In short
Mark Thompson, CEO of CNN, explains CNN’s new $6.99–$7/month direct-to-consumer streaming subscription (“CNN,” with Basic and “All Access” tiers) and how CNN plans to transition from cable to internet-first distribution while preserving cable revenue.
Guest backgrounds
Mark Thompson previously led the New York Times (CEO, built its online subscription business starting around 2012). He now runs CNN. The episode also references Barry Weiss (CBS News hire) as a figure in the broader “fix bias/trust” debate.
Key claims
CNN’s core advantage is trust, not ideology. Monetization should follow audience engagement (“delight today’s audiences” first). CNN must reach audiences on devices and formats they already use (short sessions, mobile, on the move). CNN’s ratings are higher than 10–20 years ago; audience decline is driven by fewer cable households, not worse performance. The subscription targets cord cutters and loyal CNN.com users.
Notable examples
cord-cutting numbers (about 80M since COVID; Thompson cites 18M likely interested in paying for CNN standalone). CNN’s health expertise (Sanjay Gupta) and planned weather app. References to NYT’s digital subscription growth and ESPN/Fox launching streaming bundles. Mentions CNN programs like “Crossfire” and “Abbey Phillip Newsnight.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOMark Thompson's Journey in News Media
1:08 to 3:06
Discussion on Mark Thompson's background and his vision at CNN.
“From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka.”
The Future of CNN and Subscription Model
3:06 to 7:12
Exploring CNN's transition to a subscription-based model and its challenges.
“And actually, honestly, I mean, you know, I think you could also say BBC, New York Times, CNN, that feels like a box set as well.”
Target Audience for CNN's Subscription Service
7:12 to 11:24
Identifying potential subscribers for CNN's new service and market research.
“the rebuilding of a suite of different ways of building revenue out of news.”
CNN's Strategy in a Changing Landscape
11:24 to 14:00
Discussing CNN's strategy to attract new consumers while retaining cable subscribers.
“they'd like to get that bit of cable back without having to buy anything else.”
CNN's Target Audience and Product Offerings
14:00 to 28:02
Explore CNN's audience strategy and the new digital product aimed at non-cable users.
“Americans who use.com at least once a month.”
World Cup Reflections and Political Commentary
28:02 to 29:42
Discussion on the World Cup's dynamics, the political implications, and cultural observations.
“Congo hadn't made a Men's World Cup in 52 years and hardly made this one because the United States was supposedly worried about Ebola even though no one on the team had Ebola.”
CNN's Position and Challenges
30:29 to 37:20
A deep dive into CNN's branding, societal perception, and the challenges it faces in the current media landscape.
“We were talking about where you fit in in the landscape.”
Ownership Uncertainty and Future of CNN
37:55 to 42:00
Analyzing the implications of ownership changes at CNN and what it means for its journalism and audience.
“On The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.”
The Future of CNN and Editorial Independence
42:00 to 44:10
Learn about the challenges CNN faces in maintaining editorial independence while adapting to new digital platforms.
“you know, dealing with sensitive and difficult stories in a way which is fair-minded and treats everyone involved in dignity.”
Navigating Costs and Revenue Models in Journalism
44:10 to 48:40
Explore the economic challenges of producing quality journalism in a shifting landscape and the need for a sustainable business model.
“supporting that and supporting the idea that part of the value of CNN to audiences is its independence.”
Show all 11 chapters
Digital Engagement and Talent Transformation
48:40 to 51:40
Discover how CNN is adapting to digital platforms and the excitement among talent to engage audiences in new ways.
“At that point, you're actually, you're simply, you're kind of, you are making sense of that investment with multiple revenue streams because you've got, you've found new people in new places.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Peter Kafka:One day, with the help of science, you might be able to live forever. Forever. Your body will just need a couple tune-ups. Injecting bone marrow in your 40s, your kidney in your 50s, your heart in your 60s, and so on. And then potentially a whole body transplant by the time that you were 90. This week on Explain It To Me, the quest for longevity. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Climate change is making all kinds of natural disasters less predictable. And insurance companies are jacking up prices all across the country. As someone in the insurance industry, intellectually, I understand it.
0:44Peter Kafka:But as a homeowner, it's awful. It really sucks. Today on Unexplainable, is the future uninsurable? There's a breaking point coming. Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Monday and Wednesday.
1:08Peter Kafka:From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. Today, I'm talking with Mark Thompson. He is the CEO of CNN, and he would like you to pay$7 a month to stream CNN, or at least most of CNN, on the internet. If that sounds unlikely to you, Mark Thompson has heard your skepticism before. Prior to CNN, Thompson was CEO at the New York Times, where he was also in charge of building an online subscription business. That was one that a lot of people, including people inside the Times, were very dubious about, and it has now become a huge success.
1:47Peter Kafka:The other reason this launch might sound familiar is that in recent months, we've seen ESPN and then Fox launch their own TV to streaming businesses. And a lot of what CNN is trying to do here is similar. They want to build a new revenue line, maybe build an entirely new kind of business that they'll use in the future. But at the same time, they want to keep what's left of their existing cable TV business intact. We talk about what all this says about the future of TV news, what would happen to CNN if its parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, gets sold, which seems pretty likely, and why Thompson thinks the brand's biggest advantage is trust, not ideology.
2:24Peter Kafka:And yes, we also talk about Barry Weiss. So here's me talking to Mark Thompson.
