What podcasting and radio can take from Mark Thompson’s note to CNN’s staff
We in audio can learn a lot from Thompson’s central idea: “Follow the audience.”
Welcome to Dispatch #57 of The Audio Insurgent.
Welcome to the first dispatch under our new subscription scheme. See? That wasn’t so bad. As I mentioned, The Audio Insurgent will always be free for everyone. Reader support makes it possible for me to set aside the time to do this work. Thanks to those who have subscribed.
Recently a friend (and reader) wrote saying, “I kept wondering how Mag Noise is feeling these days? Are you feeling the crunch at all yourself? Are y’all knocking it all out of the park or have things gotten financially tight? It’s kind of weird that I read the dispatch but don’t have a sense of the concrete stuff.”
It’s a fair observation. I shy away from revealing too much, mostly because Magnificent Noise isn’t solely mine–my co-founder, Jesse Baker, and I created it together and run it very much as a team. So I wanted to run this by her before I shared it with you–in fact, she gave this a pretty thorough edit. 😉
TLDR: We’re doing fine. Since we opened our doors in 2019, we have run our business on the producer’s bromide: “Hope for the best; plan for the worst.” And we believe this mindset has served us well during these topsy-turvy years for this industry.
Jesse and I have grown Magnificent Noise at a deliberate pace. We said “no” to lots of opportunities, partnerships, and other kinds of deals over the past few years. Some of these would have stretched us in new ways, but also caused us to hire too quickly, and build bigger than we wanted to be. That might have resulted in gaining a high profile, but that isn’t something we feel is a primary objective at all. We resisted because we believed it would have forced us to alter our culture and that would have affected the nature of our work.
While we are very deliberate, we also have a healthy relationship with risk. We pursue very disciplined and managed risk and are probably happiest when we are taking a wild leap that we’ve planned for.
We have always felt that the bigger we grew, the more compromises we would have to make. We concluded that would multiply our problems and concerns without a sufficiently good reason. We always keep this in mind: We are a boutique production house emphasizing craft. We survived by staying true to our vision.
Like most young businesses in and out of the audio industry, we’ve gone through our share of difficulties in our five-year history. Early on, at the outset of the pandemic, we worried that we’d have to fold when a few clients abruptly canceled big projects. Jesse and I played things conservatively and came out of the pandemic a stronger company than we entered it.
Last year played out pretty similarly. We noticed the early trouble signs and warnings on the horizon, so we jokingly said our strategic goal for 2023 was to make it to 2024.
We were also very serious about this, and looked across our business and made a lot of big and small decisions about projects, clients, staffing, and how we spent money–all with the attitude of making sure we kept as many options and directional choices as open to us as possible. Jesse and I both had some late nights –but our worries were focused relatively far downfield (in other words, six months down the line, not the next pay period).
As a result, we made sure everything we did, every dollar we spent, was focused on getting through the year in as strong a state as possible. Despite our fears, last year proved steady and stable for us and we ended up arguably more focused today than we were a year ago–and all without a crisis.
We aren’t patting ourselves on the back about all this. It’s equally fair to say we were lucky and had a very different experience than many of our friends and colleagues across the industry. We don’t take it for granted.
Jesse and I talk about how great it would be to just be able to sit back and take a breath. But to be frank, as most small business owners will tell you, that will probably remain elusive for some time. There is always a fresh challenge.
We are grateful for the past five years and the opportunity to build a team that we are devoted to, to work with clients who align with our values, and to create projects that we believe in. We’ve made new friends along the way. And we’re always learning.
So, today’s main item contains some thoughts after reading Mark Thompson’s memo to the staff at CNN regarding the organization’s future–and what audio professionals in radio and podcasting can take from what he says…and how he says it.
So…
[TODAY’S THING: WHAT WE CAN TAKE FROM MARK THOMPSON’S NOTE TO CNN] What’s the deal with CEOs feeling compelled to mark their 100th day with strategic proclamations? I guess that feels like the right amount of time for getting to know an organization and its people, as well as understanding its assets, challenges, and opportunities. On Mark Thompson’s exact 100th day as CEO of CNN, January 17th, he dropped a 2,400 word email to all staff outlining his first take on the future of the news network (note that the full text is at the bottom of the linked post).
