Welcome to People vs Algorithms #80.
I look for patterns in media, business and culture. My POV is informed by 30 years of leadership in media and advertising businesses.
Sometimes it’s nice to read in the browser.
CNN and Google face an existential moment. Pod out Thursday, 8am EST.
My podcast friend Brian Morrissey suggested we talk about this moment of change at CNN and Google, two big, important companies struggling to connect the past to the future. He wanted to talk through the challenge of playing defense in a legacy business while pushing hard to build something new, all while fending off the disruptors unencumbered by legacy, etc. A good topic for the podcast.
I started to think about CNN specifically, the precedents for its transformation and how one might perform the delicate balancing act of preserving the juicy cable money for as long as possible while leading the company to some alternative future where the TV is way less important, where what matters most is the stuff that shows up on your phone. Not easy.
CNN CEO Mark Thompson’s recent follow up to his January manifesto, “CNN’s Future”, provided a few signals and as much ambiguity as one would expect, outlining key transformational pillars on the path to the future. Doing good things like “future proofing”, “finding new sources of revenue” and focusing on “communication and culture” (props to Puck’s Dylan Byers who authored the definitive take). All of which are reasonable things to say while the harder stuff marinates. Things I have no doubt written myself in a memo. The skeptics make fun of you for saying these things. This is a natural part of the transformation process.
But what if one really wanted to aggressively change this company? What might it look like?
Here I was on Tuesday, walking the dog. A time when all good things magically materialize in the brain. I thought I might challenge myself to go beyond the memo’s platitudes.
Let’s say we dispense with the punishing cultural upheaval associated with navigating to a new CNN. I realize this is naive. How might the company meet the moment? What even is the moment?
The Moment
Strikes me that it’s a little like talking to your therapist during an earthquake. Revamping a media company right now is made that much more complicated by the fact that the internet itself is clearly in the early stages of a major mental overhaul, its foundations being reengineered from the silicon upward. Like Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, the internet is getting a brain! This shift is obviously great news for the brain-making-chip-master Nvidia whose market cap is now north of $2 trillion. Note: I checked and this is more than the GDP of Canada, Italy and Brasil.
Older digital players like myself witnessed the same Web One infrastructural cycle through the late nineties. Then, companies like Cisco, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Netscape, Qualcomm, Intel, Microsoft, Akamai laid the rails for a new thing that kinda resembled a digital version of our old physical media world.
Seems to me, that cycle will feel cute in comparison. In many ways, the first internet was a skeuomorphic of an old world — we replaced physical “pages” with digital ones. We put little boxy advertisements on top, sort of like before, but worse. The important difference, of course, is now anybody could make media. We’ve seen what that did.
At first, many thought all of it was silly and ignorable. Others thought it was cool that your market suddenly expanded to include the entire world. Until, of course, everybody got the same idea and attention became a global blood sport.
The Nvidia-powered revolution puts a layer of intelligence on top of all information, and all the APIs that power your modern digital world. AI forces us to stop thinking about pages. Instead we will now build around smart machines who talk back with text and images and video. Soon these machines will do more than answer. They will see and hear for us too.
As an aside… sometimes the AI machines make the wrong stuff or say things you don’t agree with. Please acknowledge that a giant silicon brain answering any conceivable question is a far cry from an algorithm presenting a list of web pages. This is not about “The Truth”. We are forcing immature AI statistical generators to make nuanced subjective judgments. There cannot be a single point of view that pleases everyone. Chill.
So the moment feels something like this... AI is a new monster brain-eating aggregator. It will steal most of your thunder unless you keep up with it. There are a few ways one might think about survival:
Embrace AI driven abundance and go all in;
Celebrate the humanity of all of the wonderful personalities behind the machines;
Invent new utility and, likely, deeply personalized experiences made possible by this tech. Stuff not remotely possible until now.
Precedents
If you are CNN, all this change will undoubtedly thrust you into a new competitive reality. I know you think about your world as MSNBC on the left and Fox on the right. Forget about them.
Like in all transformation projects, you will need a foot in the past and one in the future. Your people will necessarily obsess about losing short term linear battles, about the ratings shellacking in morning and primetime, about backing talent off of bygone era pay packages, about getting very different mediums and teams and cultures to sing kumbaya.
It’s hard not to see the New York Times as a shining star — they win at liberal news / lifestyle on your phone. They crossed the digital divide long ago. And, they are gonna be better than you at many things… because: 1. Their storytelling works well on phones; 2. They occupy a clear part of the cultural / political spectrum and are trusted for it; 3. They have a huge head start in selling customers a bundle of things directly; 4. They have never made the kind of dumb money CNN makes; 5. They are now decent at tech; 6. Through all of this, they have created a daily habit.
There are lessons here. And, you will have to adjust to making less money, for sure. Let’s try to focus on the things CNN does well. Let’s imagine that Zas or Malone or whomever has your back for the next three to five years.
This is an old story, but evolutionary precedents from the print world are grim. News magazines never straddled the first digital divide particularly well… Newsweek, Time, US News, Fortune, BusinessWeek. The Economist and the New Yorker have fared better largely because they are one of a kind products and old people still like them.
