Tough Decision: Warner Discovery Honchos Deserve Credit for Quickly Euthanizing CNN+
Amanda Edwards, Mike Coppola, Getty Images
CNN and Warner Bros. Discovery announced Thursday that the much-ballyhooed CNN+ streaming service will officially cease operations on April 30.
Amidst the predictable shouts of “toldja so,” and schadenfreude grave-dancing there is the sad reality that hundreds of smart people committed to launching a fresh news product — one that was high-minded in its spirit and principled in its goals — are now out of a job.
Journalism is a brutal industry, and the death of one news business is a tragedy for all of us.
It must be recognized, however, that the decision to euthanize CNN+ so quickly was a brave one.
CNN+ was presented both internally and externally as “one of the most significant developments in the history of CNN,” as the network’s media reporters noted in their report on the shuttering of the service. What’s more, CNN reportedly dumped hundreds of millions into the service to get it off the ground. The decision to so quickly pull the plug on such a massive operation requires balls of steel. But it will likely stand the test of time as the right decision for the network and its parent company.
There is no other way to spin this: the new leadership team at Warner Bros. Discovery aren’t fucking around.
Take this from a website that tried to launch its own ad-free subscription service just over a year ago, and also pulled the plug a few weeks later. Yes, Mediaite thought it was the right time to ride traffic glory into a subscription model in 2021, but quickly changed course a few weeks later when early returns did not reach targeted goals.
It was a bitter pill to swallow, but taking the medicine early allowed Mediaite to maintain the traffic surge it saw during the election year and months that followed, while the rest of the news media ecosystem fell off by roughly 30 to 40%. Mediaite may have lost some revenue opportunities, but our relevance has never been stronger.
I’m reminded of something I was taught by a junior golf instructor at Prairie Dunes golf course in Hutchinson, Kansas, where I grew up. “If you hit the ball in the bunker or rough, your instinct is to try to hit a miracle shot to make up for the mistake. That almost always makes it worse. Just take your medicine, knock the ball back onto the fairway and go for a bogey.”
I was probably going for a triple bogey but the lesson has stayed with me: It is always best to course-correct immediately after realizing a mistake.
CNN+ was a high-minded project that was launched at the worst possible time: just after the ouster of its architect Jeff Zucker, and just before a massive corporate merger that installed a new leadership eager to find easy places to cut.
The CNN brand is still platinum in value when it comes to news, but CNN+ was launched with an Achilles heel. Because of contractual agreements with cable providers — those carriage fees that make CNN roughly $1 billion in annual profit — CNN+ could never be a home for the premium reporting that was reserved for CNN proper.
It will be easy to mock the death of CNN+. But that’s the lazy and easy way out. Fortune usually favors the bold — but discretion is also the better part of valor.
And the decision by Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav, incoming CNN chief Chris Licht, and others to shut CNN+ down looks pretty bold right now.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
