Posts tagged CNN
Things You Can Do That You Never Used To
Via Archive.org:
For over a decade, CNN (Cable News Network) has been providing transcripts of shows, events and newscasts from its broadcasts. The archive has been maintained and the text transcripts have been dependably available at transcripts.cnn.com. This is a just-in-case grab of the years of transcripts for later study and historical research.
So if you can’t get enough of whatever it is they’re trying to do in the Situation Room, a one gig tarball of text is waiting for your download.
H/T: Flowing Data
CNN’s Branded News Segments
On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart breaks down CNN’s branded news segments (i.e.: Political Pop, No Talking Points, Rapid Fire, Gut Check, Endpoint) and the lack of editorial judgment that seems to go into them.
Stewart:
CNN appears to believe that the key to revitalizing the network is creating branded news segments within the news. Which brings us to our news segment: Why? Most of your segment titles have no bearing on the content within the segment.
For example, Street Level is supposedly a round-up of what is happening on the street. Stewart takes us through a few sound Street Level stories—a crime story, food safety, puppies—and then, for some reason, a paraplegic woman bungee jumping.
I’m not against news organizations having fun, having more cheeky, playful segments. Knock yourselves out. It’s cute, it’s clever, as long as the Facetime segment title isn’t randomly misapplied.
When you have all these segments you have to apply some editorial discretion when you use them.
Best example: Rock Star of the day. I won’t say more. Watch the video. It illuminates an unfortunate truth, but it’s funny enough to make your day. —Jihii
CNN takes on slavery using InDesign
In a really cool departure from what they normally do, CNN has just released an online article filled with slideshows, videos and sidebars focusing on slavery in the African country of Mauritania. Made in the interactive document-making program Adobe InDesign, the article looks more like a PDF than the usual CNN article we’re used to.
H/T: Nieman Lab
Segments Covering Trayvon Martin on Cable News, Feb 26 to March 19.
Via ThinkProgress.
Rumor Mill: CNN in Talks to Buy Mashable
Word on the street at SXSW is that CNN might buy Mashable for $200 million.
Via the Next Web:
Well, well, well. A ‘little bird’ apparently informed Reuters reporter Felix Salmon that CNN is buying Mashable, a blog that covers social media-related news, a lot of lists about anything from the funniest cat videos of the day to the most pinteresting Pinterest pinboard of the hour and whatnot, often with the CAPS Lock key turned on for the headlines, for “upwards of $200 million”.
According to Salmon, who isn’t known to throw around this type of rumor unless it came from a solid source, the deal is poised to be announced on Tuesday.
The New York Times chimes in as well but doesn’t put a price tag on the potential acquisition.
Mashable, which specializes in stories about technology and social media, could bolster CNN.com, which is one of the most popular news Web sites in the United States. An acquisition of Mashable would make a statement about CNN’s interest in startups and social media…
…Mashable, which is seven years old and is privately held, would be CNN.com’s largest acquisition to date. Last fall, CNN.com acquired Zite, a company that made an iPad app that determines what its users want to read and view, for a price that was estimated to be between $20 million and $25 million. Mashable would cost CNN far more to acquire.
Salmon’s video interview discussing the rumor is here.
US intelligence suggests no Iranian nukes
US intelligence suggests that while Iran is continuing work on its uranium enrichment facilities, there are currently no indications that it has begun work on a nuclear weapon, the US defense secretary has said.
Via mohandasgandhi
FJP: Unless you’re CNN’s Erin Burnett. Then you take the same footage but claim that Iran’s on the cusp of targeting the United States with nuclear tipped ICBMs.
Via Glenn Greenwald:
I’ll just note that [Burnett] begins her remarks by announcing that “no one buys Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes,” and to prove her point, she immediately introduces footage of yesterday’s Congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper which, she said, “drove that message home.” Except the clip then showed Clapper saying this: “Iran’s technical advances … strengthen our assessment that Iran is more than capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon if its political leaders, specifically the Supreme Leader himself, choose to do so.” Is there really not a single brain in the entire CNN apparatus that stirs in the presence of a contradiction this glaring that it virtually screams its demand to be recognized? And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Leon Panetta just yesterday said “the intelligence does not show that they’ve made the decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon,” a fact that Burnett did not manage to mention, even though the same fact was also expressed last month by Israeli officials (“The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon”).
Click through for video of Burnett’s interview with NY Representative Peter King.
Stephen Colbert on CNN’s firing of approximately 50 journalists after the network completed a study on the quality of user generated content it was receiving via platforms such as iReport.
