The Man Who Fixed The New York Times Wants to Fix CNN

You know those recruiter texts you get? The ones offering you a ton of money for basically no work. - Base pay is $2,000. - You're receiving $720 after you know it's a scam. But ever wonder what would happen if you actually responded? - This is where, if I wasn't going into this eyes wide open, this is probably where the red flag starts showing up. - This week on Explain It To Me, where those texts come from and where they just might take you. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. - What did New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani and Donald Trump have in common? More than you think. - They're not trying to calibrate for the center and they're not trying to reflect the party as it is. - I'm Preet Bharara. In this week, political journalist, Asteed Herndon, joins me to discuss Mamdani's rise, how political reporting keeps pace with a shifting media landscape, and what truly motivates voters. The episode is out now. Search and follow, stay tuned with Preet, wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - 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. The other reason this launch might sound familiar is that in recent months we've seen ESPN and then Fox launched 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. And yes, we also talk about Barry Weiss. So here's me talking to Mark Thompson. - 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 were 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. But I'm not sure what it is. And I wrote this quote down and you said, "My thing is I love big, juicy, difficult strategic puzzles." You're running CNN. Is that qualifies a big, juicy, strategic puzzle? - A 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. And that feels like a box set as well. - You have a thing for running big, giant global news organizations. - Yeah. - We're 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. It's funded by subscriber fees, but indirectly, right? I'm just paying an MVPD 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 of 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. So 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 gonna say it's a business model question, first and foremost, who is going to foot the bill for this product? - Yes, but I wanna 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 and the sense that CNN is a 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. Just look like a true tech executive, you're gonna build the thing and then figure out how to pay for it later. We are, we 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, we don't wanna build a product for its own sake, we wanna 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 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 and 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 building, rebuilding of a suite of different ways of building revenue out of news. And that's what you did at the time, 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, but it's like 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'd change into 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? It's slightly different from someone, you know, discovery of content is very different when you haven't got a big physical newspaper to look at. And 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. You know, the risk was always you thought of your audience in very large statistical aggregates. How big is the audience? Because we're selling advertising or because if you're the BBC, you're trying to engage very large audiences to justify your whole existence and your license fee, rather than focusing on the audience one by one. And I think the big lesson, we all, 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. Let's talk about the product itself that you're launching. It's going to be, you guys say $699, $7 a month gets you-- Sorry, that's a completely different-- --get you 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, and international feed, but also theholdofcnn.com. So, you know, the website, which has got a monthly active user base of $140 million on 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. It's also a product which unlocks the totality, pretty much, of CNN journalism. 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 to put 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 have cut the cord since COVID. Of 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. And they're saying CNN, not news, generic. 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 memory to get to its first million. Right, these things initially go quite further. And you had this 10 million goal that seemed incredibly audacious and kind of not reachable. When I announced 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 Salzburger, the current chairman, and Martha Meredith-Copit Levion, my successor, then the chief operator, burst out laughing at me. So, I mean, inside the New York Times, it was regarded as a sort of, if not, you know, insanity, a rather florid, going to reach the imagination. After all, the people described it as a galvanizing goal. This is the thing we're working towards. I believe that, I'm not gonna 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, and making the thing stronger, there's no reason why this couldn't build a really scaled digital model. It'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. So, but just to push on this, when the pie chart, when a year after you've launched, what do you want that to look like in terms of former cable TV subscribers versus cord never, people who've never paid for digital or never paid for cable TV? I wanna say, we're going to like paying subscribers and, you know, first. But you've got to decide where you're gonna market when you wanna reach. Although I think you will discover a mix from day one, we would expect 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. And 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 well. And we hope that some of them in numbers are going to sample these new services as well. - 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. - I think we're finding a new consumer. - I would broadly say the same thing. In other words, if someone's got cable and 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 at, I would say, in terms of all households, about 10% a year. So 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 usually at 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. - I said the product gets you almost every part of CNN. If you're used to watching on CNN Live, on traditional TV, you're getting almost everything, not quite everything. I'm assuming that's because you have deals with the pay 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 at certain parts than... - But is that contractual? Is that just an artifact? 'Cause 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, completely, as it were, simulcast, primetime, and other key day parts that I think many users will feel this is very unlike CNN Plus from a few years ago, which was a parallel complimentary service. This was explicitly not bringing CNN over to this paid product business. - And we call the subscription tier all access. There's gonna be two tiers, basic and all access. But the service is not called CNN Plus or CNN Extra. It's called CNN. - Right, so in the one end, you wanna tell the consumers, this is what you're getting on cable. While you also wanna tell the consumers who are paying for it on cable, we'd like it if you stay there. And also the cable guys, and we'd like to keep those guys there as well as we can. - I wanna say, I mean, our main issue with messaging is, as it were, clarity, and trying to get people to understand what the product is. We 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 it's when the... - Right, that's the traditional thing you hear. - 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. - The flip side of that is there may not be watching you, and there isn't news when there isn't a crisis. You guys have modest, right? 