I am a rippler. Don’t worry: Your confusion is understandable.
I am neither a person who removes seeds from hemp with a ripple, nor do I suffer from a particular disease that is possibly of venereal origin. I have invented a new meaning for the word.
A rippler, according to the Knightly Views Dictionary, is a person who ripples up and down through the news feeds on Sky while waiting for the morning paper to be delivered. Rippling may be defined as moving from news channel to news channel trying to find something other than opinionated talking heads.
There was a time when the channel selector stayed on CNN, seldom giving the BBC, Sky News or Al Jazeera a look in, so to speak. Fox News never made the list because it made me fall off the right side of my chair and, in addition, age has made screaming skulls harder and harder to endure.
CNN seemed to fill my international news needs very well. Its coverage was wide, and sometimes deep. It concentrated on reportage, and its commentators often gave their contextualised views from the field. It was, of course, the world’s first 24-hour news channel.
Yet in recent times it lost its distinctiveness. Too often, when I tuned in, it was screening yet another opinion from an eminently qualified academic or former whatever. Too often, when I began rippling, it was screening the same topic as everyone else. Well, not quite everyone. I found Al Jazeera’s news values different to the western nexus – CNN, Sky News and the BBC – whose news values and international news judgements were disarmingly similar. Its scope, however, was not as wide-reaching.
I had reconciled myself to life as a rippler. Then I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal that led me to hope – perhaps irrationally, and certainly prematurely – that help for my obsessive compulsive disorder may be on its way.
The WSJ carried a story based on a memorandum the new chief executive of CNN, Mark Thompson, sent to staff after his first 100 days in the job. It spelt out a refreshing change of approach.
Thompson has a stellar pedigree. He was editor of the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News at 30, editor of Panorama three years later, and controller of BBC2 before he was 40. After a brief stint as chief executive of Channel 4, he returned to the BBC in 2004 as director-general. Although his time leading the state broadcaster was not without controversy, he was regarded by the BBC Trust as an ‘outstanding’ leader when he resigned in 2012 to become president and chief executive of the New York Times Company. He oversaw the transformation of the New York Times into a digital giant with worldwide reach.
Last year the New York Times reached 10 million subscribers. It is increasing its digital subscribers at about three times the rate of decline in print subscriptions. Unlike the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, it is profitable.
The expectation has been that he will have the same transformational effect on CNN. His memo to staff lays out how he plans to do that.
The first step will be to combine all of CNN’s newsgathering operations into a single unit that will serve its television, streaming and digital platforms. What I liked in his memo was the statement: “We need to recapture some of the swagger and innovation of the early CNN.” He encouraged staff to “take a leaf out of (CNN founder) Ted Turner’s book”.
“[The early CNN] took risks. It improvised. Sometimes it fell flat on its face. But, story by story, it redefined how TV news covered and analysed news.”
Thompson summed up CNN perfectly when he described it as “no longer that buccaneering outsider but a tenured incumbent” that displayed too little innovation and risk-taking. In a stark reference to the organisation’s lack of digital foresight, he reminded staff that most people under 40 see their news in a vertical (smartphone) plane, not horizontal.
He said CNN’s linear services and its website “can sometimes have an old-fashioned and unadventurous feel – as if the world has changed and they haven’t.”
His integrated newsroom will have new leadership, including recruiting one of his former New York Times executives to spearhead digital development.
A telling reference in his memo was to that word: digital. He wants to see it made redundant, on the basis that its use is now tied to legacy media companies that see it as an add-on. Start-ups and Silicon don’t use the term because the technology is central to everything they do.
That redundancy has another purpose. It takes the focus away from the medium to put the focus where it should be – on the message.
Too many media organisations make the mistake of thinking that when they utter the phrase “digital first” they are freeing themselves from the ‘yoke’ of legacy media. They are wrong. They are simply exchanging one harness for another by emphasising the means of delivery rather than what is being delivered.
Thompson’s memorandum recognised that technology has changed the way audiences want their news delivered and presents opportunities to exploit that technology to extend the boundaries of news gathering and presentation. However, his missive to staff did not take the focus away from his core message.
He began it by reminding staff of founder Ted Turner’s mission to bring timely, trustworthy, and fair-minded news to audiences when and where they wanted it. That mission had not changed.
“And I believe that the mission Ted Turner proclaimed back in 1980 is, if anything, even more relevant today. The world needs access to high quality, dependable news now more than ever…”
The message Mark Thompson sent to CNN staff is a message that all news media organisations need to hear and embrace. They must be highly innovative and use technology to find new ways to spread their journalism and new ventures that will provide the revenue to sustain that journalism. The mission, however, is to retain and enhance the journalistic values on which their reputations were created.
Too many news organisations have fallen into the trap of thinking that change is everything and everything must change.
Thompson has been a change agent and some of his past changes led to criticism. However, he did not try to change the core editorial values of either the BBC or the New York Times. He clearly saw they were reputational values that are altered at the organisation’s peril.
They can, however, be improved. Thompson expects to see quality and performance improvements alongside moves to make the operation more financially sustainable “without weakening either the calibre of our journalism or the distinctiveness of our output”.
Too many news organisations have swapped to smaller calibre weapons. In part it has been the inevitable result of not having the money to sustain their operations. However, for some, it has also reflected a willingness to compromise values in search of a fickle audience rather than employing creativity to deliver value-laden journalism that engages and retains an audience. The result has been devoting too much of a scarce resource to overblown emotion and overrated celebrity.
Time will tell whether the present staff at CNN succeed in ‘taking a leaf out of Ted Turner’s book’, as Thompson suggested in his memorandum. Other media organisations should do likewise. Some might already be looking to do so. After all, the New York Times has become the exemplar for newspaper publishers seeking to secure a future for good journalism.
And I hope I will rid myself of that compulsive morning ripple with Sky’s counter-intuitive, minimalist remote – which is, itself, an outstanding symbol of a media company going backwards when it thinks it is going forward.