Industry Insider: Can Mark Thompson Finally Bring CNN Into the Streaming Era?
When CNN+ debuted in March 2022, the network's executives referred to it as a revolution. They envisioned CNN's future as a standalone streaming service alongside Netflix and Disney+. But the product was flawed from the beginning. CNN+ existed for only 30 days before being shut down, making it one of the most expensive streaming failures in history. Consumers did not see the value in paying for additional programming without live news. Inside the company, confusion arose about its purpose. Was it intended to complement or replace CNN's linear channel? No one could clearly answer that question, so the audience moved on.
Three years later, CNN is making another attempt. This time, it is under the leadership of Mark Thompson, the executive who played a key role in The New York Times' transition from print to successful digital subscriptions. In a conversation with Peter Kafka, Thompson characterized the forthcoming service as a cohesive digital hub for the brand rather than merely an experimental side project. “The service is not called CNN Plus or CNN Extra. It’s called CNN. You get complete access,” he emphasized. That phrase, “complete access,” encapsulates the essence of his new strategy. Rather than creating something distinct from CNN, Thompson aims to transform CNN itself for a digital audience.
Thompson's plan is to combine live television, on-demand programming, and CNN.com into a single subscription service costing around $7 per month. His goal is to reintroduce CNN to cord-cutters and younger viewers who may have never seen it in its original form. Unlike CNN+, which provided supplemental shows, this new version aims to deliver CNN's main reporting streams, as well as the breaking news and analysis that have defined its legacy.
Thompson believes this reorientation toward authenticity and clarity is crucial. “Our main issue with messaging is clarity,” he told Kafka. “We want someone who knows and likes CNN to find themselves in a very familiar setting.” That is a subtle, but effective framing of CNN's problem: coherence rather than content.
Thompson demonstrated at The New York Times that audiences were willing to pay for quality journalism when it was clear, consistent, and built on trust. He now applies that same playbook to television news, saying, “If you can deliver on those things, what we proved at The New York Times is there are scalable subscription models. Nobody’s really tried it properly in TV news yet.”
The challenge, however, is that CNN’s lifeblood remains cable TV. As Thompson admitted, “Almost all of its money still comes from television.” The network cannot afford to alienate cable partners who still pay hefty carriage fees. His approach, therefore, is what he calls a “parallel migration strategy,” one that protects existing television revenue while building a digital foundation for the future.
“If someone’s got cable and is satisfied with cable, we’re going to let their subscribers authenticate and use the product for nothing,” he said. “We’re not trying to undermine cable as a platform.” But he also acknowledged that cable households are declining roughly 10 percent each year and new viewers must be captured elsewhere. His acknowledgment that “cable, as a proportion of U.S. households, is much smaller than it was,” reveals how urgent this transition truly is.
Thompson's media philosophy of audience-centric design is useful in this situation. Rather than using streaming as a dumping ground for clips or leftovers, he envisions a product tailored to how people currently consume news. Viewers switch between short bursts, multiple screens, and constant movement. “Small screens, large screens, short duration, long duration, on the move, and still sometimes leaning back at home,” he said, describing CNN’s new multi-platform future.
Beyond technology, Thompson’s most profound insight may be philosophical. He wants CNN to reclaim the mantle of trust-based journalism in an era of ideological media. As he put it, “I don’t want to be centrist either. I want to be outside the political arena.” He continued, “I would much rather be observing the spectrum… providing a platform where the debate can take place.”
That belief ties directly into his broader concern about media tribalism. “We live in a tribal world where everyone decides their version of the news is the one they want,” Thompson said. “I do want to insist on the facts.” His insistence that CNN should be “outside the spectrum” rather than somewhere in the middle signals a rejection of the left-versus-right binary that has defined American cable news for decades.
He acknowledges CNN’s demographic gap as well. Similar to the Times and the BBC in the past, CNN’s staff and audience tend to be coastal and college-educated. “You’ve got a college-educated, significantly urban, prosperous sort of thing, and that’s not completely representative of the country,” he admitted. “We need geographical diversity, people from urban, suburban, and rural backgrounds.” By expanding its newsroom perspective, CNN aims to restore trust among audiences who feel disconnected from mainstream media.
Thompson's reputation as a "turnaround specialist" lends credibility to CNN, but the economics remain daunting. Live journalism is expensive, and global bureaus cannot operate on the edge of streaming profitability. Thompson acknowledged the challenge bluntly: “it's much more expensive to make cable television, live television, CNN's version of news than lots of other news stuff.”
He sees scale as a necessity rather than a luxury, which can be achieved through digital innovation and brand consistency. “CNN is one of the world’s great news brands,” he said. “It’s not just a U.S. cable channel. It’s much more than that and it matters to people in many other countries.” For Thompson, the network’s global reach and reputation for accuracy can become its biggest streaming advantage, provided it learns how to monetize trust.
CNN+'s first iteration failed because it was a content experiment with no clear target audience. In Thompson's version, CNN's streaming future is viewed as a test of relevance and endurance. It is less about developing a new product and more about redefining an existing one for the next era. Whether that vision is realized will depend on whether audiences believe that, in a world of noise, CNN still represents something real.
If the first launch was an overconfident startup, this one feels like a strategic reset. And in the words of Thompson himself, “I love big, juicy, difficult, strategic puzzles.” Solving CNN’s digital reinvention might just be the biggest puzzle of his career.