2:32Peter Kafka:I'm here with Mark Thompson. He's the CEO of CNN. Hi there. I'm actually at CNN at your office. Thanks for making time. Yeah. The last time I talked to you for a podcast was the summer of 2020. Very different time. You were at the New York Times. You were leaving the Times. You're doing sort of an exit interview with me. I was asking you what you're going to do next. And you're like, oh, I don't know. Do something. I bet I'm not sure what it is. and I wrote this quote down. He said, my thing is I love big, juicy, difficult strategic puzzles. You're running CNN. Does that qualify as a big, juicy strategic puzzle?
3:03Peter Kafka:Decent level of self-knowledge there. Yeah, I think so. And actually, honestly, I mean, you know, I think you could also say BBC, New York Times, CNN, that feels like a box set as well. You have a thing for running big, giant global news organizations. Yeah. We are here specifically to talk because you are launching a new subscription product. We'll talk about that. I also want to talk about where CNN fits in sort of in the news landscape. And before we go into the details of the subscription product you're launching, just talk to me about sort of where CNN is still a business that makes all of its money from television or almost all of its money from television.
3:44Peter Kafka:It's funded by subscriber fees, but indirectly, right? I'm just paying an MBPD. and advertising. I'm assuming you don't believe that can sustain it. So where are you headed? And the launch of the product in a few days time is completely at one with the strategy, which is we think we've got one of the best known, by some measures the best known, and most widely trusted news brands in world journalism. But our original legacy platform of conventional pay TV in the US on cable, which has stood the test of time for decades, we're now seeing a very big audience transition from that platform to other platforms and from, as it were, a certain kind of rather fixed mode of consumption and typically the television set as the receiving device to lots of different modes of consumption, almost all of them powered one way or another by the internet, and small screens, large screens, short duration, long duration, on the move, and still sometimes leaning back and watching it at home.
5:00So it's really saying to continue to keep CNN strong in the future, we better go after our audiences where they currently are and feed them and give them the service of breaking news and everything else CNN stands for in ways and on devices that work for them. So part of that's a technical product strategy question, right? How do we get this stuff to people? Completely, but that's the lesser part of it. The biggest part is what kind of mindset changes and changes at the level of what do you make? How do you make it? I was going to say it's
5:34Peter Kafka:business model question first and foremost, who is going to foot the bill for this product? Yes, but I want to say, I think it's an industry, a media industry mistake to jump to monetization too early. We need to engage and delight today's audiences, next year's audiences with news. And if we get the engagement and the delight in the sense that CNN is an indispensable part in the lives of millions of people in America and around the world, you know, the monetization piece is not, that will follow. You're spoken like a true tech executive. You're going to build the thing and then figure out how to pay for it later.
6:24We want to be laser focused in identifying ways of serving today's audiences, getting in front of them and then engaging them on the basis, not, we don't want to build a product for its own sake. We want to reach the audience for its own sake. It's actually our mission to reach and serve audiences. What does that mean now? How do you do it excellently? And then, of course, there's a, you know, a challenge to be faced about what combination of means of monetization. But I would say, you know, I'm probably something of a stuck record on this. I think we're entering an age of where the customer is king.
7:02And if you want someone to pay, you better start with the customer. In other words, direct-to-consumer end-user subscriptions is at least my base case for the rebuilding of a suite of different ways of building revenue out of news.
7:18Peter Kafka:And that's what you did at the Times, right? You didn't start the subscription business there, but you sort of came in early. At the New York Times in 2012, almost all the economics were in the physical newspaper. Right, right. But someone prior to you had sort of kicked off the subscription model, but you're the one who grew it initially. And you inverted the business model, essentially. It was an advertising-supported business, mostly, and you changed to a consumer-supported business, mostly. And do you imagine the same thing now happens? Yes, but at the Times and at CNN, I think that the breakthroughs came from a close attention to how people were consuming news, what was the kind of news and the subject matters and the areas that interested them, the whole idea of what level of interactivity, how do you engage a modern audience, slightly different from someone, you know, discovery of content is very different when you haven't got a big physical newspaper to look at.
8:11And again, I think some of these are problems which never used to be a problem because, you know, in a sense, the platform brought the audience with it. There was a cable TV audience. And typically, TV companies on both sides of the Atlantic. And I'm, you know, remember, I'm a television person. I'm not a newspaper person. I'm pure television and creative, by the way, rather than business. um um you know you you you you were you the risk was always you thought of your audience in very large statistical aggregates how big is the audience um um because we're selling advertising or because if you're the bbc you're trying to engage very large audiences to justify your your whole existence and your and your your license fee rather than focusing on the audience one by one.
9:04And I think the big lesson we all learned from Silicon Valley starting about, you know, 20, 25 years ago is you better start thinking about how you build an audience one at a time by serving individual people one at a time, or in the end, you'll get beaten by people who do that better.
9:24Peter Kafka:Let's talk about the product itself that you're launching. It's going to be, you guys say$6.99,$7 a month gets you. Sorry. That's a completely different price point. almost everything that's on CNN plus a bunch of stuff that's not on CNN. Yeah. And so the idea is if you... And by the way, that means CNN domestically, the international feed, but also the whole of CNN.com. So, you know, the website, which has got a monthly active user base of 140 million or thereabouts, people is also in scope for this. So this is not just a television product or a connected TV product, though it is those things.
10:05It's also a product which unlocks the totality, pretty much, of CNN journalism.
