Editor’s note: Welcome to another segment of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” now a regular Contrarian Boston feature. Today, we talk about how CNN, The New York Times and other mainstream media giants are teaming up with social media creators in a bid to look hip and attract a younger audience.
Emily Rooney was joined by Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, The Boston Globe’s Lylah M. Alphonse, editor of Globe Rhode Island and Globe New Hampshire, and Scott Van Voorhis, editor and founder of Contrarian Boston.
And thanks to Tonia Magras, principal owner of Hull Bay Productions, who produced today’s piece. Tonia was the supervising producer for “Beat the Press” when it was on GBH and is the principal owner of Hull Bay Productions.
If you would rather use a different platform, you can also watch “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” on Contrarian Boston’s YouTube channel.
Edited transcript:
Emily Rooney: All right. So watch out Gen X, Z, Gen Z, sorry. Or they’re called Zoomers. These are people born roughly between 1997 and 2012, I think it is. CNN is looking for the eyeballs of these people and has recently launched something called CNN Creators, which is a show focusing on basically social media stories and things that are trending. And in this case, the show’s hosts [01:16:02.21] were given sort of carte blanche to look into anything that they want, that they find interesting. So the names of these people are Bijan, Antoinette, Ivana, and Matthias. And from what I could see, they all moved to Doha, or at least they did the first show out of Doha. So here’s a clip from, uh, the creators.
[01:16:21.11] - clip from CNN Creators - [01:16:36.16]
Emily Rooney: All right, so Scott, you told me that you actually watched a little of this. What would you take? I, I couldn’t follow it. I saw no rhyme or reason to it. It was a bunch of young people sitting around, you know, calling themselves hip and cheeky and that kind of stuff, and the conversation was inane. I, I mean, I, I don’t want to sound like an old fogey, but I, I didn’t, I didn’t follow it at all. It made no sense to me.
[01:17:02.17]
Scott Van Voorhis: Yeah, I looked it up. I mean, we started watching some of it on YouTube, CNN Creators, and it just seemed like they were trying to give the show a youthful, casual feel. You see four people in their 20s casually dressed and sitting around, chatting. In the segment I saw, they did do a story about these Google Glasses and men doing bad things with them. So it’s— so then you had this kind of contrast - You start off with this casual setting. So you think it is [01:17:32.22] going to be like a talk show. And then there’s some real reporting there in terms of, you know, what the glasses do. But I don’t see that that’s going to like, it’s certainly not gonna get my 22-year-old to start watching CNN.
[01:17:46.04]
Emily Rooney: I mean, and is that something that’s really trending? Google Glasses? I mean, yes.
Scott Van Voorhis: As with any any new technology, they’ve figured out perverted uses of it. Meanwhile, The New York Times is working, uh, with MrBeast, I guess. He’s a creator and the Times is trying to figure out what he’s doing, uh, you know, what his secret of success is, why he has so many more followers than they do. But of course, [01:18:21.10] many people in the media would die for the New York Times subscribers, right? I mean, they’re not— they have some of those influential people in the world reading them. MrBeast has lots of 18-year-olds or 16-year-olds, I don’t know.
Emily Rooney: So I tried watching MrBeast, or I, I checked into a little bit of that too, just to see what it was. I think the New York Times wrote about it, and that make— that made me curious.
Scott Van Voorhis: He does a lot of contests now and giving out money, and, and it’s— I mean, just probably [01:18:42.18] - the video production values he/Mr. Beast could help the Times with, but, but why? But I would think that the core always has to be the journalism and which people do want - including young people. I think it’s just, is tway to meld the two? I don’t know. But, um, but it does seem like when you’re in trouble, big companies start chasing after these fads. I remember getting into the journalism business and the [01:19:12.18] chain I was working for was struggling, and they were like, there’s this paper in Boca Raton and they have this new template. It was just like dumbing down stuff and making it more entertaining and, and the, you know, they’re out of business now. So I mean, um, they stopped seeing, they didn’t see what they were providing of value, which was actually doing reporting that other people weren’t doing, they didn’t value that. So I hope that doesn’t, isn’t a sign that they’re just trying to embrace different gimmicky fads like, [01:19:43.18] you know, Gannett hiring a Taylor Swift reporter, though actually I meant such a bad thing, but is that you’re real reporting, butthat’s not going to solve the problem of—
Emily Rooney: [01:19:52.18] - Lylah, I mean, you’ve got relatively young kids, I think. I mean, is this something that would appeal to them? And have you checked it out yourself?