We also spent a great deal of time analyzing how we utilize and deploy photojournalists across all of our locations in the U.S. […] We looked at the impact of user-generated content and social media, CNN iReporters and of course our affiliate contributions in breaking news. Consumer and pro-sumer technologies are simpler and more accessible. Small cameras are now high broadcast quality. More of this technology is inthe hands of more people. After completing this analysis, CNN determined that some photojournalists will be departing the company.
Jack Womack, CNN’s SVP of domestic news operations, in a memo to staff announcing 50 layoffs at the news organization. Among those fired were about a dozen photographers.
Womack suggests that User Generated Content via iReport, and improving cameras used to capture images, made the photojournalists obsolete.
Comparing The New Aggregators: Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, Float…
At the PaidContent Advertising conference last week, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue talked about Flipboard’s business model, relationship with publishers and the evolving world of content consumption across platforms and devices.
I just finished editing the above video.
PaidContent’s Amanda Natividad put a handy chart together comparing some of the leading news reader apps on the market today. For each company, the chart compares price, how content is aggregated, official content partners (if any), social networks used as content sources, ability for users to customize the experience, platforms supported, funding, and what makes each one special.
For consumers, there are now so many of these next-generation RSS readers that it can be daunting to keep them straight. But they have distinct differences. Some curate content with an algorithm, while others use a team of editors. Some have made partnerships with publishers, while some are charging ahead without them. And there are other differences too, in areas like customization, sharing and price. To see how some of the new aggregators stack up, check out our chart
- Amanda Natividad, paidContent.org
What CNN Can Learn From Buying Zite
CNN just bought Zite, the magazine-style iPad newsreader, for a reported $20 million.
So what’s in it for them?
Writes Matthew Ingram at GigaOm:
The media conglomerate says it plans to leave Zite alone and doesn’t want to integrate it into its existing assets, or clog up the app by forcing CNN content into it — something Zite CEO Mark Johnson promises won’t happen either. So what is the purpose of buying the app at all then? If CNN is smart, watching what happens inside Zite could give it something that all media companies are in desperate need of, whether they know it or not: real-time insights into what people really want to read about, instead of what CNN editors think they want to read about.
CNN’s “Let’s Leave it There” Problem
Via Jay Rosen:
The problem is this: CNN thinks of itself as the “straight down the middle” network, the non-partisan alternative, the one that isn’t Left and isn’t Right. But defining itself as “not MSNBC” and “not Fox” begs the question of what CNN actually is. To the people who run it, the answer is obvious: real journalism! That’s what CNN is. Or as they used to say, “the news is the star.”
Right. But too often, on-air hosts for the network will let someone from one side of a dispute describe the world their way, then let the other side describe the world their way, and when the two worlds, so described, turn out to be incommensurate or even polar opposites, what happens?… CNN leaves it there. Viewers are left stranded and helpless. The network appears to inform them that there is no truth, only partisan bull. Is that real journalism? No. But it is tantalizingly close to the opposite of real journalism. Repeat it enough, and this pattern threatens to become the network’s brand, which is exactly what Stewart was pointing out…
…Meaning: You can’t keep “leaving it there” and claim to be the one dedicated to real journalism. You can’t have a “he said, she said” brand and yet stand out as the quality network. That doesn’t work. But it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that it kinda sorta works because journalists in the U.S. are trained to believe that “not ideological” means…. good!
Somewhat related: Way, way back in 2009 Michael Hirschorn summed up the decade for New York Magazine by observing that we live in “a media age that lacks a central authority to referee reality.”
The observation was neutral and intended as a starting point to explore how we win and lose in a roiling media landscape where there’s no longer a there, there.
Which is precisely where Rosen (and Jon Stewart in the video) contends CNN leaves things.
For the record, per TVEyes: NY same-sex marriage vote was covered for 60+ mins by MSNBC & CNN. It was covered for 2 min by Fox News.
Brian Stelter, Media Reporter, New York Times, via Twitter.
It’s all about priorities.
H/T: Muck Rack.
The Pilates approach: How CNN is trouncing its competitors on the web
Using numbers from multiple analytics firms, it has long been apparent that CNN beats not only its cable news competitors on the web, but nearly every other major news source, as well. According to comScore, CNN received an average of 8.5 million unique U.S. visitors a day for the first three months of this year, figures that dwarf MSNBC’s 7.4 million daily visitors and Fox’s 2.3 million. A comScore spokesman provided me with charts showing that CNN, with 75.9 million US visitors, is beaten only by Yahoo! News Network’s 88 million. In U.S. monthly uniques, CNN outperforms MSNBC.com (51 million), AOL News (40 million), Fox News (20 million), CBS News (16.4 million), and The New York Times (32.9 million).
CNN’s Amber Lyon explains her team’s difficulties in reporting on protests in Bahrain. From government minders to a six hour detention to the disappearance of sources that they had planned to interview.
Run Time: 8:03
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