10:09Peter Kafka:Who is your target audience? Is it someone who is watching CNN on television and has a cable TV subscription and is going to get rid of that cable TV subscription and this is going to be one of the things they buy? Is it someone who doesn't have cable TV, is not watching CNN, and you would like them to become a CNN consumer? I think if you think about audience opportunities and think about initial opportunities and then what we hope will emerge as we learn more and develop our product in the face of the audience is subsequent opportunities. Certainly, we would say essentially that, you know, cord cutters, something like 80 million Americans are in households who've cut the cord since COVID.
10:51Of those, our market research suggests that 18 million of them, these are people who have cut the cord, by the way, not because they didn't like news. Many people actually regret not being able to get news from cable anymore. But that regret was not enough for them to part with 80 bucks just for a single news service. 18 million out of the 80, say, or at least a representative sample, which makes us say 18 million, say they'd be very interested in receiving and paying for CNN as a standalone subscription because they'd like to get that bit of cable back without having to buy anything else.
11:32Peter Kafka:CNN, not news. These are people who are specifically saying CNN. 18 million. So you think there's 18 million people that you can go after with this? If you like, that's an initial target audience. But I want to be clear, our ambitions, I mean, of course, we won't get all of the 18 million. And, you know, it'll take time. The New York Times digital model took four years and three months, by my memory, to get to its first million. These things initially grow quite slowly. And you had this 10 million goal that seemed incredibly audacious and kind of not reachable. When I announced in the quarterly earnings call, I think in 2018, a 10 million goal, I have to say, the moment the call was over, two people, Arthur Gregg Salzberger, the current chairman, and Meredith Copit-Levian, my successor, then the chief operator, burst out laughing at me.
12:25So, I mean, inside the New York Times, it was regarded as a sort of, if not, you know, insanity, then a rather florid kind of reach of the imagination. People describe it as a galvanizing goal. This is the thing we're working towards. I believe that I'm not going to give you any galvanizing goals today. But as it happens, I believe that setting up a flag out there and saying there's no reason why we couldn't get that. And I definitely believe that if we get it right and figure out great ways of connecting with the audience, learning from them, making the thing stronger, there's no reason why this couldn't build a really scaled digital model.
13:00It's got many of the qualities of it. The underlying trust in the brand is very strong. It's got a global opportunity as well as a domestic one. We think we can get the economics to work with really, I would say, quite a reasonable price point where we're placing it.
13:15Peter Kafka:But just to push on this, the pie chart a year after you've launched, what do you want that to look like in terms of former cable TV subscribers versus cord nevers, people who've never paid for digital or never paid for cable TV? I want to say, we're going to like paying subscribers first. But you've got to decide where you're going to market. We think, although I think you will discover a mix from day one, we would expect that the people who already know the product because they used to consume it and would like it back again may be a fairly large part of the buy. But also, we've got people who are very regular and loyal CNN.com users, and there's 100 million Americans who use.com at least once a month.
14:03And of that 100 million, there are many people who do not have cable, perhaps never had cable, but who really believe in CNN. They will, I think, be unable to use that product without realizing that for a small amount of money, they can upgrade and get all the TV services as well. And we hope that some of them in numbers are going to sample these new services as well.
14:24Peter Kafka:ESPN and Fox just launched their own digital services, and they took great pains to say, whether they believe it or not, we're not competing with existing cable subscribers. In fact, we don't want people who are watching us on cable to go down. We're finding a new consumer. I would broadly say the same thing. In other words, if someone's got cable, they're satisfied with cable. We're going to let them, for all participating cable companies, we're going to let their subscribers authenticate and use the product for nothing. So we're not trying to, in any sense, undermine cable as a platform. We are, however, and by the way, this is all in partnership with the cable companies, recognizing the fact that cable, as a proportion of US households, is much smaller than it was, and is continuing to contract, you know, I would say, in terms of all households, about 10 % a year.
15:21So the rate of contraction at the moment is quite rapid. And the people who have not got cable, both people who used to have cable, that might be on average slightly older households, but much more general users. We get many, many tens of millions of people below the age of 40 looking at CNN, may also find this product to their taste as well. So I would say quite broad spectrum, but if you like, definable, targetable groups of the audience within that. And maybe this is a conjecture, but some sense of a sequence of different priority target audiences.
16:00Peter Kafka:I said the product gets you almost every part of CNN. If you're used to watching it on CNN Live on traditional TV, you're getting almost everything, not quite everything. thing. I'm assuming that's because you have deals with the paid TV distributors that doesn't allow you to fully port regular CNN to digital. That's a factor. I think also when we think about this product, and frankly, I would say speculating or basing what we do on research, there are some cases where we think maybe for this product, for example, rolling headlines might be more appropriate certain parts than... But is that contractual thing?
16:39Peter Kafka:Is that just an artifact? fact, because again, the ESPN and Fox are just saying we're literally bringing everything that is on TV over here. It's a duplicative product. In our cases, for a variety of reasons, including considerations of wanting to keep some hours of CNN exclusive to cable audiences, for a variety of reasons, it's not a perfect match. I have to say there will be enough, and in particular, a completely, as it were, simulcast prime time and other key day parts I think many users will feel this is very unlike CNN Plus from a few years ago, which was a parallel complementary service.
17:19Right.
