A New Face for All-News Network

Walter Isaacson--Harvard alum, Rhodes scholar and longtime Time Inc. executive--spent his third day as the head of CNN News Group praising Andrea Thompson, the former “NYPD Blue” actress, as a smart talent who could be “developed.”

Thompson may be one of the cable network’s newest co-anchors, but she’s best known for her five-year stint on the ABC drama. Last year she left acting to take a reporting job at a television station in Albuquerque, and in June she joined CNN Headline News network. Isaacson raved that while broadcast journalism is new to Thompson, it also feels new for him after years at a weekly magazine.

“Anybody who’s an actress and doing well and says, ‘No, I have a passion,’ ” Isaacson said, “and goes to a local market in New Mexico and starts a new career in journalism, and sends her tape. . .”

He is interrupted as Thompson breaks in, looking for a red leather purse that she left under a couch pillow next to Isaacson.

“There she is!” Isaacson said. “Andrea, I was just defending you.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Thompson, who had just finished doing the same. Seated in front of a room of television critics, she had responded to questions about her qualifications for the high-profile job.

“Certainly I am not a seasoned journalist,” she told them. “[But] if the stardom of my past has something to do with it, then I say: Use me, baby!”

This is the new face of CNN. As Isaacson envisions it, CNN will have a stable of talent like Thompson who can “come alive,” breathing a little personality into what were once bare-bones news reports from somber newscasters such as Bernard Shaw.

Isaacson is clear that the 21-year-old cable news network can no longer stay the course--that for all its accomplishments, CNN’s mantra will no longer be “the news is the star.” Over the years, CNN has won nine Peabody Awards and more than 10 Emmy Awards, including a special recognition Emmy this year for “innovative news coverage.”

Yet the network that invented the concept of televising news on a 24-hour cycle is now trying to survive an environment with countless competitors and three other news channels: MSNBC, CNBC and Fox News Channel.

CNN’s parent company, AOL Time Warner, is taking steps to protect the revenue-generator of $1 billion last year. In the past few months it has replaced CNN’s highest-ranking executives, hired a handful of high-profile talent and revamped one of the networks--CNN Headline News.

While it might appear to be dramatic, these changes represent only the latest phase in a four-year effort of fits and starts meant to redefine CNN’s image.

Many observers see Isaacson as a thoughtful choice, even though he has no TV experience. At Time he brought back to life a medium--the weekly newsmagazine--that looked as if it would be leapfrogged by the 24-hour news cycle of television and the Internet.

But critics suggest it will take more than a cosmetic face lift to make CNN into the influential force it once was.

“(CNN) started out with a great idea, and never took it to the next step,” said Dow Smith, who teaches broadcast journalism at Newhouse School for Journalism at Syracuse University and wrote “Power Producer: A Practical Guide to Television News Producing” (2000). “They provided heavy, heavy, in-depth news. News is terrific and it’s important, but there’s a whole lot more that has to be there than just covering events. You have to have engaging people and first-rate storytelling, and they never have gotten any of that.

“News organizations can become complacent and self-satisfied. They did that. They were unique. They did well in the Gulf War, but then after that--they just stayed.”

Even though CNN airs in more than 212 countries, a glimpse at the A.C. Nielsen ratings shows its domestic audience is one-third smaller than its audience was just two years earlier. During the first week of this month, 610,000 viewers on average tuned in to CNN at some point during prime time. In January, the network proved it was not immune to dips in the economy, laying off nearly 10% of its domestic work force, although it hardly touched its international presence, which had helped CNN stay ahead of the competition on global news stories. (In the past few months, CNN opened up new bureaus in Nigeria and Australia.)

Despite its international reach, critics say the network’s programming strategy of newscasts interspersed with magazine-style shows has driven CNN into an older and smaller audience niche.

“I turned on CNN tonight, and they had talk,” said Marlene Sanders, a Peabody Award juror and former network news correspondent of 24 years. “There wasn’t going to be news for a while. I used to tune in because I used to get the news. Now, you have to look at the listings, because they have so many of these interview shows. I hate those shows where all they do is scream at one another.”

Two media buyers who represent major national advertisers suggested if CNN misses this opportunity to reverse its direction, the network will not only lose viewers but also advertisers, who can place ads less expensively on Fox News Channel. Fox’s brash style has generated ratings quickly approaching, and sometimes beating, CNN’s.

Former CNN correspondent Deborah Potter believes the network lost its way in the mid-1990s, tarnishing its hard-news reputation.

“A network that started out being all news wound up being a network with very few pockets of news on the air. The rest of it was shout TV or talk TV, depending on who was moderating,” she said, adding that this “sea change” occurred before MSNBC and Fox News Channel debuted in 1996.

“So, when these other two networks spun up and began to nibble away the audience, there was less and less that CNN could point to to prove they were a news network. They haven’t had a true commitment to doing news even 12 hours a day, much less 24 hours a day,” said Potter, who left the network on good terms to go into teaching for several years.

