When the New York City subway shooting happened earlier this week, I noticed CNN+ was providing some live breaking news coverage of the event. Which I thought was noteworthy, given that the streaming service doesn't have a continuous live news feed as part of its offering.
I wanted to hear more about the process and get a better sense of where the service was after being live for less than two weeks.
I spoke early Thursday afternoon with Amanda Wills, VP of Content Programming for CNN+, who walked me through their breaking news process. She also provided some interesting insight into the service, which has been buffeted a bit over the past 48 hours by conflicting news stories about its future.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
First of all, I want to talk to you a little bit about the breaking news part of CNN+, because I was really curious about how you handled the subway shooting. This was the first time that CNN+ had to deal with breaking news. Was this something you anticipated at launch that you were going to do at some point?
For sure. We knew that there were going to be moments that you were not expecting. There are different levels of breaking news, there is the breaking news that you know what's going to happen like this, like a Senate vote, for example, for a Supreme Court justice. But then there's the unexpected breaking news, which was obviously this week. We didn't know that was going to happen. But we knew this moment was going to happen. So luckily, we have been rehearsing these situations. And we were ready with our staffing. And, we knew what to do in the control room. And we knew what our approach was going to be because we all come from breaking news backgrounds.
It seems like one of the challenges for doing breaking news is that you don't have a 24/7 live feed. So there's a certain amount of ramping up to get to the point where you can go on the "air."
It's a great point. You know, we are in a very interesting place. Because we don't necessarily have to fill time in order to wait for reporting to come in. We can wait for the reporting to come in, assemble in a control room, and then go live the second we know we have it. Or go live when we know we are five minutes out from a press conference. The great thing is that because we are not linear we can move with the story versus trying to fit the story into our own movement and our own 24/7 schedule.
I was checking out your service as the day was progressing. It seems like one of the big challenges for you is presenting the stuff in a way that, when people sign in, they realize, this is live, this is not live, this is what I want to watch. There's a certain amount of training for the viewer that you have to do.
We definitely anticipated something like this. We are doing something new in the marketplace. And we have to continue to iterate on what we have because we have several different types of content. They're all tied to the news. They're all different ways of watching the news. You could watch it live, you can watch on-demand, you can interact within an interview club. So it is a different experience for a user and we're definitely in a space where we have to show people what we're doing and what we're capable of doing. Which is a lot because we're CNN and we tap into the larger CNN newsgathering efforts. But it's just presented in a new way.
By far the question I've gotten most from readers about CNN+ is why you don't have that 12 or 24-hour live news feed. When people ask you that question, how do you explain "hey, we think the approach we're taking is the right one."
That's a great question. Because with CNN, the brand is synonymous with live and breaking news. But we are doing live and breaking news, but we are letting the story drive when we go live versus being live all the time to fill time. We get to decide as journalists, this is worthy to go live right now. That doesn't mean that we don't also have things for you to watch when there's not that big breaking news moment.
There's been a lot going on in the last 24 hours in the industry media with CNN+. There have been stories about the service's performance and its future. And I wonder - as a leader - how do you tune that out as much as possible and what do you tell your employees to keep them focused on the task at hand?
Listen, this is an organization of journalists. And they are here building something new, they are excited, they're motivated, and they're here to work. They're here to get the news done. And no matter the noise around CNN, no matter what it is good or bad. Everyone knows that they have a job to get done. It's kind of like the beauty of anyone who works at CNN - if they walk through those doors, they're like, I'm here to do a job, I'm here to do the news. Let's get at it. That's a pervasive attitude in the building. And as a leader, it's my job to keep that motivation high. And to keep people just really, really motivated to keep doing the news. They are doing a very important service for the public. It's worthy to keep reminding them and it is exciting to do something new. It is very different. And yet, it's the same because we are all journalists, and we've been doing this for years. So what an exciting time to be able to try it in a new way.
I've been part of digital news organizations when you're trying something new. And you do all this testing and you think you know how it is going to work. Or not. There are always surprises - positive and negative. For you, what have been some of the things you've learned so far, even in just the couple of weeks you've been live?