17:20Peter Kafka:That was explicitly not bringing CNN over to this paid product. And we call the subscription tier all access. There's going to be two tiers, basic and all access. but the service is not called CNN Plus or CNN Extra. It's called CNN. Right. So there's tension. On the one hand, you want to tell the consumers, this is what you're getting on cable, while you also want to tell the consumers who are paying for it on cable, we'd like it if you stay there, and also the cable guys. We like to keep those guys there as long as we can. I mean, we've got our main issue with messaging is, as it were, clarity and trying to get people to understand what the product is.
18:02We want someone who knows and likes CNN to find themselves in a very familiar setting. And with things like breaking news, when a big story happens, often the time people turn to us, obviously, is when there's a story break. Right. That's the traditional thing. By the way, that's one of the traditions I rather like. I think the idea of a trusted guide when really big stories happen is a particular calling card.
18:24Peter Kafka:The flip side of that is there may not be watching you when there isn't news, when there isn't a crisis. You guys have modest, right? Like 500 ,000, 600 ,000 people a night watching primetime? Well, yes. I want to say I think you conflate two different things. If you say, has there always been a question about what do you do when there isn't big news around? I mean, I've been involved in continuous news on both sides of the Atlantic. That is a question about the format. But I want to say having a very, very rich range of VOD content on the same time is a partial answer. The other answer I have to say over my, you know, many decades long career, like the news flow is getting denser and has been getting dense for years.
19:10And if you say, you know, well, there are weeks when nothing ever happens, I'd like you to point out one of those in 2025.
19:16Peter Kafka:There are weeks when most normal people, not people like you and me who spend time thinking about news and like news and care about it, are just tuned out and they want to do anything else but consume news. They're not interested in it. Do you know normal people? I've heard of them, yeah. You've read studies about them. And so what I'm getting at is, do you have to, again, one of the way that the Times handled this, I mean, it's a different readership, but they gave you lots of other reasons to come to the Times that weren't news oriented. Is that a play you can do here? Yes, to some extent. They do games, they do cooking.
19:49CNN Styles is a brand which is at least 25 years old. CNN Underscored, the consumer testing site, is now very successful, growing very quickly. And I would say we have practices. We're going to launch a weather app in a few months' time as well. We have demonstrable permission from our audiences. And we have in-house creative talent around many categories. And I'm absolutely like, I mean, as you've just suggested, think that great journalism and useful information about a broad range of topics. I'd say that health, one of the reasons that CNN got spectacularly large audiences during COVID is a particular Sanjay Gupta and some of our other experts, particular audience trust around good advice about health and well-being.
20:48So we, I would say, have multiple potential targets there. I'm also clear, as I was when I was running the New York Times, that news is a central plank, the central plank. And in the end, news, particularly up to the minute, we're on the spot, breaking news, you know, there's wildfires in the Pacific Palisades. You have to be able to do that. And yes, that's Anderson. You have to deliver on that and deliver on it live. You said you did one thing, though. You conflated two things a few minutes back. And you talked about the size of audiences on and related that to this idea of quiet days. I mean, I think it's just worth saying our ratings, many people who talk about media, you misuse the word ratings.
21:36Our ratings are higher today than they were 10 or 20 years ago. We get a higher percentage of cable viewing in 2025 than in 2015 and 2005. So the average of that universe, the average consumption is actually higher than it used to be, not lower. What has happened is the universe is smaller. Yep. And if you multiply, as it were, the percentage by then and see the context of the total number of households, the decline in the numerical number of the CNN audience has got everything to do with the second and nothing to do with the first. And I say, for example, if you look at our competitive position versus MSNBC, which is often talked about, MSNBC overtook CNN in all audience ratings in, I think, 2017 and has been ahead ever since.
22:29Fox has eclipsed both of you guys. Fox is, I think, in a slightly different business in some ways. And also, I think, just given the political context, Fox has eclipsed both for many. But people, rightly or wrongly, I'm not convinced that we're trying to do anything like MSNBC, but, you know, there's a reality about the way media is covered. We were regarded as head and head with broadly the idea being that not only was MSNBC getting close to beating CNN in all audiences, but also in prime time was getting very close. And it's true that in the two quarters before I arrived in this job two years ago, so the Q2 and Q3 of 2023, the two networks were in a dead heat on so-called demo audiences, the audiences between 25 and 54.
23:20we're now 50 % ahead of them in that audience, in the demo audience. And the gap between us and MSNBC in all audiences, around 40 % when I arrived, is now 20%. So we gained significantly in all audiences, though we're still behind so far. And in the demo audiences, we now have a very comfortable lead against them. But let's not pretend that our audiences are falling simply because we're in some way editorially falling back. It's something different going on. And our response, you can't deal with a contracting platform by marginally better competitive performance on the platform. You need a strategy which is about reaching to audiences on new platforms and in new ways.
24:08Peter Kafka:Fair enough. And I do want to talk about programming and how you set yourself apart. My main point was just that most people, given the choice on a normal day, are choosing not to consume news. As much as a news person like myself or you would like them to consume more news, they're just not. They're not leaning into it. But this goes back to the stuff we were talking about a few minutes ago. I think people are consuming as much news as they ever did. if you're saying they don't want to consume it to the same level in a linear lean back linear television format i think that's true but also obvious point when it when is the peak time for for wanting to know what's happened when when's the peak time for news i'm guessing you're going to say the morning it's the morning it's not the evening it's the morning um there's a there's a bump at lunchtime there's a shape to people's consumption and short session news in particular catching up on headlines on your phone, it's not a new behavior.
