Most of CNN has been hard to watch for a long time time, but one of CNN's remaining strong suits was always its website--there was a lot of news there, and if you didn't mind the slant, you could at least learn some things.
But maybe no more, because CNN is cutting costs by eliminating Reuters.
That's not the headline that either CNN or Reuters gave to the announcement, but that's the unmistakable gist. For its part, Reuters gave CNN due deference: "This is all about us, not Reuters. This is about content ownership," CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard was quoted by the wire service. "Everything is changing and content ownership is king." Yeah sure.
If that were true, what Pritchard was saying, then where was the big announcement at the same time about an upgrading of CNN's own newsgathering capability? Hiring staff, and all that? There wasn't one.
Maybe CNN, locked in that struggle for second place, is having a harder time than we realize.
Which reminds me, now that summer vacation is over, and all those Wall Street moguls are back from the Hamptons, it's time to start looking into those persistent rumors about a breakup of CNN's parent company, Time-Warner. One influential site, BloggingStocks, describes T-W CEO Richard Parsons as "A dull, competent caretaker who is unimaginative and slow-to-act."
If I were a T-W shareholder, looking at a stock that is down over the past three years--and down 80 percent since 2000--I might be looking at a change at the top.
Maybe Parsons knows that much, at least--that he has to do some cost-cutting. And so, to help get his company's act together, and avoid the Wall Street wolves, he has been telling each division to cut costs even more.
And so Reuters has been just the latest to walk the plank.