500, 600,000 people a night watching prime time? - Well, yes, I wanna say, I think you conflate two different things. If you say, has there always been a question, 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. I wanna say, having a very rich range of VOD content on the same time is a partial answer to that. The other answer I have to say, over my many decades long career, like the news flow is getting denser and has been getting denser for years. And if you say, you know, well, there are weeks when nothing ever happens, I'd like you to point out one of those in 2035. - 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 wanna do anything else but consume news, they're not interested in it. - So you know normal people, do you? - I've heard of them, yeah. - And read studies about them, yeah. - And so what I'm getting at is, do you have to, again, the one of the way that the times handle 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. CNN 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 wellbeing. So 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 and the Pacific palisades. - You have to deliver on 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 to 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 misuse the word ratings, our 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 at the context of the total number of households, the decline in the numerical number of the CNN audiences 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 Sofen talked about, MSNBC overtook CNN in all audience ratings in I think 2017 and has been ahead ever since. Fox has eclipsed both of you. - Fox is, I think in a slightly different business in some ways and also, I think just given the political context, something 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 there's a reality about the way media is covered. We were regarded head and head with broadly the idea being that not only was MSNBC getting close to, it was 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. We'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. - Yeah. - 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. - Fair enough. And I do wanna 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 needing it. - But can I say, 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 wanna consume it to the same level in a linear, lean back, linear television format, I think that's true. But also, obvious point, when is the peak time for wanting to know what's happened? When's the peak time for news? - I'm guessing you're gonna say the morning. - It's the morning. It's not the evening, it's the morning. 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, it's now decades old itself, but the patterns and the kind of diurnal kind of spread of news consumption and the media people use 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 for the likes of NBC. - We have a-- - There's a CNN. - Right, so-- - So, it gives-- - So, it gives-- - Headline services. - So, if you-- - I would argue, I don't think it's much truly high quality, but there are, there's some good, fast channels. - This audience that is vaguely interested and is flipping through headlines, whatever it is, aren't they already being served with lots of other free options? - You'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. - I mean, it's very precisely what people said. 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-- - 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. You can get good free recipes for, you know, 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 gonna 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. And I would say, you could say, well, how do you know it's gonna work for TV news? I would say, I don't think anyone's really tried it properly on TV news yet. And nobody certainly is offered as rich a mixture of television media as this product on next Tuesday will represent. We'll be right back with Mark Thompson, but first a word from the sponsor. First, it was one alleged truck boat back in September. - US military forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified trendy Arangwa narco terrorists. - 11 on board were killed. - When you flood American streets with drugs, you are terrorizing America. - Then, a second strike in the Caribbean, then another and another, almost every week for two months. In total, more than a dozen ships have been hit, and at least 57 people left dead. - We're gonna kill them, you know? They're gonna be like dead, okay? - And Trump is still upping the ante. He's sending warships to the coast of Venezuela. But the question is why? And what's Stephen Miller got to do with it? - Okay. - I'm Asted Herndon, filling in around here for the next few months. That and more on Today Explained from Box. - Asted Herndon, you're finally here. - Finally, I'm excited to be here. - You are joining Today Explained for the next five months to fill in for my co-host Sean while he's taking care of a baby. And you are also starting a brand new podcast at Fox. - Exactly, I'm excited to continue my reporting and help make politics more accessible to people. - What's the thing that you're most excited to cover? - I'm most excited to help people make sense of all the noise that's happening right now and try to figure out what really matters. And most importantly, help people make sense of the chaos that's going on right now. - Today Explained weekdays wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - OpenAI wants to be worth a trillion dollars. NVIDIA is already worth $5 trillion and Google just made $100 billion in one quarter. What do all those things have in common? They all talk about AI a lot. And no one, including I suspect them, knows exactly what we're all supposed to do with AI to make it worth all that money. This week on The Vergecast, we talk about which AI products might turn into something. Plus smart glasses with screens, apple shortcuts, all the new stuff in Photoshop, and more on The Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - 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-- - Well, you say that. 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 were getting out. We weren't, people were getting whipped up about it. - Well, let's be quite clear. The idea that mainstream media in the United States was, as it were, coastal, in fact, CNN was Atlanta, rather than coastal, but coastal and broadly liberal, is an idea certainly from Richard Nixon's era. - Sure, but in modern times, you guys-- - Things have got a little bit sharper since then. - Yes. - No, I wouldn't deny that. - So in modern times, things are sharper now, and you have-- - 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 the famous example of a program which very deliberately defines CNN as a platform for debate rather than the leader of debate. 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 Abby Phillip Newsnight program in the evening, as it touches its cap towards Crossfire. - So this is where I'm going, right? So your predecessor-- - I think I'm already there. - Yeah, your predecessor, there was a whole bunch of time about we're gonna sort of correct the left wing bias and make it truly central, and you still hear it from-- - Which one was that? - That was Mr. Lick. 