What can we learn from Mark Thompson's vision for CNN?

You may have seen that the newly-installed CEO and Chairman of CNN, Mark Thompson shared his vision for the future of the company in a memo a couple of weeks ago.

To quote the Hollywood Reporter "In a wide-ranging memo titled “CNN’s Future” sent to staffers Wednesday morning, Thompson outlined a new organizational structure for the company, one built “around the future not the past.”"

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the memo itself, but what struck me was just how much of it could be talking about (or applied to) the cultural sector.

Who is Mark Thompson?

For a bit of background, Sir Mark Thompson has previously held roles as CEO of Channel 4, Director-General of the BBC, and President & CEO of the New York Times.

I often reference this fascinating 'exit interview' he did with McKinsey on his departure from the New York Times.

"Under his watch, the Times’s digital readership has jumped to nearly 5.7 million subscribers, from half a million. Its annual revenue from digital-only subscriptions topped $450 million at the end of 2019. The Times has said it now has 6.5 million paying readers, more than halfway toward Thompson’s target of ten million subscribers by 2025."

He is clearly someone who sees, understands, and believes in genuine digital transformation, particularly at media companies.

What did he say?

I've pulled a few particularly notable sections from the memo below.

Now technology and audiences are on the move again. For many people today, the smartphone is a more important device for consuming news than the TV. Their news primetime is in the morning not the evening. Video remains key but the news video that most people under 40 watch is vertical not horizontal and, because neither we nor any other established news provider offer a compelling video-led news experience, they often find their news on generic video and social apps. Many get to know CNN reporting and CNN anchors on YouTube or TikTok without connecting them with CNN at all.

This relates to the 'unbundling' consideration I've written about previously.

User behaviour and habits have been radically reshaped by technology, and I would argue that reshaping isn't confined only to news consumption.

All the reports I shared about content consumption at the end 2023 point to the overwhelming supremecy of short-form video across the board.

Add into this the importance of social platforms for how audiences discover news, content, and information generally and this section of his memo also describes a big challenge the cultural sector is facing.

He continues:

So far CNN has been slow to respond to the challenge. [...] there’s currently too little innovation and risk-taking. 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.

Some people in our industry privately agree with this but have concluded that catching up with today’s audiences is simply too hard and decline is therefore inevitable.

This resonated strongly.

Cultural organisations have underinvested in digital, are fearful of innovation, and don't feel they can 'indulge' in risk-taking.

I have these types of conversations about this exact topic with people in the sector on a weekly basis, but the feeling that 'catching up is too hard' is also something that I hear on a regular basis.

Separately to the memo, Thompson also did an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he said “I’m not even sure that subscription is the right pathway for CNN,” Thompson said in the interview. “But I do think we need to start experimenting and exploring in the broader sense direct-to-consumer relationships and potentially direct-to-consumer paying relationships.”

I really believe that this spirit of experimentation is something the cultural sector needs to embrace more widely. To stand still, hoping that the way we've always done things doesn't require review is to welcome irrelevance.

It's something that I've spoken about with numerous guests on the Digital Works Podcast (such as Label Sessions Partner, Nick Sherrard, and DEN's Maaike Verberk).

Next, he moves onto organisational structure:

For historical reasons CNN has grown up with separate domestic and international news operations. Some – but not all – of digital news creation and curation reports into a currently TV-centric news division. Across much of news there is currently limited access or awareness of data science and digital product capabilities.

This structural fragmentation, and the forcing of 'square pegs into round holes' just because 'that's how things have always worked' is shared with large parts of the cultural sector.

So much of the good digital work that happened during the pandemic was possible, in large part, because those 'normal structures' ceased to apply for a time.

Colleagues could work in small, multi-disciplinary, project-oriented teams that cut across usual organisational lines and silos.

The point about 'limited access or awareness of data science and digital product capabilities' is also entirely true of our sector (and has only recently begun to be addressed, and even then only by of the best-resourced organisations).

He then addresses how digital is resourced:

Only legacy media organizations use the word “digital.” In start-ups and in Silicon Valley it 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.

Until today, digital has been organized as a separate operation at the company under a separate general manager, [...] But given that we want every part of CNN to have a digital sensibility and digital skills, it no longer makes sense to organize digital under a general manager or Chief Digital Officer.

Today we urgently need not just drastic modernization of CNN.com, but multiple other new digital products [...] We need new registration/customer management and, above all, new monetization capabilities to access new sources of revenue. We need new skills to add to the strong bench of talent we already have. [...] In short, we need a new strategic approach with a view to becoming an industry leader in digital rather than a follower. We need the best product and tech skills in the business, and we need great and visionary digital product leadership.

This silo-ing of digital, as a separate concern, or as a set of responsibilities contained within one department is something that Kati Price and Dafydd James identified in their 2018 research looking at how digital was structured in cultural organistions.

In their report, Kati and Dafydd clearly describe the same issue that Thompson points to.

They said "Our findings reveal that none of us have yet embraced full digital maturity. The majority are still using a centralized model, but aspire for digital to become distributed across the organization. Yet that won’t happen until we tackle a significant underinvestment in digital skills (most notably in data analysis and technical leadership), and until we begin to set—and measure—realistic objectives for digital success."

And finally Thompson talks about commercial effectiveness:

we need to change from being farmers to hunters, and to go out and seek new audiences and new sources of revenue if we’re to prosper. In the past we haven’t always gone the extra mile to squeeze every bit of value from the outstanding news and other intellectual property we create.

The cultural sector (especially in Europe) is often squeamish about discussing things in the sort of terms Thompson uses above.

But in an environment where central funding is being reduced (even in high-tax, subsidy-heavy Sweden the cultural budget has recently been cut), cultural organisations need to become more focused on maximising revenue opportunities where they can.

It'll be fascinating to see the impact that Mark Thompson is able (or unable) to make at CNN.

The organisation has been in turmoil for a while now (significantly declining audiences, fired leaders, cancelled channels) so it'll be interesting to see whether his fairly radical reshaping and refocusing of the company does what it needs to.

From a digital perspective it's interesting to see a leader centre digital quite so explicitly. It's not just 'a strand of work' that is being given priority, it is a cultural and structural shift towards embedding digital across everything CNN does.

I suspect there will be lessons for us there either way.