Is CNN Finished?

Where is Larry King?

CNN, once the very cutting edge of broadcast news may be about finished.

Michael Hirshorn, writing in New York Magazine this week says as much.

Last week, Nielsen reported that CNN had lost roughly half its prime-time viewers in the first quarter of 2010 compared with a year earlier, despite news events like the Haiti earthquake. Meanwhile, Fox New's talk radio on TV propelled it to second place among all cable networks in the same time period. In 2009, led by the twin riders of the apocalypse Glenn Beck (up 50 percent year over year) and his comparatively more fact-based coeval Bill O'Reilly (up a mere 28 percent, but still boasting an audience nearly five times that of Larry King's), Fox had its best year ever.

The blogosphere has been filled with solutions to CNN's problems. They run the spectrum from turning CNN into a liberal version of Fox News (Jay Rosen) to ditching Larry King before rigor mortis sets in live on air (everyone).

Let me suggest something different.

CNN was Ted Turner's brilliant response to the convergence of two then-new technologies: Cable and Satellites. Cable, because the rapid introduction of cable meant that there was ample shelf space available in everyone's home that had to be filled, and satellites, because now a way existed to feed that cable need cheaply and efficiently. News seemed a logical option and Turner took it.

I remember being interviewed by Eason Jordan in CNN's Paris bureau in 1983.  He didn't hire me! But it was an exciting time.

Technology has since outpaced CNN, and today, it is an anachronism, and one that will soon be off the air if they don't do something.

I have just finished reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and this has given me great insight into what CNN should do, not just to survive, but to return to being on the cutting edge of news.

Kuhn's seminal book (1962) noted that massive scientific revolutions (Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein) were a function of observing the universe as it was, as opposed to how we believed or wished it to be, and then having the courage to draw what were then radical and revolutionary conclusions based on those observations.

Good.

Here is an observation about news in 2010.

It is everywhere and it is very cheap, in fact, mostly free.

The days of their being avalue associated with sending a reporter to Iraq or Haiti with a crew (particularly a the reporter rarely spoke either Arabic or Creole) are over.  With the web and the digital revolution, everyone and their brother is in Iraq or Haiti if they want to be, and on top of that, there are thousands of Iraqi and Haitian bloggers and videographers who actually do know the language, the culture and the history far better than Wolf Blitzer or the Scud Stud (if you remember him).

Our nexus of journalism has changed from one well known celebrity reporter to millions blogging and videoing away and posting it all over the web.

Now, CNN is very much a product of the old model - one report broadcast to millions.

The web is the opposite. Millions of people talking to millions of people.

This is, in fact, what social networks are all about.

Could CNN become a social network, a Facebook, but with news as its content.

How would that work?

Instead of being the provider of news, CNN would have to become the locus of news. That is, the place where millions in search of news and information were connected with the tens of thousands who are eagerly supplying it, 24-hours a day.

Instead of being a producer of news, they would become a publisher of news.

Would it work?

As Thomas Kuhn might say, it is a theory that is coherent with the "observable facts"

Will CNN have the courage to completely re-invent itself, as a sort of eBay of news?

I doubt it.

I doubt it because it is very hard for institutions to shift their core. Certainly without a driven and dynamic personality like Ted Turner at the helm. He had a vision.  The current leaders of CNN do not have a vision.They have anxieties.

WWTD?

What would Ted do?

Respond to the realities of today's technology, as opposed to the technological revolution of 30 years ago.

But somehow, I don't think this is going to happen.

As the Catholic Church responded to the reality of Galileo's observation: they arrested him, tried him and made him recant.

CNN does not employ torture these days, except when it airs Larry King.