CNN is planting its own flag in the ever-growing creator economy.
The network’s international division on Thursday revealed a new initiative to create a unit, titled CNN Creators, based out of its new Middle East hub at Media City Qatar, Doha, as well as a 30-minute weekly show to be released on October 23 with the same branding.
Meara Erdozain, CNN’s international director, said the show is “unlike any show we’ve ever launched” and “will reflect the way our young audience engages with stories and deliver engaging and entertaining content in a multitude of ways. It will focus on current affairs topics and stories that feel real, relevant and relatable.”
Former Vice Media producer Andrew Potter will lead the team with a focus on “AI, technology, art, culture, sports and social trends,” the company said.
The launch of what should be a new format for the network is coming. CNN is undergoing a new round of digital reinvention. A standalone subscription product (the network’s first major effort since the CNN+ app, which quickly shut down in 2022) is expected to collapse this fall as the company tests a metered paywall on its digital content.
Since the old New York Times Business leader Mark Thompson joined CNN a little more than two years ago, with the goal of charting a new course for the network beyond its 24/7 cable TV roots. In January, Thompson unveiled a major restructuring that eliminated hundreds of jobs and set up open employment opportunities to, as he put it, “shift the gravity of CNN to the platforms and products where the audience itself moves” while investing $70 million in the effort.
The company relaunched CNN Audio as CNN Podcasts as it expands its lineup of shows and has brought in a slew of new executive-level hires to manage and reinvent its digital operations (with nearly 75 million monthly uniques, it’s one of the few sites that can compete with the Times‘ ladder). It also revealed plans to integrate new lifestyle offerings and further integrate its linear and streaming programming teams.
The launch of CNN Creators appears to be a small part of the new strategy, although its rollout announcement recalls another of the network’s digital innovations from ages ago: “iReport for CNN.”
That gamble by Time Warner in the 2000s also had an international TV show component – ”a monthly interactive, international half-hour television program featuring the most newsworthy and informative iReport contributions and citizen journalism reports on the Internet” – as a kind of pre-social media look at what independent creators could report on.
This time, however, the creators are veteran producers with a background in journalism. Still, the final product appears to be different from the traditional news anchor presentation. A job posting for a role on the team describes a series that sounds like something a digital media studio might produce.
“The weekly linear show is a high-stakes storytelling challenge where two teams of content creators compete against each other. At the start of the week, they choose a topic to cover and set out to create the most compelling stories around that topic,” it reads. “Viewers have a front-row seat to watch their creative process – brainstorming, scripting, filming, editing and refining their work – before teams present their latest pieces in an energetic live showdown.”
