let’s get that out of the way. I still revere the likes of Christiane Amanpour and Fareed Zakaria, and believe they are role models of how a journalist should conduct their business. And I still respect the actual journalism the majority of the journalists and editors in that newsroom that aren’t on seven figures still try to produce. It’s the small percentage of strategists and celebrities at the top of the hierarchy that have blown it.
Aside from CNN’s self-destruction, we also have another big update to the job board with 500 new openings added. Subscribe below for full access for roles at the likes of the AP, BBC, FT, GQ, Hearst, ITV, National Geographic, Sky, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post and Univision.
Check out Friday’s edition where we updated our Journalism Awards, Events and Fellowships Deadlines Calendar. Upcoming deadlines include for the NABJ-Apple News Fellowship, The 19th’s News Fellowship, and the London School of Economics’ JournalismAI Discovery workshop.
And lastly, if your organization is hiring, fill out this form and we’ll see if we can help. That’s all from me today, let’s get to what the hell is happening at CNN…
📚 Archive Corner 📚
Some of the best of Inside The Newsroom…
✍️ Job Corner ✍️
🚨 Featured Postings 🚨
The New York Times
Senior Product Manager, Visuals
Location: New York, NY
Contract: Full-Time
Salary: $140,000-$160,000
Requirements: 4+ years of relevant experience; 1+ year of experience working with or supporting a newsroom; An ability to collaborate with a wide set of partners; An understanding of the evolving media, technology and news landscape; Support senior newsroom editors in setting a strategy for making our news coverage more visual; Partner with visual journalists to build an insight-driven roadmap that improves editor tools and innovates on new formats at the same time.
Deadline: Rolling
Location: New York, NY
Contract: Full-Time
Salary: $140,000-$160,000
Requirements: 4+ years of relevant experience in journalism and product-development-related skills; Experience working with, in, or supporting a newsroom; Proven ability to collaborate with a broad set of partners; Understanding of the evolving media, technology, and news landscape; Implement and enable opportunities for other teams to use and extend our core article editor in their work advancing storytelling and newsroom goals; Partner with engineering and newsroom support to prioritize work needed to ensure secure and reliable 24x7 global operations for story workflows
Deadline: Rolling
Preview of New Audience and Strategy Roles ✍️
The below listings are just a sample of the many categories of journalism jobs we list. Others include Audio, Broadcast, Data/Viz, Design, Editing, Photo, Product, Reporting and Video.
Cable Entertainment Network
In the summer of 2017, I interned at Bloomberg News in New York. As part of the program, we had weekly seminars with various personnel, one of which was with a senior news executive who reported directly to Bloomberg himself. My four hours of sleep the night before was compounded by this executive’s methodical, Obama-esque opening remarks, and I struggled to keep my eyes open, let alone piece together anything he said. But one thing did make my ears prick up: “CNN is not a news network. It’s an entertainment channel.”
I was shocked and angry. Who was this know-it-all barraging my beloved CNN? He must have been detached from reality, right? Were there actually people that didn’t think the sun shined out of Chris Cuomo’s behind?
Turns out that Bloomberg executive knew what he was talking about and I’d been drinking gallons of CNN Kool-Aid, believing anything and everything they served me. The critical mistake I made was to regard CNN as the U.S. equivalent of the BBC, a central news hub that looked out for me and had my best intentions at heart. However embarrassing it is to admit, and my god I cringe at how naive I could be, I now see CNN for what it really is: an entertainment-first channel that masquerades as an objective news outlet.
Attracting new audiences is of course critical to the survival and growth of any business. I know how hard that is through running this newsletter. But unlike CNN, I do my utmost to provide a service that doesn’t lurch left and right in search of new audiences. I’m obsessed with good content. For CNN, its obsession has been, and continues to be, with audience capture. It might hit a home run each time it hosts a town hall or debate, but as soon as the presidential candidates fly out of town, the network is left with next to nothing — 3 million people watched Trump’s town hall, before its audience plummeted to an average total of 335,000 viewers between the 8-11 p.m prime time slot two days later. The next question is how shameless and desperate CNN is willing to be in its bid to stay relevant.
Like politics, cable news has become a popularity contest, with ratings seemingly the only metric that matters, instead of substance and trust, the latter of which CNN has helped tank to near-record lows for the rest of the industry. Replace the formal clothing and multi-million dollar studios, and what you have is a network built on opinion and speculation that is not too dissimilar from TMZ.
I recently wrote about trust in mainstream media and came to the conclusion that, while we still need it in our news ecosystem, we simply cannot trust any single outlet, especially those driven by shareholders and profit. To think that CNN’s projected $700m-$750m operating profit isn’t enough is mind-boggling, if not an open window into the mentality of the folks at the top.
My CNN enlightenment was unique to me, but what’s not unique is the journey they’ve taken tens of millions of people on, and the deluded decisions they continue to make.
New CEO, New CNN? Think Again
One year on since Chris Licht took over as CEO and, on paper, much of CNN’s top brass looks different to that of his predecessor, Jeff Zucker. Among Licht’s first moves was to try and convince people the network could switch tack to focus more on delivering unbiased news instead of opinion. Most corporations, or by extension their well-paid PR firms, water down public statements with vague language so they don’t actually reveal much, if anything. But Licht’s overt public admission that the network’s previous leadership pushed the network too far from the truth was shocking news in itself.
Licht quickly fired some of the network’s most well-known on-air talent including Brian Stelter, Alison Kosik and Chris Cillizza. Hundreds of other staff were also caught up in the restructuring that streamlined the network’s operations to protect it against uncertain economic conditions.
But what transgressed in last week’s town hall with Trump was yet another slap in the face to anyone who believed CNN would actually change.
The reality is that Zucker’s abrupt resignation was because of an investigation into his consensual relationship with former CNN EVP and Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust, which violated company policy. The turmoil wasn’t caused by a newsroom mutiny against the company’s fundamental ideology, like the departure of former Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker in 2018.
While Zucker served as President of CNN Worldwide from 2013 to 2022, leading them into the ratings war with Fox News and MSNBC, Licht was busy fighting his own ratings battle as EVP of Special Programming at CBS, as well as an executive producer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. To think Licht wants to legitimately revert CNN back to its news-first roots for non-financial reasons might be the most naive stance of them all.
And here lies the harshest reality for Licht and the entire CNN operation. For years, journalism’s smartest thinkers sounded the alarm over what CNN and the other cable news networks were doing. But for years, CNN plowed on with its ratings-at-all-costs strategy, launching its infamous Breaking News banner any time Trump sneezed or farted. And now its reputation might be too tarnished, the damage it has caused too widespread, its viewer trust too broken to repair. Unless it relinquishes its compulsion for ratings-at-all-costs, I think the hole CNN has dug itself will be too deep to climb out of.
That’s all for today. This is how I see it, how about you? Drop us a comment below…