The head of CNN finally tires of being repeatedly prison-raped in the ratings every night by Fox News and throws in the towel:
After
almost a year of tinkering, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has
concluded that a news channel cannot subsist on news alone. So
he is planning much broader changes for the network—including a
prime-time shakeup that’s likely to make CNN traditionalists cringe.Once,
CNN’s vanilla coverage was a point of pride. Now, the boss boasts about
the ratings for his unscripted series, and documentaries like the Sea
World-slamming film Blackfish. Zucker, in his first one-on-one interview
since taking control of CNN last January, told Capital he wants news
coverage “that is just not being so obvious.”Instead,
he wants more of “an attitude and a take”: “We’re all regurgitating the
same information. I want people to say, ‘You know what? That was
interesting. I hadn’t thought of that,’” Zucker said. “The goal for the
next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.”Zucker—“rhymes
with hooker,” he likes to say—also expanded on comments he has made
about breaking CNN out of a mindset created by historic rivalries with
MSNBC and Fox. He wants the network to attract “viewers who are watching
places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.”“People
who traditionally just watch the cable news networks [are] a great
audience,” he said. “I’m not trying to alienate that audience. But the
overall cable news audience has not grown in the last 12 years, OK? So,
all we’re doing is trading [audience] share. … We also want to broaden
what people can expect from CNN.”The 48-year-old
Zucker initially faced internal resistance to his experiments beyond the
realm of hard news, but he now has an irrefutable retort: The No. 1
show on CNN is now “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” a travel-adventure
show featuring the bad-boy celebrity chef. Zucker said that inside CNN,
his formula has finally been accepted “because people have seen the
results.”
As JartStar commented: “It will be amusing
that in another year or two CNN will have less to do with the news and
more to do with reality TV than SyFy has with science fiction”.
And
fitting. What Fox has done to CNN is exactly what Larry, Mike, Tom,
Sara, and me are going to do to the world of Pink SF. By presenting an
ideological alternative that appeals to more than half of the
prospective audience that is ignored and denigrated by the monolithic
gatekeepers, our market is far less saturated. Having lost their former
ability to keep us out of print and out of the bookstores, there is
nothing the genre publishers can do except watch helplessly as we cut
into their sales in the same way that Fox News cut into CNN’s ratings.
I
only wish Amazon permitted authors to give away Kindle Select
books on an ongoing basis. Every individual who downloads a free copy of
The Last Witchking or The Wardog’s Coin and reads it isn’t merely a potential buyer of A Throne of Bones or Quantum Mortis, he is also one more book sale lost to the gatekeepers.
They
are the dinosaurs, heavy with overhead and thin operating margins. We
are the mammals, able to write and publish a book in the time it takes
them to bring a finished book to market. That’s why we are going to win
despite their best efforts to pretend we don’t even exist.
Speaking
of which, I’m looking for translators who are interested in translating
my books in return for a share in the revenue. If you are a native
speaker of a language other than English and you want to take active part in the Blue
SF Revolution, fire me an email.