CNN wants to expand its podcast business, bringing new talent and formats to the fast-growing audio (and increasingly video) business.
But first, it needs to do a little rebrand.
CNN is rebranding the division from CNN Audio to CNN Podcasts, recognizing the fact, well, people call them podcasts.
“I remember when I first got into podcasting at Slate Magazine, people were saying ‘I hate the word podcast, podcast is such a dumb name,’” says Steve Lickteig, the head of CNN Podcasts in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “But it’s the name! That’s what we’ve called it from the beginning. I did see across the industry, places that were switching from podcasts to audio, and CNN did the CNN Audio thing back before my time. I think it was just sort of a trend of getting away from podcasting. But the fact is, these are podcasts. It’s what the industry and the general public, more importantly, calls them.”
“These are self contained shows that you listen to on a device, such as your phone,” he adds. “Audio can mean so many things, but what we’re trying to show is that podcasts are what they originally were, video notwithstanding.”
So CNN is doubling down on that original premise, building out its stable of shows and formats, and leaning into talent that may be underutilized on TV.
“If you listen to all the CNN podcasts, you basically have a pretty good sense of what’s going on in the world,” Lickteig says, ticking off the channel’s slate, which includes shows led by Anderson Cooper, Audie Cornish, Sanjay Gupta and others.
But he wants to bring in other talent, and other formats, to build out a wider slate.
“There’s a lot of reporters and journalists at CNN that don’t necessarily have a television show, but are doing incredible work,” he says. “So one of the things that we just recently launched was The Account, which is a narrative anthology show. So we’re going to showcase narrative stories and journalism, audio-first, from various reporters over a year. The most recent one was Donie O’Sullivan, his show called Persuadable, which was about folks who have sort of found their way out of the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. It was a three episode run, and then we have another one coming up late summer, with Omar Jimenez about the sort of knock on effects of this brutal Chicago Police Captain Jon Burge, who was notoriously torturing confessions out of African American men and getting them sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit.”
“These are names, but they’re not big names, and we want folks who know CNN to get to know these folks a little bit deeper,” he adds. “So we’re trying to create a sense of relationships with these very talented journalists, so that’s the process and strategy going forward, is to create this idea that CNN is more than just a place to go for breaking news. It’s that these are people who care about their stories and care about telling stories, and we just want to showcase that.”
He also cited Trial By Jury, a podcast that popped up to cover the trial of Diddy, with plans to do another edition connected to the trial of Luigi Mangione. Lickteig says that it was the brainchild of anchor and analyst Laura Coates, who reached out to him with the concept.
“It felt like it matched all the check marks that we wanted, it’s newsy, there’s a societal impact here, it’s cultural. It covered all the bases, and we turned that around and launched that a couple of days after that,” he says.
One area that CNN is exploring more gingerly is video podcasts. Shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy and New Heights often have more viewers on a platform like YouTube than they do in audio apps. CNN is in the space, and will add more shows that utilize video (“CNN is a video company and that we want to have as much video content out there as possible for folks that are already fans of CNN,” Lickteig says), but that doesn’t mean that it will be turning all of its podcasts into video podcasts.
“We’re doubling down on this idea that this is an intimate experience, that these are things going into your ears. Even when you’re watching a video podcast, you often still have your earphones or your earbuds in listening to it. So the idea is to keep it a contained medium, which is what podcasts are,” he says. “The reason we got into video is a CNN is a video company. “That’s what we do, and it’s meeting the listeners and the viewers where they are. There are some folks that would never potentially find or listen to Audie or Sanjay, but they might find them on YouTube, and they’ll watch this interview, and maybe that’ll draw them into the larger podcast, or maybe they’re satisfied with just getting that interview portion on YouTube.”
Instead, Lickteig wants to build out more community around CNN’s podcasts, a critical piece of the puzzle for the news organization as it navigates cord-cutting, and as CEO Mark Thompson tries to diversify its revenue toward more direct-to-consumer offerings.
Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, for example, focuses on the theme of grief.
“We created an online grief community at CNN, where people could go there and share their stories,” he says. “Anderson had over the last two seasons, 600 hours of voicemails people left, telling their stories of grief, just an incredible number. And we loaded them all up into mp3, just for Anderson, and he just would listen to them on his walks, listen to them when he was doing other things.”
“Basically what we did here is all these people who had things they wanted to talk about were able to get on the site, on our platform, and talk to each other about their loss. So they would leave their story comment, Anderson would comment,” he continued. “To have someone of Anderson Cooper’s notoriety and fame to be on there, responding to a listener in the comments really has a deep impact.”