Read the full transcript
25:09It's now decades old itself. But the patterns and the kind of diurnal kind of spread of news consumption and the media people use
25:18Peter Kafka:has changed. Let me try this way. You're charging$7 a month for this new subscription. I assume that will go up over time. It's much cheaper than most streaming services. It is much more expensive than lots of other options for television news online. You can get high-quality free news now from the likes of NBC. We have a broadcast. There's a CNN fast, free headline service. I would argue, I don't think there's much truly high quality, but there are some good fast channels. This audience that is vaguely interested, is flipping through headlines, whatever it is, aren't they already being served with lots of other free options?
25:59You'll understand that was the argument, very vocal at the time, about why a digital subscription service at the New York Times wouldn't work. Yep. That meant it's very precisely what people said. Yep. By the way, I would say it was the reason that a majority of people slightly before my time inside the Times were against the launch of a digital subscription. They were very nervous about it. Well, I would say hostile to it, not least because, you know, how on earth can you? And indeed, things like cooking. I was told when I said, I think we should do a cooking app. at the times, said, there's no point.
26:31You can get good free recipes for nothing on the internet. I believe that certain things around brand and quality and distinctiveness, and you have to hit those bars. You can't say your quality and not be quality. You actually have to deliver it. And a true international kind of news machine, which actually delivers in real time when there's going to be a ceasefire in the Middle East or when suddenly you get wildfires in Southern California and astonishing pictures of the consequences of that. You better deliver on those things. But if you can deliver on those things, I would say that what we, I think, essentially proved at the New York Times is there are scalable subscription models.
27:14And I would say, you could say, well, how do you know it's going to work for TV news? I would say, I don't think anyone's really tried it properly in TV news yet. And nobody certainly has offered as rich a mixture of television media as this product on next Tuesday will represent.
27:35Peter Kafka:We'll be right back with Mark Thompson, but first a word from his sponsor.
27:42Peter Kafka:No one could blame you if you thought this Men's World Cup was going to be a disaster. The President of the United States isn't exactly a welcome mat for the world, and there have been plenty of embarrassing stories for the country. There was the mom of Kate Bird's goalkeeper who wasn't let into the United States to watch her son play until the team started doing well and people clamored for her entry. The team from Dr. Congo hadn't made a Men's World Cup in 52 years and hardly made this one because the United States was supposedly worried about Ebola even though no one on the team had Ebola. If you were watching Senegal Norway last week and were wondering where all the Senegalese fans were, they weren't let into the country.
28:20Peter Kafka:but you probably noticed we let in like a million Vikings. I wonder what's different about their fan bases. Oh, and who could forget we're literally bombing one of the countries that up until Friday was playing here. Missiles aren't the problem. But, but somehow the vibes at this World Cup are mostly positive. The World Cup might just be healing us on today's Explained from Vox. Is Donald Trump still cool? Well, at first there's what he was promising to America. He was promising change. Yeah, promising a big change. Has he lived up to that? No, no. I wouldn't say so. I wouldn't say so. I'm disappointed.
28:53Peter Kafka:We're in Washington, D.C. for one of the events that Donald Trump is throwing for America's 250th anniversary, and it's UFC night. Proud to be American. We got free tickets. It's just going to be a great time. That's about it. It's an opportunity to talk to a group that was central in the 2024 election, young men. Why do we think Trump and men seem to have a connection? I feel like he just knows how to advertise himself to the younger proud. It aligns with masculinity, I feel like, to a certain extent. But if they don't like Donald Trump, what do they prefer politically otherwise? I care about my family.
29:25Peter Kafka:I care about my country. I want people to be safe and happy where they live. I care about my wallet too, man. I'm Estet Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
29:41Peter Kafka:I'm Seth Matlins. My new show, Create or Destroy Reimagining Marketing, explores how every decision a company makes, Not just the marketing ones, but the HR, IR, pricing, org design, and planning ones. The ones most don't consider marketing at all contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week, I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking, and reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. The creator destroys the show that argues. They've always been the same thing.
30:15Peter Kafka:from the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.
30:29Peter Kafka:And we're back. We were talking about where you fit in in the landscape. CNN is very well known, obviously, and I think for a long time was considered sort of down the middle news. People just thought of it as news. And in the culture we're in now, now lots of folks. Well, you say that. I mean, I was around. actually in America in the middle 1980s. And partly because, I think, of Ted Turner's own politics in a way, it was considered liberal in the 1980s. You're too young to remember this. I don't remember people getting whipped up about it. Let's be quite clear. The idea that mainstream media in the United States was, as it were, coastal.
31:07In fact, CNN was Atlanta rather than coastal. but coastal and broadly liberal is an idea certainly from the Richard Nixon's era. In modern times, you guys - Things have got a little bit sharper since then.
31:21Peter Kafka:Yes. No, I wouldn't deny that. So in modern times, things are sharper now and you have - But it's really important to say there was never - What you said is, I think, is not really true in the sense of the people who looked at bias. CNN did some good things. And I think, you know, programs, Crossfire was a famous example of a program which very deliberately defines CNN as a platform for debate rather than the leader of debate. And by the way, I would say Crossfire and the spirit of Crossfire is very interesting to me. And I would say that the way we have formatted the Abbey Phillip Newsnight program in the evening as it touches its cap towards Crossfire.
32:03So this is where I'm going, right?