The note is fascinating to me, both for what it says and for what it doesn’t say. For the people of CNN, it lays down some clear boundary and pathway markers about how the organization will position itself in the coming years. It isn’t a guide to the future in as much as it is a guide to the decisions CNN will make in the coming months and years. It points to a direction, yet is still vague on specifics. However, it offers a “why” to the specifics to come.
The reason I wanted to focus on it today is because it is a great model for strategic planning, and a great example of the questions that legacy organizations need to ask themselves as they confront change. And while only a few of us are in the legacy TV news business, I think there are some things that audio creators can take from this as well.
A special note on this for public radio stations and organizations in the US or internationally. If you are struggling to come up with a fresh strategic plan, you could take Thompson’s memo, remove all the personnel announcements, substitute every mention of “CNN” with “NPR” (for example) or your station/organization name, every reference to “video” with “audio,” and every reference to “TV” with “radio”--and it holds up! Work done! (I’m more than a little serious about this.)
HORIZONTAL INSTEAD OF VERTICAL
The note calls out CNN’s position as a leading global news brand and a profitable business, but Thompson keenly points out that success comes in spite of some deep misalignment with the audience’s interests and preferences for how to consume content, generally, and news, specifically.
“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”
The smartphone being more important than the TV, and mornings versus evenings–all true and clear, but the part I keep coming back to his point about “vertical not horizontal.” That’s profound. It goes so much deeper than our “content,” saying that we are putting what we make in a most basic container that doesn’t match what the audience wants and expects. It made me think of how I, as well as the companies I work with, are out of sync in this way. Ask yourself, in what ways are the things you create or the way you distribute them horizontal instead of vertical? In what ways do we, at a profoundly base level, miss the audience and their interests before we even say a word? I bet anyone reading this could make a list of 3-5 items that are horizontal instead of vertical in their work. Why not do that–and list a few things you could do to correct that?
EMBRACING A DIGITAL, ON-DEMAND FUTURE DOESN’T REQUIRE HATING YOUR LEGACY
In a few places in the memo, Thompson addresses the future of linear TV broadcasts.
“TV remains an important way of reaching some loyal audiences, but the critical revenue we currently derive from it is increasingly under threat.”
And…
“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…We also need to address the long-range economics of TV at CNN. Even after cable consumption began to fall, there was a period of strong revenue growth from cable subscriptions in the mid-2010s and some of that unexpected bounty ended up as raised production costs that now look difficult to support given the changing economics across our industry. I firmly believe that financial success and sustainability fund our journalism and afford us more independence to focus on what we do best. So, in addition to quality and performance improvement, expect to see us also looking hard at how best to put our TV production machine on a sustainable footing without weakening either the calibre of our journalism or the distinctiveness of our output.”
I think there is a tendency in legacy media organizations to feel that in order to embrace the new, they need to reject the old. I see this a lot in public radio organizations. Listening to them speak, they talk of their radio broadcasts–and radio audiences–as if they are trapped in some kind of dutiful, loveless marriage of necessity. It's almost like they want to knock down the legacy platform as a show of their sincerity about new platforms. No, that’s wrong. You show your sincerity through your efforts in those new spaces. This all feels kind of like thinking that the way to impress the new girlfriend is by trashing your old girlfriend. That doesn’t work.
I feel the same sometimes as podcasters’ experiment with video and YouTube. Is video of a podcast an interesting way to reach more people? Possibly. For some, highly likely. But if you want to produce a TV show, produce a TV show. What frightens me are the number of podcasters who embrace video and are slowly losing touch with the audio audience that built their success.
I feel very similar to Thompson in regard to the audio space. If you have a radio presence, you will most likely continue to have a presence on radio regardless of your success on other platforms–and will do so for the foreseeable future. For many, radio will be part of your show or organization for the rest of your career. Same with podcasting, as new opportunities to connect with audiences emerge, don’t take your eye off the ball.
FARMERS TO HUNTERS
This is one of my favorite lines of the memo:
“At CNN 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.”
