CNN rethinks output. Dumps ‘fn’ ;Opportunity for CNN Int’l

By Chris Forrester , LONDON: November 11

Last week was a good one for CNN. It’s not every week that there’s a presidential election. Nevertheless, the ratings show CNN was still easily beaten by archrival Fox News. Of course, Tuesday’s election night was well covered by the major networks that stole many of the viewers who would normally have stayed with CNN (and Fox) for breaking news.

But it was also a bad week for CNN, having to admit that its 9-year experiment to give financial news its own channel, has been a failure. Parent company Time Warner will pull the plug on CNNfn in mid-December. The channel is available to about 30m US homes and a few specialised overseas markets. It has never launched in Europe, for example. However, the decision is more a reflection of the much-softened market for business-related advertising in the US market. The downturn in advertising also tracks the – apparent – lack of interest in business-only channels. CNBC in the US, for example, is suffering a dramatic drop-off in viewers, down 30% over the past year, to a typical 166,000 a day despite being available in nearer 86m US homes (and near-200m globally).

In truth CNNfn has never found its feet. It even went through a name change to CNN Money, but was quickly re-named CNNfn after a management change. At the height of the dot-com boom it even lost its star turn Lou Dobbs, who quit for the joys of a dot.com company, only to return to CNN in 2001 a little wiser. Dobbs’ show ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ is now carried live on CNN and repeated on ‘fn’. Of late ‘fn’ has changed format from a business news channel to what could best be described as a personal finance station. Some 60 staff will be offered work elsewhere.

CNN’s news group president, Jim Walton, said CNNfn turned a profit last year, but "we came to the conclusion there is more potential growth" to be gained by going in a different direction, he told reporters. CNN now plans to approach its US distributors with CNN’s International service as an alternate. CNNI is already carried in the late-night hours and at weekends. Report from Atlanta say that CNN’s Headline News service is also slated for an urgent makeover which will include dedicated longer-form programming in prime-time replacing some of its fast-repeated 30 minute news-wheel.

Quite why this is needed when CNN already exists (and CNNI might also be available) is the question some observers are asking. "We're going to try to create some programs that are going to generate viewer interest and appointment viewing," Walton told the Atlanta Constitution, in a report. "We still will have news on Headline News." Oddly enough, there are more than a few international viewers to CNNfn, in the Middle East, in Germany’s PrimaCom cable system, in Japan, and elsewhere. It will be interesting how CNN now attempts to hold onto this distribution.

The final irony might be that Fox News, for a year or more a ratings-winner compared to CNN, is rumoured to be planning its own ‘financial channel’.