32:05Peter Kafka:So your predecessor - I think I'm already there. Yeah, your predecessor, it was a whole bunch of time about we're going to sort of correct the left-wing bias and make it truly central. And you still hear it from - Which one was that? Mr. Licht. But, you know, Mr. Malone, John Malone, very important shareholder still, every nine months gets on TV and talks to a journalist and says, CNN's full of lefties. do you feel like that description is something you have to actively work against, especially as you're rolling this product out? Or maybe you can move beyond it. I like the idea of being in favor of the news and grounding everything in a practice which is based on what has happened and how can we understand what's happening.
32:52Peter Kafka:We live in a tribal world where everyone decides their version of the news is the one they want. Yes, I want to say I feel fairly straightforwardly, however, that I do want to insist on the facts. I don't regard that as a practice of believing there are such things as facts and trying very hard to figure out what they are and actually trying to do that without bias and without your own filters or trying to compensate for your own filters and making the facts the basic of the offer. Some people say, oh, you want to be centrist. I don't want to be centrist either. I want to be outside the political arena.
33:27I don't want to be anywhere on that spectrum. I would much rather be observing the spectrum, albeit sometimes, and the Abbey-Philip Newslight format is a good example of that, providing a platform where the debate can take place. So I don't want to claim we're perfect. Of course, we're not. And if you say CNN has got the same issue I've lived with as New York Times and the BBC see in the UK, which is you've got a college educated, significantly urban, prosperous sort of thing. And that's not completely representative of the country. I think that's true of almost any professional body of national scale in most countries, actually.
34:10I think being careful that you don't have employment practices, that when you think about making sure you've got a diverse workforce, diverse newsroom. You're thinking broadly about diversity, diversity to include geographical diversity, people from, as it were, non-coastal, from urban, suburban and rural backgrounds.
34:34Peter Kafka:There's a swell of new media and now supported politically all the way up to the White House that says, we've been bamboozled by left-leaning, liberal, whatever, mainstream media. We need an alternative. We are deliberately ideological and we are also bringing you the truth. And the biggest version of that is Fox News. And then there's sort of more smaller and extreme versions on the way out. I think this is a market. And I would say to members of the audience, I broadly think plurality of choice in the media market is a good thing, not a bad thing. To say the obvious, what we're trying to offer is a form of journalism where we hold ourselves to account for actually trying to find out objective facts to bring them as quickly and accurately as we can to the public, and then to have measured and broadly courteous debates about what that might mean.
35:29Peter Kafka:Is it important to you to find people who are watching Fox News or feel like mainstream media is biased, you're part of the bias, and convince them they're wrong and they should be consuming it? We have a significant Republican audience on all platforms. We have at least two million Republicans looking at CNN who never look at Fox. We have some, as it were, soulless Republicans, Republicans who get their news from CNN. That's, I mean, it's manifestly not as many Republicans who do watch Fox. But there are certain, I mean, I think, to be honest, our audience is composed of Democrats. And there are, you know, a significant Democrat audience, not denying that.
36:14independents, moderates, and Republicans. And what they've got in common is a desire to hear what's actually going on. Now, not everyone has got that desire. And if you'd rather, as it were, listen to a pleasing version about what might be going on or what should be going on or what you'd rather like to think is going on, that's available too. We're for the people who, in a sense, who, for whatever reason, from whatever class, whatever part of the country, want to expose themselves, which by definition means exposing yourself sometimes to unwelcome content, unwelcome voices, unwelcome stories.
36:52And not everyone wants that. And obviously, CNN's, in some ways, its entire fundamental Ted Turner-originated mission, and its whole history really is about having the courage to actually do that and believe as an act of faith that out there, there are large audiences who do want that and who deserve to be served. We'll be right back, but first, a word from a sponsor.
37:28Peter Kafka:A lot of us probably grew up with mountains of video game stuff. cartridges, consoles, discs, other discs, broken discs, more discs, everything. And now it seems like those discs are gone. This week on The Vergecast, we're talking about why the gaming industry is going all digital and what it means that that's going away. Plus, whether Rivian can take on Tesla, whether any of us can figure out how to Vibecode, and much more. On The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.
38:07Peter Kafka:And we're back. What do you make of what's happening over at CBS News, where the new owner has said, we're fixing some bias that I want to come out and say, but there's a bias, and I'm going to hire Barry Weiss to fix that bias? Well, I mean, I have to say, I haven't spoken to anyone recently. I mean, since the recent events inside CBS News, I can't work out from the coverage so far. with any certainty at all about in that debate or whatever, who's right or who's wrong. I would rather patiently wait to see how CBS News develops and then make an assessment of it. Reasonable. Speaking of David Alston.
38:47I mean, I mean, that's sort of seriously. In other words, I think it's incredibly easy to jump to it.
38:51Peter Kafka:Well, I guess the thing I would ask is, yes, we should see what happens there. But the point is, the owner has said, well, we have to reestablish trust. He's hired someone who's an active critic of mainstream media saying, why aren't we trusted? They're diagnosing, they're saying we have a problem. They've talked about an agenda of fact-based journalism. And I mean, they've talked about some of the things I've talked about. I have to say, to be fair, they've talked about as well. So in terms of the statements and the journalistic principles and all the rest of it, much of that seems to me to be unobjectionable.
39:27It's very funny.
