And now, to Hudson Yards…

On Thursday morning, CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson joined the 9 a.m. editorial call and announced an October 28 launch date for the network’s new “All Access” streaming service—a $6.99-a-month tier that gives subscribers access to CNN’s live and on-demand programming, including a feed of the network’s linear broadcast. The news was both long-awaited—nearly four years earlier, former CNN president Jeff Zucker and his team had tried to stand up a very similar offering in CNN+—and unremarkable. When CNN+ launched, then-digital chief Andrew Morse described it as “the most important launch for CNN since Ted Turner launched the network in June of 1980.” This time around, no one even pretended to be under such illusions.

In private, members of the current regime contend that this is a better product because it offers the live linear feed. Of course, members of the previous regime counter that the original plan was to include the live feed starting in 2026—and that, had David Zaslav not killed it in the crib, CNN+ would now have at least 6 million subscribers by the most conservative estimates. That may or may not have been a pipe dream then, but the salient detail is that it certainly would be now—which may explain why many CNN insiders are reacting to this week’s announcement with a collective shrug.

I’ll spare you the now all-too-familiar history of how we arrived here. Suffice to say that CNN lost a lot of its D.T.C. momentum during the last few years, as Chris Licht’s mismanagement hastened the decline of the core linear business and Mark failed to fulfill his reputation as a digital transformation artist. In brief, Licht all but decimated CNN’s brand equity and hemorrhaged ratings, turning would-be digital subscribers away at the top of the funnel. Mark had the right digital priorities, but arrived with only the dog-eared playbook he’d been given to execute The New York Times’s own D.T.C. transformation a decade earlier—and, if we’re being honest, a less valuable product to pull it off with. As he’s surely aware by now, it’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy.

In any event, the mountain before CNN is now quite steep. The bull case from the front office is that they need to convert only a small fraction of the 120 million-some users who visit CNN.com each month, and that cord-cutters who can’t get news from Netflix and Amazon will see the appeal of adding an à la carte service. (CNN’s first marketing spot debuted on YouTube during the recent Chiefs–Chargers game, which gives you an idea of the audience they’re going after.) The bear case is that cord-nevers already watch their version of news on YouTube and X (if they watch news at all), and the world needs CNN a whole lot less than anyone inside the building realizes.

Alas, the headwinds are already evident. ESPN, which recently launched its flagship streamer, has so far amassed fewer than a million subscribers, according to available estimates. (Guggenheim puts the number at half a million, Antenna somewhere between 750,000 and 900,000.) In a best-case scenario, analysts predict it may one day reach up to 8 million—enough to help drive up ARPU through the Disney bundle, but by no means enough to offset the losses in cable. The difference is that ESPN still has some exclusive live rights to the NFL, college football, the NBA, et al., which still makes it a must-have for consumers.

News, by contrast, is heavily commoditized, and in the post-Zucker era, CNN no longer produces it in a compelling or differentiated way. Its edge in live video is growing vulnerable to myriad competitors, especially as the Times and others ramp up their own investments in those areas. And indeed, even the very format of buttoned-up anchors at desks reading teleprompters is discordant in an era that rewards authenticity from personable and charismatic creators. Jake Tapper reading Trump’s text messages in his Eagles sweatshirt is not going to solve for that.

Meanwhile, CNN’s effort to achieve differentiation through a Timesian strategy of niche verticals is also limited by its mass market orientation. This year CNN tapped New York and New York Times veteran Choire Sicha to help develop lifestyle channels, and recently hired The Washington Post’s Rachel Tashjian to serve as a fashion critic. Of course, lifestyle coverage and criticism is now disseminated across digital brands and social media influencers, and it’s hard to imagine millions of consumers pulling out their credit cards to get fashion tips—or food, or travel, or health and wellness advice—from a cable news network when they can pay for more premium sources or simply get it elsewhere for free. This hire, as good as it might look on paper, is designed to disappoint everyone involved and gesture at the impossibility of CNN’s challenges: It’s both too big for fandoms and too small to superscale.

Presumably, Mark sees that reality, but also knows that at least having a streaming service in 2025 beats the alternative. And looming over all this is the fact that Zaslav has already consigned CNN to the fate of the soon-to-be-spun-off cable portfolio, which will either ride its decline to a private equity exit or be absorbed by David Ellison’s Paramount, at which point CNN will likely be handed over to Bari Weiss—who will then have to decide whether she wants to kill off a subscale news streamer, as Zaz once did. Indeed, one wonders how much longer Thompson intends to stick around and suffer this indignity. I suspect the pay is pretty good, and given how fast things change in this business, maybe he’d like to keep his options open.

For now, most CNN insiders remain nonplussed. “The ghost of the CNN+ flop still haunts everyone, the fact that it’s taken this long to get to the streaming launch hasn’t helped, and the so-far lack of a clearly communicated plan to deal with [the challenges] of streaming is feeding a sense of, Sure, let’s see what happens, maybe,” one CNN journalist said. “It would be really nice if it works, and there’s reason to believe it can, that CNN is at least decently positioned to be stronger than others in the next phase of the multiplatform future.”

Meanwhile, members of the previous regime are just happy to see the fruits of their labor finally come to fruition: “I think launching a global direct-to-consumer service sounds like a really smart idea,” Morse told me on Friday. “I wish we’d thought of it.”

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