Thus far, Isaacson’s pronouncements have not been revolutionary, and he is not the first executive to proclaim he knows how CNN can stay on top. When MSNBC and Fox News Channel suddenly crowded what had been its exclusive province, CNN hired former ABC News producer Rick Kaplan in 1997 as the new president of CNN/USA. He was determined to hold the interest of thousands of viewers who sent ratings through the roof only during big news events. The Gulf War was one of the more striking examples of CNN at its most dominant, when virtually the entire nation tuned in to watch the unfolding action.

Kaplan thought magazine and talk shows could pacify viewers in the absence of hard news. Though revolutionary at CNN, the concept had proved successful on the networks, with veterans “60 Minutes” and “20/20” joined in the ‘90s by “Dateline,” “48 Hours” and “60 Minutes II.”

Nevertheless “that sent shock waves through the system,” said CNN White House correspondent John King, who joined the network from the Associated Press just one month before Kaplan’s arrival. “People watch cable news television for the rawness, for what just happened.”

By June 1998, controversy arrived in the form of a collaborative report with Time magazine that appeared on the network’s first installment of “CNN NewsStand,” a TV magazine franchise. The Tailwind Operation story said the military used the nerve gas sarin against U.S. defectors in Vietnam, but the military denied the report. Three weeks later, CNN retracted the story.

“The place has repeatedly grown without someone stepping back and saying, ‘Wait a minute, we keep adding wings to the house. . . . Should we build a new house?’ ” said King, who just renewed his contract at the network.

Kaplan is now teaching at Harvard University. He was reached on his cell phone as he finished up a game of golf on Wednesday, but he said he didn’t want to talk about CNN.

Much of Kaplan’s programming legacy remains in place at CNN, at least for now. Typically, the day begins with a traditional newscast followed by a series of talk/interview shows such as “Talkback Live” and “Inside Politics,” then heads into its evening with a nightly news show followed by “Lou Dobbs Moneyline,” “Crossfire” and “Larry King Live.” CNN’s Headline News channel is built on the idea of quicker hits and more frequent recaps of breaking news. Potter, who is now executive director of NewsLab, a nonprofit educational resource for local television stations covering complicated stories, said CNN is overlooking its greatest asset.

“You have a 24-hour news window, and yet they still operate that every story has to be a minute 45 seconds. And I’m not talking about magazine shows, either. I’m talking about throwing out the template, and doing some stories at 7 minutes. It’s a shame to have all that time and continue slamming it on as if it’s a local news show. They have tons of time.”

Isaacson agrees, and he says he will encourage correspondents to break from the rote news report to elaborate on issues.

“Having shows that seem to be based on people reading from the TelePrompTer and tossing to 2-minute canned pieces has outlived its usefulness,” he said. “We need to have narrative storytelling, smart discussions.”

The stewardship of CNN falls not just to Isaacson, but also to his new boss, Jamie Kellner, who approached Isaacson about heading the news operation just a week after Tom Johnson resigned June 28. The Turner Broadcasting System chairman and chief executive, who oversees not only the cable news operations but all of the Turner cable networks and the WB network, finds himself in an unusual position with CNN. Kellner has a history of building start-up operations, from the Fox network in its infancy to the WB.

With CNN, he inherits a network that is rooted in a certain tradition and is losing ground. At Fox and the WB, Kellner and his management team could create the rules, and the only thing to do was prove critics wrong about the networks’ own projections of success.

Isaacson and Kellner say more new hiring is planned in the next few months, but in the meantime they hope naysayers will look at the former anchor of the Saturday edition of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” Aaron Brown, who was hired last month to host a prime-time news show on CNN. Brown’s show will premiere in the fall or winter, Kellner said.

Isaacson also points to such current CNN hosts as Judy Woodruff, Lou Dobbs, Jeff Greenfield and Larry King as members of the brain trust who are equipped to illuminate hard news. But many say these figures cannot give CNN the fresh approach it needs to differentiate itself from its own recent past.

“Brian Williams is a brilliant star on MSNBC. Chris Matthews, too. Fox hired some personalities like Brit Hume and Bill O’Reilly,” said Smith, the journalism professor. “Other than Larry King, I don’t know who CNN has. Nobody emerged from their system.”

The average viewing age of both CNN and Fox News Channel is 58, and while MSNBC has the smallest audience of the three, it has managed to dip into an enviable, slightly younger demographic, drawing a viewer that is typically about 50.

“Fox and CNN go for a much older audience, which is mostly political talk show programming. We’re just not interested in those viewers, and they are welcome to them,” said Erik Sorenson, MSNBC’s president. “We’re very focused on trying to establish the next generation of news watchers.”

So are CNN executives. They reinvented Headline News network, which will debut Aug. 6 with a huge, airy “studio in-the-round,” new theme music and Thompson at the news desk.