39:27Peter Kafka:Five years ago, we were talking about Barry Weiss, too, and she had left the times. David Ellison - I think Barry's, by the way, a really interesting figure. I agree. And thoughtful and not to be stereotyped in a way that she often is in the current discourse about CBS. I would say that she's an interesting kind of individual. I agree that she's an interesting individual. Well, there we are. Her employer, David Ellison, wants to own this company. They've offered Paramount wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. I've read about that too. Now, your owners would like there to be a bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery.
40:08Peter Kafka:Someone might buy the entire thing. They might buy part of it. All I want you to say is there's obviously a lot of uncertainty. What's going to happen to this company? How do you manage under that uncertainty? Well, firstly, you may have noticed in recent years that the whole of media is going through change. Things are combined. They're discombined. And things are sold, bought and sold, and the rest of it. And I think that, as I sometimes say to my colleagues, if you're looking for a life of complete certainty, you may want to consider opening a pub. But there was never anyone who was going to buy the BBC.
40:41Peter Kafka:And there was never anyone who was going to buy the New York Times with a family-run business, family-owned business. Well, it's worth saying CNN has had changes, albeit, you know, not that often, but I think, depending on how you count it, four or five changes of ownership in its history. Yes. Previous changes of ownership, I would say, have not resulted in significant editorial changes. You know, there may be other factors which, you know, explain various trends and movements and the rest of it. We could discuss that for hours. But basically, changes, because of the character of cable and the big blocks of channels and the arguments for consolidating and deconsolidating the rest of it.
41:22There's been a lot of this over the years. And, you know, I would say just from recent months and the last few years, the Hollywood assets more broadly of almost everyone are shifting in multiple ways. I think that's a fact of life. I mean, and I want to say to my is the best thing CNN can do to assure its future is one, high quality of journalism and courage about this particular path of news first, genuinely fair journalism and passing tests, you know, dealing with sensitive and difficult stories in a way which is fair-minded and treats everyone involved in dignity. You know, that could be, you know, a political story or some other story.
42:11That's the best thing we do. The second good thing we can do is to continue to develop a compelling plan for our digital future and demonstrate our ability to reach digital audiences and engage them more than we would with a simple website by doing what we're doing. for example, that's not the only thing we're going to do, but a portfolio of digital products which genuinely engage audiences and which can be made global, that is the best thing we can do whoever is owning CNN.
42:43Peter Kafka:Do you have thoughts about who an ideal owner of CNN would be in terms of, I'm not going to ask you whether you think David Ellison should own it, but whether it's someone who's primarily interested in running a media business or someone who's a financial owner and as sort of maintaining the assets? What I would say is, and I would say straightforwardly, over the last two years, I've worked for owners for the board of Warner Brothers Discovery and for David Sousa, its chief executive, who have been supportive of the strategy, who have invested in CNN's future and have regarded CNN's editorial independence, including independence from them.
43:23So allowing me to, as editor-in-chief, to be in the end where the buck stops in terms of editorial decision-making, they've honored all of that. And I would say, you know, I would test any owner, not on, as it were, general perfection, but on commitment to editorial independence and commitment to building. I mean, CNN is one of the world's great news brands. It's not just the US cable channel. It's much more than that. And matters a lot to people in many, many countries around the world, as well as in the US. But it needs to find a future business model and future audiences on new platforms, supporting that and supporting the idea that part of the value of CNN to audiences is its independence.
44:21and the fact that it's not a mouthpiece for anyone is one of its great strengths. And by the way, I would say part of its value as an asset is it's got that quality.
44:29Peter Kafka:We started off talking about this transition from linear to digital. There's a cliche about that transition overall as you're taking analog dollars and turning them into digital pennies or digital dimes. It gets better over time. But it's much more expensive to make cable television, live television, CNN's version of news than lots of other news stuff. Can you support the cost of making live television, high-quality television for a digital audience? Yes, at scale. I mean, essentially, I think you should think of the challenge as being every bit of news. I mean, as we all know, on Substack, you know, sole trader, single people writing on their own laptop.
45:19so as it were fixed cost incredibly low actually you can leverage that into a you know it's it's not you know going to be ever be a competing with Rupert Murdoch but it's you know that's a very viable way of doing great journalism and by the way that's a good thing not a bad thing I'm something people say you must be very about sub stack I'm really glad that the that the individual journalists can really reach audiences and also make money that's actually being a really good thing. But a newsroom of scale, bureaus around the world and the ability to very quickly in a few minutes or hours get cameras in front of almost anything that happens anywhere on the planet, and television studios and the whole operations around a 24-7 newsroom, the fixed costs are not colossal, but there's a question.
46:07There's quite a big lump of cost in that. automation has helped. We'll probably go on helping a bit. But yeah, the key thing is, can you scale an audience to get the economics to work? So it's simply really a question of how big an audience and, you know, it's like revenue times numbers.
46:25Peter Kafka:What's the average? Are you going to be under pressure to cut those costs though, to say, look, that, you know, you're not in TV anymore, you're moving out of TV towards this new world, you're going to have to spend less. I mean, I would say we have a multi-year plan, which is strongly profitable in every single year. I mean, there's never, there's never got to a point where, where, in our plan, I mean, you know, a plan is a plan, let's see what happens. But in the plan, CNN is remained so cash generative that every year, we can, we believe, fully invest in our future and also still deliver very large, very large EBITDA operating property.
