Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to shut down CNN+ on April 30th, the once-highly-promoted streaming service that CNN had hoped would be its entrée into the digital future, just weeks after its debut due to widespread disinterest.
Michael M. Grynbaum, John Koblin, and Benjamin Mullin for The New York Times:
“While today’s decision is incredibly difficult, it is the right one for the long-term success of CNN,” Chris Licht, the incoming president of CNN, wrote in a memo. “It allows us to refocus resources on the core products that drive our singular focus: further enhancing CNN’s journalism and its reputation as a global news leader.”
MacDailyNews Take:
The shutdown is a stunning and ignominious end to an operation into which CNN had sunk tens of millions of dollars, from an aggressive nationwide marketing campaign to adding hundreds of new employees to hiring big, high-priced media stars, including the former “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace and the former NPR co-host Audie Cornish.
CNN had planned to spend more than $1 billion on CNN+ over four years, according to people familiar with the matter, budgeting for 500 additional employees, including producers, engineers and programmers, and renting out an additional floor of its offices in Midtown Manhattan to accommodate them.
MacDailyNews Take: Once, a very long time ago, one of us asked our Newhouse professor (we wish we could remember his name) what kept the news organizations from slanting their “news’ one way or the other. His reply, paraphrased: Nothing, but, eventually, if they strayed too far one way or the other, they would damage their credibility and their subscribers would respond accordingly.
CNN’s chickens have come home to roost.
It seems that people aren’t quite as stupid as CNN assumed. Looks like zero credibility equals zero subscribers.
Bottom line: One less subscription service means more SVOD subscription dollars available for Apple TV+ and others.
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The karma strikes are just beginning in 2022!
Much more to come (especially in early November)!
Because CNN couldn’t compete with Babylon 🐝 for “fake news you can trust” AND it’s a profitable ongoing business.
CNN stands for Crap News Network?
Excuse me….Comedy News Network
How can you not laugh at Brian Stelter?
Yeah, Brian Stelter, the 36 year old who looks like he’s in his late 40s
CNN can’t get 10,000 viewers a day. Fake news.
Back in 1990s, it was the Clinton News Network. Although your updated name says it all…
Just like truth social 🤣
“Just like?” Truth Social is not shut down.
It’ll also soon not be necessary once Elon cleans up Twitter’s act.
Clean up Twitter’s act? Twitter can do whatever it wants to and your First Amendment rights aren’t being violated.
https://twitter.com/ur1TruthDetect/status/1517200133716336640
Indeed!
The average person is not buying the most trusted name in journalism crap anymore, because it is the furthest thing from the truth. No amount of millions spent on celebrity liberals and premium digs could save CNN from itself…
Rest In Plus
Again, I don’t think bias (something that exists everywhere on every platform on the entire spectrum of opinion and commentary) was the primary thing that killed CNN+
It was just a dumb idea.
As an expat living overseas on two different continents in the pre and nascent internet years of the 80s and 90s, CNN was a lifeline for news. That was all there was to stay informed in English. It was an innovative, compelling idea way back then. It offered a fantastic service for people who just wanted the news at whatever time of day they wanted it. Ted Turner was a brilliant entrepreneur. Larry King in suspenders, a global rock star.
But do people want to suddenly pay for something they’ve gotten free for decades?
No, of course not.
CNN is already front loaded with way too many ads, but who really wants to pay to make them go away?
It was just a bad business idea.
CNN will still struggle to figure out how to make itself necessary when there’s no election and John King to endlessly pontificate on voting districts and turnout. That’s the only time my wife and I watch. Original content seems to lead the way for other paid services, but I just think it’s weird for a news org to be creating original content beyond talk shows. By accident, I’ve seen a couple documentaries produced by CNN (one was about comedy) and they were just kind of hollow and bad even thought the subject matter was interesting.
CBS was able to create “60 Minutes” way back when and make it a compelling TV News magazine on network TV. But network TV is dying, so how to proceed?
MDN is a place where conservatives love to bash the Left and then the Left will respond in kind, but again, I don’t believe this has anything to do with wherever you place the bias meter on CNN’s spectrum. For me, I find them vaguely MOR. Others will find them too liberal, or too conservative, or truthfully, just less relevant in today’s news saturated world.
Either way, the market wasn’t interested in this paid offering from them. Good for CNN for eating humble pie and getting out 100 times faster than they got in.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see where things go from here, but we’re hitting market saturation when it comes to all of the streaming channels consumers are expected to pay for. Everyone feels uncomfortably engorged.
I want to cut my stupid Cox TV cable, but am not ready to lose the ease of recording football games I can’t watch live and don’t enjoy trying to watch them on the NFL or NFL Sunday Ticket apps. I’m wondering if that might change if Apple buys the rights to the latter.
Regardless or your political bias, I don’t think anyone on either side of the aisle is going to miss CNN+.
CNN didn’t eat humble pie. It’s hard to do when you have no humility.
Warner Brothers Discovery fed them crow!
Heck, Libs of Tic Tok gained nearly 200,000 subscribers in one day when that retard journo-cyber-bully, Taylor Lorenz, doxed the owner, even though, days earlier, this trash excuse for a human being was sobbing on MSNBC, shedding crocodile tears for same thing done to her.
CNN, if it had its druthers, would have ran to Daddy Warbucks for cash infusion. Thanks George Soros.
Well, my comment was more aimed at the fact that they didn’t let embarrassment from the very early kill switch cancellation (a possible record?) get in the way of correcting a bad and poorly executed idea.
I’m fine if you wanna call it eating crow. 🍽 🤤
It’s still less about however one perceives their political bias, and everything about a bad idea likely born of desperation.
Next Disney!
https://media.patriots.win/post/AnJYNq1OtZ61.jpeg
We hardly knew ye.
Chris Wallace – what a fooool to have left Fox. Egg on his face.
People are living in echo chambers and losing the ability to see things from the perspective of other people. Fewer and fewer people want to watch CNN (for free). It’s obvious outside the echo chamber. So who’s the genius who thought enough customers would want to pay for CNN.
This is hilarious! Bravo!
And yet the CNN+ web site STILL has a page to register and pay for a subscription