When we were building this product, we spent a lot of weeks rehearsing. And rehearsing is very interesting, right? Because you're going through the motions of rehearsing news, which kind of sounds crazy. And it doesn't really replicate what you actually are doing in the real world. So even this week, for my own team, it was a learning curve in a lot of ways. We realized we are inefficient in some of the ways that we're working. And we need to completely tear down that workflow and rebuild it, and do it better next time.
And I think there have been many moments around that. In particular - since we've been live - that we thought we kind of knew how to do it. But then we actually got live and you discover that actually, that workflow doesn't work. Or it's just easier if we work with this team instead of that team. It's easier if we do the images in this manner. I think right now we're still working through little things like that. Because you have to remember, we all just like came together as a team only a few months ago. And there's a lot of us here. So we're still getting to know each other. We're still getting to know the product. We're still getting to know our audience, and we're all doing it like at 100 miles an hour together during the news.
You mentioned learning to know your audience. And there was a story yesterday about which CNN+ show is most popular, which show is not the most popular. And I know you can't talk about it. But generally, at what point do you start looking at what's working and not working and make adjustments? Are there some things where you already think "this will be an interesting type of show for us moving forward or this would be an interesting thing to cover that we're not covering right now?"
I think it's really early to make major calls like that. I have said this before and I will continue to say it because I worked at CNN for years even before this job. CNN doesn't just do breaking news, it IS breaking news. And I think that will consistently drive what we do with CNN+. And I think we will continue to iterate on what it looks like.
I live in the Midwest and one of the things I wish I would see more of from the news, in general, is coverage of regional news. And certainly, CNN has all those assets around the country. I wonder if that's something you've thought about, because there are a lot of regional stories that aren't necessarily Beltway stories, but that people care about it. And I suspect people would be interested in seeing it.
You actually bring up an excellent point that we've sort of talked about. And again, we're in the first two weeks of this. And I really do believe that as far as storytelling goes, the sky's the limit, because we are not beholden to a linear schedule. So I think we have so many opportunities to do things like that. Also, CNN has a vast affiliate network. So there are ways for us to tell stories from Minneapolis without sending a team of 50 people to Minneapolis. And I do think that as we get our sea legs under us a little bit, it's something we should definitely look at leveraging
It seemed as if you were doing a bit of that leveraging during the breaking news of the subway shooting that I saw. You were using CNN affiliate footage as part of your....I don't know what to call it. Newscast? Live cast?
Newscast is good. Maybe live news stream?
Look, I still call music albums, so it's a hard habit to break. But I did notice that you were leveraging that access and it seemed like an interesting way to use CNN assets.
You'll see this happen across CNN. And sometimes it's logistical, right? We're getting reporters out to the scene. We were sending reporters from the building that we're in Manhattan to Brooklyn, and you will sometimes want to get on the air before the reporter is on the ground. And that's when the affiliates are the most helpful.
You know, there's nothing more frustrating than working for a news organization that is getting a lot of attention. Because inevitably, there are stories that you don't agree with, or that you feel aren't quite on point. Is there something that you've seen that's a pet peeve of yours, or where you think that people just don't understand what it is that you're doing?
I'm thinking about how to answer this. Because again, I think we're so new. So I'm giving everyone a lot of leeway to try to just figure out what we are.
But I would say one of the things that I think we need to do a better job of doing and I think has a lot of promise is the Interview Club feature that we have within our product. A great example is that last week, we had Dana Bash sit down with Mayor Eric Adams. And they literally sat and answered viewers' questions about crime on the subway. Crime on the subway. And then we had this story happen this week. And I feel like we should have had better programming. And this is on me and my team, we should programmed this better, we should have said "we had Mayor Adams and this is what he told us." And this was an opportunity for subscribers to engage with the Mayor of New York City. And by the way, Dana is going to be having several mayors from around the United States in the Interview Club.
That's something really distinctive, and I kind of think it's the future of how we do news. I'm very excited about that feature. And I just want to get it in front of people and for people to use it and understand it, and help us even make it better.
That would be my answer to that. But it is really early.