47:07Peter Kafka:Yeah, I'm asking whether you're going to have to cut costs, whether that's cutting people, cutting programming. Well, I would say, I mean, our headcount's gone up since I've been at Cien so far. We're going to need to, I think, probably continue to hire on the digital side. If you say, are we going to need over time to cut some costs on the linear side? The answer is probably yes. And the reason I was going there was - But this is more of a shifting of cost and a change in skills mix. So, I mean, I always think in these conversations there's a risk that the cuts get noted and the new hires and the investment doesn't.
47:45The reason I wanted to underline is - I don't believe that as far as I can see, there's going to be a significant net reduction in the number of people who work for CNN.
47:53Peter Kafka:The reason I was underlining it is because, again, in the last discussion we had five years ago, this last time I bring up the five years ago discussion, is you were saying, look, lots and lots of newsrooms made a terrible mistake by cutting themselves. It made their product crappier. And of course, no one wanted to consume it. You look at Netflix, they're spending a ton of money. They, you know, and at the Times, we've been spending. And I would say so far - Is that playbook still working? We're still investing in journalism. But, you know, what happened at the Times, I can tell you, it was at least 800 people left and about a thousand people arrived.
48:24I mean, so there's a lot, and of course, to someone who is leaving a role, Maybe unwillingly, it always feels like a cut. So I don't want to minimize what's going on because this business of shifting from one set of activities to another at a human level does sometimes lead to quite tough consequences for the people involved. But it's very hard to see how you can seriously claim to be leaning into the future when, as it were, in your actual deployment of capital, You're obviously spending most of your money on your declining legacy operations rather than your new ones. And the great hope with our all-access product and more broadly, the way of trying to merge the TV-like experience of CNN and CNN.com is actually we can get one stream of content creation, you know, including Anderson Cooper AC360 or as to it, and actually find new audiences for essentially the same product on a different platform.
49:28For a long time. At that point, you're actually, you're simply, you're kind of, you are making sense of that investment with multiple revenue streams because you've got, you've found new people in new places.
49:37Peter Kafka:For a long time, when you'd have these discussions about digital transformation, one of the problems was because all the money and the prestige was in the old model, it was very hard to get people who were doing well there or being paid a lot to move over to digital. It's considered sort of the B team, even with CNN Plus, right? Like Anderson Cooper, you weren't getting the Anderson Cooper show on CNN Plus. You were getting Anderson Cooper's, I don't know, it was a book club, whatever his derivative stuff was. You were getting Anderson Cooper, to be fair. I mean, it was, but it was a different product.
50:08Peter Kafka:So do you feel like now in 2025, your best highest price talent, people with pulling in ratings, want to be part of digital and want to reach audiences there? Yes, I do. And I would say they're enthusiastic. And at the moment, I'd say literally, you know, here we are at the end of October 2025. We are racing to build enough capacity to deal with the enthusiasm that we've got on the linear side for getting involved and getting stuck in. And it's more a sense of I've got five great ideas. When can I start on them? And so at the moment, I would say we're actually running to catch up with the enthusiasm.
50:50Though the simplest things, Jake Tapper started doing these short, impromptu, wherever he is. I just talk to the president, TikToks, yeah. Which are doing astonishing numbers and which, of course, Jake, you know, as you'd expect, is taking to like a duck to water. So it's not. The real thing is these are not. TV journalists. they are great journalists who appear on TV and are great at talking directly to audiences. And I would say it's very easy to assume that somehow there is a world of talent and the rest of it, which is TV. And there's another world with completely different people, which works well on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube.
51:33It isn't true. And we have sometimes gigantic audiences on these platforms with our people. Many of the people who consume these pieces, by the way, don't know to come from CNN, but we have an enormous footprint on social media. We need to get better at branding it and marketing it and making the most of it. But I've got very little worry that we can propagate our form of journalism as we do now, but in even greater numbers and get more experts. We've needed something at CNN a bit like the innovation report from the New York Times. We've needed just a bit of a wake-up call about what is the state of art with social media?
52:11How do people think about how you get audiences on these platforms? And why don't we do that? And part of the investment in digital has been in data science and getting
52:22Peter Kafka:better at machine learning and increasingly AI as well. You told me you don't want to give me a 10 million number or some goal like that. So how do we measure your success in a year if I come back and talk to you and say, how's it going? We will give you updates about what we're doing. Yeah, but how are we going to know if you consider it successful? I'll tell you Fair enough I'll see you in a year Thank you Mark Thompson Bye bye Thanks again to Mark Thompson Thanks to the folks at CNN For letting us record this interview At their studio Thanks to our advertisers Who bring this show to you for free Thanks to Charlotte Silver Who produces the show She is awesome So are you guys Thanks for writing Thanks for listening See you soon we'll keep us with each other and get ready!
From the publisher
Would you pay $7 a month to stream CNN?
Because CNN CEO Mark Thompson would like you to do that.
I know, I know, I’m skeptical, too. But Thompson has been here before: At his last job, as CEO of the New York Times, he helped shepherd that company’s subscription business, which had a gazillion naysayers at the start. And now the Times’ business model is the envy of everyone in journalism.
Can he do it again? One big difference is that the Times launched its paywall all the way back in 2011, before everyone was asking consumers to pay for monthly subscriptions for everything. I also have a hunch that the Times brand registers more deeply for its audience than CNN does for its. But now we’ll get to find out.
Meantime, all of this is happening as CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery is likely to get sold, yet again. Which means all of the work Thompson and his team are doing could get upended by a new management regime.
But that’s the future. For now, it’s very much worth listening to Thompson make the case for CNN, and TV news in general.
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