Lylah Alphonse: So I think we’re having, respectfully, a get-off-my-lawn moment here. Um, we Gen X and Boomers, we are not the target audience for this. In fact, American consumers aren’t the target audience either. This airs on CNN International. It’s based in Doha because Doha has created a government subsidized media city where they’re trying to turn themselves into a media hub, and CNN has a space there. So that’s why these four content creators [01:20:30.19] who have a journalistic background— one’s with— has been with the BBC, one’s a producer for CNN. So they are based there because from Doha, that’s kind of the new central location. You can get all over the place. One of the content creators is from New Zealand, one’s from London, one is US-based. I’m not sure where the fourth is. They’re all multicultural, multiracial, very, very much a reflection of Gen Z today. There’s also a phenomenon called newsfluencers. [01:21:00.23] That’s news influencers. The same way you’ve got influencers telling you what to put on your face and telling you how to dress, you’ve got influencers telling you what the news is, what it should be. So they’re focused on Gen Z, they’re news influencers, and they’re focused on tech and AI and things that their generation is native to.
[01:21:22.04]Like, we’re still thinking AI. And if you’re a Marvel fan, maybe you’re thinking Jarvis and/or Ultron. But for most digital native, digital first content creators, this is normal. There are lots of YouTube shows, lots of TikTok shows where you’ve got young people sitting in easy chairs wearing their sweats, discussing whatever’s bubbling that day, whether it’s the latest tech, whether it’s the latest person who is doing something wrong, whether it’s the latest thread [01:21:52.09] on Reddit with people complaining about what they’ve seen. This kind of setup, this very casual information sharing where the viewer is a fly on the wall listening to a conversation, this is kind of mainstream now for people who are not us. So I think that what we’re seeing, we can access these— the show CNN Creators on YouTube, where most of us do not normally get our news, but where people who are deeply skeptical of the mainstream media do get their news. And so CNN, I think, is [01:22:22.12] smartly trying to capitalize on this audience. I think as long as there has been mainstream media, we have struggled to figure out how to reach a younger generation. I remember being 22 and having to turn over my senior thesis from college to my editors who are wondering like, what does the young kid have to say about what people are doing?[01:22:41.21] The Globe had a whole section on Sundays for a while that was very condescendingly aimed at young people. And even today, newspapers and TV stations routinely do the, here’s how you translate what your kid is saying. BRB means be right back in text, right? So we’re always trying to crack that code.This is just another example of it that’s a bit more polished and a bit more in line with what their target audience is actually doing.
Emily Rooney: [01:23:08.07] -
Good analysis. All right, Dan.
Dan Kennedy: So, um, CNN has struggled for many, many years with what to do when there isn’t a huge breaking news story to follow. And this strikes me as a reasonably intelligent attempt to try to reach out to a new audience. I, I went to the CNN creators page on YouTube. Uh, the topics all seemed interesting to me. And I watched a little bit of one on feral cats [01:23:40.06] in New Zealand because I like cats, but I didn’t stick around because the point of the story is that they’re killing feral cats in New Jersey, which I said—
Emily Rooney:
New Zealand.
Dan Kennedy:
Yeah, New Zealand. Yes, we don’t want to do that in New Jersey either.
Emily Rooney: Eating them.
Dan Kennedy: So I did not want to stick around for that. One of the things that I thought it was on CNN domestically on Thursdays at 11 AM because that’s—
Emily Rooney: Oh, maybe they repeat it.
Dan Kennedy: 01:24:09.21] - Maybe they do, but we’re only talking about 30 minutes a week. And I would guess that almost no one is ever going to watch it on TV. So one of the things that really struck me as odd about this, and maybe they need a couple of more Gen Z producers, is that the format is horizontal. And the audience that they’re trying to reach watches the video entirely in vertical format. So I don’t really know [01:24:40.01] what they’re thinking about that. Finally, you just wonder where any experiment on CNN is going in the future, because we may be looking at the final months of CNN as we’ve known it. The Ellisons are about to take it over. Barry Weiss may bring her ratings magic to CNN as she has to CBS News, and no one will watch it anymore.
Emily Rooney: Well, I’m predicting right here it tries too hard. It just tries too hard to be clever and hip, and I don’t see it appealing to many people anyway.
