In the Room: Notes on Zaz Rule and CNN+’s Debut

Good evening, I'm Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In the Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry.

Today, my notes from Hudson Yards on the imminent launch of CNN’s highly anticipated, frequently misunderstood streaming service—and what it all means for the future of the global news network as its parent company is folded into David Zaslav’s new media empire.

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Notes on Zaz Rule and CNN+’s Debut

David Zaslav’s date with destiny—the endlessly anticipated consummation of Discovery and the WarnerMedia assets—is finally (finally) less than two weeks away. And yet the first major artifact of his tenure—the emergence of CNN+—is already in the market. Herewith, some notes from Hudson Yards.

DYLAN BYERS

On Monday evening, Andrew Morse, the executive in charge of CNN+, offered some remarks at a launch party in Hudson Yards attended by top talent from the network and its about-to-debut streaming product. It was a refreshing moment amid a bewildering season beset by Omicron, Cuomo, Zucker, and a clandestine search for his successor, which ultimately led to the hiring of Chris Licht. Morse, who had been considered a contender for the top job on CNN’s greasy pole, did not betray any signs of frustration, angst, or even anxiety. Instead, he sounded like the model low-key, HBR-imbibing leader of the David Zaslav era. “This is the right time to launch CNN+,” Morse said. “We know the media landscape is changing quickly, and so is the way people are consuming news. In order for us to ensure our journalism remains as essential to the world for the next 42 years as it's been for the last, we must always continue to push ourselves and to innovate.”

CNN+, as Morse plainly noted, is being launched to ensure the long-term relevance of the brand’s journalism. And that testament, perhaps inadvertently, gets to the heart of the matter: news channels are building streaming services these days out of sheer necessity, just like magazines and newspapers built websites 25-30 years ago. The day will come when all of these channels need to make their core offering available via streaming, and the linear product will wither. They can’t do that yet because of the economics of linear, so they’re building placeholders in the meantime. Indeed, similar to the transformations of the music and print industry decades earlier, news brands must convince their employees, and audiences, that the real action is on their streaming service, not their cable channel—and to do so probably before that’s actually legitimately true...

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