I wrote in an earlier dispatch about my friend Will Page’s writing on builders and farmers, this is a very similar idea. So, so, so many in all audio industries are farmers today. They are extractive, rather than creative. They extract value from something that exists, rather than creating something new that generates additional value. Most of the conversation I hear in podcasting today is about how to extract more value from podcasting and its audiences. Rarely is there much attention paid (beyond lip service) to attracting new audience, serving audiences we don’t reach today, or creating new types of podcasts and audio products. That would require risk—and podcasting in 2024 has nothing to do with risk, even smart risk.
Commercial radio has been on an extraction tear for the past quarter century. Optimizing, trimming expenses, and reducing investment, all to squeeze out more net revenue without concern that these moves were slowly killing the stations and companies being “optimized.”
But Thompson takes this concept a step further–there is a mentality to being a hunter. It is being tenacious and aggressive in the pursuit. It is a hunger, literal and figurative. If you aren’t successful as a hunter, your family doesn’t eat. But there is also a drive that won’t allow the future to happen passively. It requires intervention and drive.
Throughout the memo, Thompson does call out that CNN has atrophied on that drive.
“The CNN of today is no longer that buccaneering outsider but a tenured incumbent. You still see our strength when big stories break. We still sport brilliant on-air, digital and producing talent and have one of the world’s most visited news websites. But, despite all these strengths, 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.
“To succeed, we must abandon our preconceptions of the limits of what CNN can be and follow the audience to where they are now and where they will be in the years to come. We will still stand for the same things – video-led breaking news, delivered as it happens with honesty and insight – but with greater flexibility about the how and multiple new forms of monetization to complement existing revenues. We need to organize around the future not the past. We need to recapture some of the swagger and innovation of the early CNN.”
(Remember the point I made earlier about substituting “CNN” with “NPR”?)
“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. Not me.”
Bless you, Mark Thompson.
“I believe CNN is a brand and a trusted news source of immense potential. I believe not just that audiences still want access to news 24/7, but that they would welcome new ways of getting that news from us, and new forms of storytelling presented on new devices and in new use cases.”
For anyone in audio today, podcasting, audiobooks, radio, streaming, it is important to stress that you should never be comfortable where you are at. It seems silly to say, as digital audio platforms are still in their infancy, but I see complacency everywhere, and it is the thing that will undermine what you’ve built.
One last quote from Thompson’s memo. It didn’t fit anywhere else, but it is so true.
“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.”
Oh, how true. When I hear legacy media execs talk about “digital”--it feels like the lack of comfort, vision, and understanding that we’ve heard around the term “diversity” in recent years. “Diversity” became a catch-all for work that many executives didn’t really understand, but felt a need to demonstrate their commitment to. “Diversity” has always been a tough word for me, because it represents an impossibly broad overgeneralization. Real “diversity” work involves getting specific in target, measure, and action. If you can’t demonstrate those specifics, you are only offering performative talking. The same goes for “digital”--when you use that as a catch-all for all the things you are supposed to be doing and aren’t–it shows your lack of command of understanding the opportunities and the power associated with them.
Again, here is a link to the Deadline article with the memo in full at the bottom.
[COULD WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE, PLEASE?] I’m looking forward to the Super Bowl this weekend (and I’m supporting the Chiefs, FYI).
I used to be a regular football fan until the Cleveland Browns, the team I grew up being disappointed by, moved to Baltimore in 1996 to become the Ravens. I was so angered by that move that I pretty much swore off football for…decades.
But over the past few years, I’ve been slowly watching it again and despite having the two New York teams playing 7 miles from my house, have slowly come to realize that I admire the Chiefs. It was really solidified by the 2020 Super Bowl when the Chiefs pulled off the most amazing six minutes of football I’ve ever witnessed.
Sunday’s game will be a rematch between those same two teams. Here’s hoping that it is half as exciting.
Oh, in the last dispatch I talked up the early episodes of Drops of God on AppleTV+. They kinda boffed the ending. It was a good show, but missed the “great” mark for me.
Okay, that’s it for today.
Thousands of people read this newsletter without even a free subscription. If this was forwarded to you or you read this online, would you mind subscribing?
If you are a regular reader of The Audio Insurgent, I hope you’ll consider doing your part by supporting this work with a small donation. And if that’s too much, you are also always welcome to buy my book or (even better) buy me a beer.
Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric