CNN Headline News used to be a fixture in my life. No matter what time of day or night, I could count on a quick review of the top news stories in the world. But that's changed.
On August 6, CNN Headline News introduced a new format. According to their promotional copy, the idea was to "change everything but our name." That's what they did.
They changed the screen. The bottom thirty percent or so of the screen is filled with headlines that change every few seconds, a ticker that shows either sports scores or stock prices, and another display that usually has something to do with weather.
Above that flickering mass of information, the screen is divided into two parts. On the right is either the head of the anchor who is speaking or video for the story being presented. On the left is a "data board" with several bullet points that relate to the story but which aren't covered in the copy being read.
The overall effect is one of unconnected jittery clutter.
They changed the set, too. What they had before looked like an anchor desk set at the camera end of a working newsroom. What they have now looks like something by Sharper Image out of MTV. The MTV reference is highly appropriate
Now, instead of being the only real news station, they've got more entertainment and lifestyle features and less news. They've got the same content as everyone else now, only in a more confusing format.
These are all bright folks, so why would they do something like this? The answer comes back: "To achieve corporate objectives."
Headline News is profitable, but evidently it's not profitable enough. There's incessant pressure in the corporate world today, not just to be profitable, but to generate increasing profits.
Ratings have been slipping. The corporate suits figured that the basic format, which hadn't been changed for many years was part of the problem.
Advertisers were putting on the pressure, too. Advertisers are having a particularly difficult time reaching young people in the twenty to thirty-five year age range. Those folks don't watch much news, but advertisers figured they would, if only someone would do the news right.
These advertisers and evidently the TV execs and the consultants that live in symbiotic relationship with them felt that these young folks have proved they want non-fiction programming, and could be lured to it. What gave them that idea? The success of the reality TV shows like Survivor.
Somehow, these corporate suits got the idea that the fact that a whole bunch of Generation Xers watch a show like Survivor means that they'd be more likely to watch Headline News if only they could change a few things. The idea is to make Headline News "hipper" and edgier.
But young people have never been big consumers of news. Not in this generation, not in the last generation, not in any generation that we know about. Paying attention to the news is something that seems to happen a bit later in life. That's why the average age of a Headline News viewer is 51, not format.
There's another problem, too. The people at CNN want you to actually sit down and watch Headline News like any other show. They point out that folks only watch for about 11 to 12 minutes at a time. One of the key executives thinks his 29-year-old daughter will be enthralled with the new mix, though, and sit right down and keep on watching.
Think so? I don't. What Headline News gave a lot of us was a kind of running news wire on TV. You could be busy getting kids off to school in the morning, or packing up your briefcase, or riding on an Exercycle, and still get a good dose of news while you were doing it.
The suits ignored all that. They decided that a change in format will get those young viewers glued to Headline News and the ad dollars rolling in.
Well, once you've decided that, the rest is easy. First you know that kids like websites, so you make your news display look something like a website. Too bad a TV screen is not a website.
Personalities are important to fashion conscious kids. Suddenly, instead of a simple anchor desk, we have a whole array of anchors. They're all well dressed and very good looking.
We've got the obligatory man and woman co-anchors, just like local news. And there's a bunch of subject matter anchors. That's not all. There's also a "just in" breaking news anchor who shows up when there's a hot story.
And kids like to multi-task, you think. You've already decided that you want folks to sit and watch Headline News, though, not mix it with other tasks. So you try for some weird kind of information multi-tasking and fill the space on the screen with lots of different, unconnected bits of fluff.
Did I say fluff? They call it Headline News, but it's become Headline Fluff. I guess they figured that if kids wouldn't watch news, they'd just give kids whatever they want and call it news.
For proof of this you don't have to look any farther than the new prime time news anchor, Andrea Thompson. Back when CNN started up, they hired top, seasoned journalists like Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw. The message was clear: "news is important here."
Ms Thompson, by her own admission, is "certainly not a seasoned journalist." She's a former actor with no journalism training. She's got less than a year's experience working at a local station in New Mexico. Again, the message is clear. This time it's that entertainment is more important than quality journalism and content, and the pursuit of profit wins over journalistic principles.
The abandonment of principles in order to chase the Painted Lady of Profit is not something unique to CNN or even to journalism. It's almost endemic in the corporate world today. It starts from the belief that the purpose of a business, any kind of business, is to produce a profit.
But that's not true. In fact, it's perniciously not true.
The purpose of a business is to do whatever its unique business purpose is. In the case of a journalistic enterprise, like a news television service, for example, the purpose is to find, edit, and present news of value to people. That's not just news that's simply of interest to people, it should also be of value. There are plenty of places in the entertainment pantheon for finding things that merely interest, but are not important or valuable.
What Headline News has done is taken profit as the purpose. It has sold out to the advertisers. It's basically abandoned its primary journalistic goal in favor of getting yet one more kiss from a fickle advertising community.
The irony of this is that it's bad strategy in the long run. What makes strong brands and strong companies over time is not profit as the purpose. It's emphasizing and being excellent at the primary purpose. It's building a culture around achieving that purpose with vigor, energy, and effectiveness.
Sure, it's necessary to do it at a profit. Without a profit, the business can't go on. But profit isn't the purpose. In this case, journalism was the purpose. But it's not any more.
Maybe they should have changed the name, too. CNN Headline Fluff has a nice ring to it.
This feature appeared on 13 August 2001