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 up, 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. - 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, 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. I don't want to be anywhere on that spectrum. I would much rather be observing the spectrum, albeit sometimes, and the Abby Phillip 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 you've got, CNN has got the same issue I've lived with in the New York Times and the BBC in the UK, which is you've got a college educated, significantly urban or yuppies prosperous, yuppies 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. I 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. 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 that's the biggest version of that is Fox News. And then there's sort of more smaller and extreme versions all 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. - Right, so I'm saying, 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. - Is it important to you to find people who are watching Fox News or who feel like mainstream media is biased, you're part of the bias and convince them they're wrong and they should be concerned? - 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 was solace 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, independence, 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 and 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. (upbeat music) And we're back. What do you make 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, blood boats 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, I mean, I mean that sort of seriously. In other words, I think it's incredibly easy to jump to it. 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 talked about some of the things that 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 an objectionable. It's very funny. We were talking about Barry Weiss, too. And she had a lot of the times. David Ellison- I mean, I think Barry's, by the way, a really interesting figure. I mean, I'm thoughtful and not to be stereotyped as, you know, in a way that she often is in the current discourse about CVS. So I would say that she's an interesting kind of individual, you know. 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 there's a they would like your owners would like there to be a bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery. They might someone might buy the entire thing. They might buy part of it. All what you say is there's obviously a lot of uncertainty. What's going to happen to this company? How do you 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. Yep. 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 if you're looking for a life of complete certainty, you may want to consider, you know, there was never anyone who was never anyone who's going to buy the BBC and there was never anyone who's going to buy the New York Times as a family run business. Family on business, the the 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 in significant editorial changes. You know, there may be other factors which, you know, explain various trends and movements and the rest of we could discuss that for hours. But basically, change changes because of the character of cable and the big blocks of of channels and the arguments for consolidating and deconsolidating, rest of it. There's been a lot of it over the years. And, you know, I would say just just from recent months and the last few years, the Hollywood assets more broadly of almost everyone of shifting shifting in multiple ways, I think that's a fact of life. I mean, and I want to say to my colleagues, the best thing CNN can do to assure its future is one high quality of journalism and courage about this particular part of news first, genuinely fair journalism and passing tests, you know, dealing with sensitive and difficult stories in a way which is which is fair minded and treats everyone involved in dignity. You know, that could be, you know, a political story or some other story. That'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 the simple website by doing what we're doing. For example, it'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. Do you have thoughts about who an ideal owner of CNN would be in terms of not going to ask you whether you think David Ellison should on it, but whether it's someone who's primarily interested in running a media business or someone who's a financial owner and is 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 World Discovery and for David Souslap, 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, so allowing me as editor-in-chief to be in the end where the buck stops in terms of editorial decision-making, they've honoured all of that. And I would say, you know, I would test any owner, not on 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. And 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 its got that quality. 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 time for a bit. 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, not, I mean, as we all know, you know, on the substack where, you know, sole trader, single people writing on their own laptop. So as a fixed cost incredibly low, actually, you can leverage that into a, you know, it's not 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 substack. I'm really glad 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 no question. There'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, how much what's the average. Are you going to be under pressure to cut those costs? So to say, look, that, you know, you're not in TV anymore or 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 gets to a point where, you know, a plan. I mean, you know, a plan is a plan. Let's see what happens. But in the plan, CNN is remains so cash-generative that every year we can, we believe, fully invest in our future and also still deliver very large, very large EBITDA operations. Yeah, I'm asking whether you're going to have to cut costs, whether that's cutting people or cutting programming. I would say, I mean, our headcount has gone up since I've been at CNN so far. We are 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 costs 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. I don't believe, as far as I can see, there's going to be a significant net reduction in the number of people who have CNN. 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, and at the time, we've been spending." And I would say, so far, we're still investing in journalism. But what happened at the time, as I can tell you, is that at least 800 people left and about 1,000 people arrived. I mean, 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, including Anderson Cooper AC360 and us to it, and actually find new audiences for essentially the same product on a different platform. For a long time... At that point, you're actually, 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. For a long time when you had 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, was 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 book club, whatever his derivative stuff was. You were getting Anderson Cooper to be fair, I mean, it was a different product. So do you feel like now in 2025, your best, highest-priced talent, people with pulling in ratings want to be part of digital and one of the 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, though the simplest things, Jake Tapp has started doing these short impromptu, wherever he is- I just talked to the president, Tectaxia, 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. It 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, dope notes 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 former journalism as we do now, but in even greater numbers and get more experts at that. We've not been- we've needed something 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 the art with social media. How 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 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 you- how are we going to know if it's- 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.