• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 24, 2024

From now on, CNN will be a "digital-first" news-content company, officially consigning the company’s TV network to legacy status.

Or maybe it already was digital-first. No matter. The situation was clarified earlier this month in a long memo from CEO Mark Thompson.

As a matter of fact, the phrase "digital-first" -- specifically, the word "digital" to describe a media content company today -- is itself obsolete, the memo said.

"Only legacy media organizations use the word 'digital'," the memo said in the lead-off to a section subtitled "A New Digital Chapter At CNN."

“In start-ups and in Silicon Valley [“digital”] doesn’t need to be said because it’s so central and so obvious. At CNN we also want to move as quickly as possible to a point where it becomes redundant,” it said.

"Legacy" was not the only word applied in the memo in reference to the old (but still with us) CNN. 

Others words were “tenured,” “old-fashioned,” “unadventurous” and “heritage” (in this context, a synonym for “legacy”).

“The CNN of today is no longer that buccaneering outsider but a tenured incumbent,” said the memo, positioning CNN on par with a college professor of advancing age who is increasingly out of touch with his constituency -- i.e., his young students.

“There is currently too little innovation and risk-taking,” the memo said of CNN.

“Like so many other news players with a broadcast heritage, CNN’s linear services and even its website can sometimes have an old-fashioned and unadventurous feel as if the world has changed and they haven’t,” it said.

Later in the memo, CNN is likened to a forgotten, older child whose younger siblings are getting all the attention from mom and dad.

“In many ways, media companies are families and, just as in a family, the first-born child can sometimes look round [sic] and wonder why it’s their younger siblings who are now getting all the attention.

“It’s only natural for someone who currently works on the TV side at CNN to ask themselves whether I’m ever going to turn to them,” Thompson said in the memo.

To offset the memo’s portrayal of CNN as something like the cobwebbed interior of the Munsters house on Mockingbird Lane (OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it was fun to write), the memo does include some portions insisting that the old gal is not dead yet.

“At their frequent best our domestic and global TV schedules are one of the jewels in our crown and I believe that linear TV will play a central and vital role in CNN’s success as far out as the eye can see,” said the memo, which then appends the word “classic” to the word “linear.”

“It’s also been great seeing new audiences find classic linear TV and new programming in meaningful numbers on CNN Max,” the memo said, citing as examples “our coverage out of Israel, our Iowa debate and our New Year’s Eve programme [sic].”

The memo came 100 days after Thompson, 67, joined CNN last October. His full title at CNN is Chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide and editor-in-chief of CNN. 

He is also a “Sir,” as in Sir Mark Thompson, having been knighted last year for “services to Media.”