Remember the pioneering spirit of Ted Turner who birthed CNN in 1979. At the time, major networks dismissively nicknamed it the "Chicken Noodle Network" due to its limited budget and spartan production values. No one really thought it was going to work. This always happens in media. New things seem cheap and silly until they aren’t.
CNN grew through landmark moments—Challenger space disaster, the Gulf War, 911, a string of elections. Today, some people trust it. Some don’t. Nonetheless, you are an enviable global brand rooted in reliable, timely news. Remember what you were born to do. CNN is 24x7 news. Let’s build on the idea. You will undoubtedly have your next moment soon. Get ready.
An Idea
Remember this is a “look to the future and imagine a very different CNN unencumbered by massive internal political and cultural realities” scenario. My goal is to feeeeel what the future might look like.
Now imagine a world where CNN is everywhere, but delivered exactly how the viewer wants it — an AI-powered video stream of live news, across every major geo and category, in every language, on any device. A persistent video feed that is ALWAYS there when you need it. On your phone, in your ear, at the airport, on the TV, in the doctor's office, your car. Yes, at the gas station. Kinda like what you are now but faster, way cheaper and more personalized. Not one stream, but N streams. Your stream.
AI is your new lodestar, your strategic shot and pivot opportunity. Your organizational co-pilot.
You, CNN, are now the ultimate video news aggregator. AI makes this feasible. AI assembles the news. Another AI fact checks it. Another one helps humans fact check it again. AI reads much of it. This new operational capability will become a key moat for you.
Stupid hallucinating machines can never be an excuse for future snafus. You will be different. You will build systems and processes to double check.
In your AI-assisted feed, you are careful to delineate facts from opinion. Critically, you never give up on human reporting because machines can’t do this very well. Your band of news gatherers digs deeper now because the basic shit is mechanized by machines that do it better. AI makes them superhuman.
Naturally, AI powers many of the talking heads that deliver the news. All within the frame of a brand, of course. Invoke the Christiane Amanpour avatar. Or the Anderson Cooper one. Try Jake Tapper. Resuscitate Don Lemon if you want. He will appreciate the royalty check. Offer local options around the world. Your audience will help decide how things are packaged. AI will manufacture the feed accordingly. It will feel a little creepy at first. It will get better and people will start to love it.
Your “Magic Election Video Wall” will be a totem for total viewer empowerment in the next CNN. This time without John “Magic Wall” King. Hybrid tech / news teams will devise new ways to cut the AI stream with interactive maps and data applications that let the audience participate. But only if they want to.
To visualize this new experience more clearly, picture a future where CNN and one of the new AI information applications like Perplexity or ChatGPT have a beautiful techno-baby. Don’t know Perplexity? It’s like ChatGPT or Gemini but better connected to the news / now. Download it and play with it. It’s in the App Store. The Perplexity team has been delivering prepacked “prompts” as news. This is an important new concept and worth a look.
Now you have a hyper-efficient, AI powered, global, multilingual, personalizable stream. The business still needs lots of people, but it frees them from the bullshit stuff that used to create value but doesn’t anymore. You will redeploy them to build a production capability that is the envy of the news industry. You will produce tons of short documentary / feature flow under the CNN banner across news and any category that touches how we live now. Old content boundaries and silly terms like “lifestyle media” will languish inside of your walls. Your pulse will defy old fashioned “news” categorization.
You will never abandon the power of personality to dimensionalize your brand and build trust in it. But you will start to redefine your relationships.
A handful core talent will continue to will drive affinity to the CNN brand, but you will not be limited by those exclusively on your full time payroll. Your employment relationships will become far more flexible. You are now a “collective” that embraces outside talent and side hustlers. Some of these will challenge how you see the world. This is the new reality. You are a platform for experts. For provocateurs. For debate.
You might even welcome vanguard news / lifestyle / conspiracy Instagram news weirdos like Jessica Reed Krause. They are very popular now because people like quirky people in their feeds and don’t care about conventions that defined old media. Think differently about talent and the permission you give.
You will gather the likes of them at new “CNN Global Jams”, in person events and live streams celebrating discourse and cultural expression.
You will not get caught up in delivering a failed generational news product like “NowThis” that fishes for loyal viewers and subscription money where none can be snagged. You are way bigger than that. You are a pulsing personalized AI-powered global feed. You are everywhere.
Your new metric… the volume and frequency of video stream consumption across all devices.
It’s gotta be free. Or mostly free because global scale and access are the game. If we win at this, for sure we can find extensions and access people will pay for. That can come later. Spend the cable money to get there.
Yes, the new CNN moves at the speed and dexterity of AI.
You are not the New York Times. You are easier, more fun and faster. They are Threads. You are TikTok. You are not narrowly left or right. You are a platform for facts, personality and perspective. You are progress. You own the idea of a steady global feed of news and video. All other formats will flow elegantly from this center.
You make space for me and my views. You are always there for me.
You are ambient in the best possible way.
You are the pulse of life.
This will work.
Ted Turner will be proud…/ Troy