Why HLN's demise matters

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https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/...fs-cnn/672332/

CNN’s Headline News may seem thoroughly old-fashioned now that it’s dead. But its demise is a reminder of the creeping nature of media obsolescence.

By Brian Stelter

DECEMBER 2, 2022, 1:25 PM ET

Media Winter is here once more, and it is getting ugly. It seems as though every news giant is shrinking toward 2023 through end-of-year layoffs, hiring freezes, or otherwise Dickensian austerity. Text chains and Slack channels are bursting with farewells and expressions of uncertainty about the future.

Industry veterans will tell you they’ve come to expect these Christmas-time cutbacks. The Gannett newspaper chain is laying off scores of local and national journalists. NPR is looking for ways to save at least $10 million. The Washington Post is ending its Sunday magazine. CNN, where I was an anchor until August, is cutting several hundred jobs.

As usual, explanations vary. The advertising marketplace is softening. Economic headwinds are worsening. Shareholder demands are unforgiving. But the effect is always the same: contraction, lost livelihoods, diminished brands, fewer outlets for both reporters and consumers.

Yet there’s something different this time around. Job losses in journalism have been rolling across the industry for decades now. But it’s not every day that a fixture of cable television goes belly up. The demise of HLN, CNN’s 40-year-old sister station, which will stop airing original newscasts next week, deserves attention not just because it marks the end of an era but because it’s a reminder of how eras in media actually end. Before death comes obsolescence.

HLN, better known as Headline News, was a Ted Turner creation. The founding father of cable news rushed HLN to air on New Year’s Day 1982, a mere 19 months after he launched CNN. The goal was to preempt a rival with a similar idea: a headline-driven TV channel that would mimic the nonstop wheels of news radio. Whereas CNN in those days had a wide variety of programming, including in-depth interview shows, HLN had headlines around the clock. Quick bursts of news, barely 280 characters at a time, were perfectly suited for a pre-broadband age when news was relatively scarce.

Just as YouTube destroyed the MTV we once knew, the informational environment created by iPhones and tweetstorms irrevocably changed HLN. But irrevocable change can be hard to see as it is happening. Perhaps counterintuitively, the reinvention of a broadcast medium plays out anticlimactically, like a slowly abandoned shopping mall—one store closes at a time until the whole structure serves a different purpose.

At HLN, executives first tried to refashion the channel with new reasons to tune in, creating talk shows hosted by Glenn Beck, Joy Behar, Drew Pinsky, and others. The biggest hit was Nancy Grace’s fear-stoking crime fest. Grace pointed a profitable way forward for HLN, but the overall endeavor was a branding nightmare—crime one hour, comedy the next. The channel was revamped so many times that even Wikipedia could barely keep up. In retrospect, it’s clear that the network wasn’t simply pivoting, to use industry parlance. The ground was shifting dramatically, and HLN was trying to find a way to stay standing. Here’s the problem with obsolescence, though: It isn’t just the ground that shifts. It’s the whole media universe.

Television news, the way I see it, is about consistency and companionship. Or it was, anyway. TV journalists break big stories and speak truth to power the same way journalists in every other medium do—but the thing that sets TV apart is the relationship forged between the people on either side of the screen. Viewers form emotional bonds with the anchors they watch and stream. This was certainly the case for devotees of HLN’s weekday-morning host, Robin Meade, who was one of the longest-tenured morning hosts in history, and who lost her job in the gutting of HLN.

Almost anyone can do the wake-up shift for a day, maybe even for a year, but almost no one can do it for two decades, as Meade did. (I can speak with some degree of authority on this: I married a morning-show host.) Meade has done it with infectious joy—and with uncommon interviewing talent—for 21 years. TikTok’s emerging stars could learn a thing or two from Meade about connecting all the way through the camera lens to the person on the other side. Meade's signature greeting was “Morning, sunshine!” Sometimes she’d add, “Yes, I’m talking about you.”

Television is a team sport, never mind the fact that the hosts get most of the glory. That's why Meade, speaking on a call with her soon-to-be-unemployed colleagues on Thursday, called their show Morning Express, the “greatest joy of my life” and meticulously thanked the writers and producers, according to several people who were present. The team will have a chance to sign off on Monday morning.

No one at HLN whom I’ve spoken with in the past 24 hours was completely surprised to be canceled. To a person, they chalked it up to management’s quest for billions of dollars in cost reductions. They had seen the news coverage get snipped and sheared for years, gradually replaced by titillating true-crime reruns. It seemed inevitable that the news on HLN would stop altogether at some point. But hosts like Meade still had a fan base that your average podcast host or Substack writer could only dream of. She also had an audience outside of her industry’s coastal bubbles—with fans in towns and cities all across America.

That’s a pivotal part of this story. HLN exhibited a polite sensibility—lighter and less politically focused than Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC; Meade’s producers made time for entertainment and sports and lifestyle coverage. “How to carve your turkey” was a top segment before Thanksgiving. If you were home alone and wanted to leave on the TV all morning, you could do worse than HLN. Even in this age of pinpoint on-demand streaming, HLN asserted that companionship TV still had value.

But now? Effective next week, HLN will stop producing live news coverage. It will transform almost completely into a true-crime channel. (CNN will simulcast its recently rebooted morning show on HLN, but that’s primarily a concession to long-standing cable deals that say HLN must carry some amount of straight news.) In a flattened media world where practically anyone can read headlines or annotate a live-streamed trial, HLN seems to have been rendered obsolete. That’s why I am skeptical, too, of the TV start-ups that are trying to replicate the old Headline News wheel for less money and with less staff.

There are lots of things to love about our endlessly fragmenting information environment, complicated though it is. But Meade’s fans are right to feel a sense of loss. This strained moment for TV news has no small number of anchors and hosts questioning what they thought they knew about the medium—and how much shelf space will exist for them in the future. Another channel is disappearing into the TV ether. Viewers tuning in for companionship may find only the faintest echo of what once was. The TV will still be on, but all the warmth is gone.

CNN's Sister Network HLN to Stop Airing Live Programming

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Big Cable Networks Like HLN Are Failing, and Media Companies Can’t Stop Their Decline

By Brian Steinberg

Jeremy Freeman

Viewers have turned to the cable network HLN over the years for a quick-hit version of its sister, CNN; for coverage of court cases; for Robin Meade’s long-running morning news shows; and for a bevy of true-crime programs, including Nancy Grace’s primetime talk show and repeats of “Forensic Files.” What it will be recognized for over the months to come is anybody’s guess.

CNN — and, by proxy, its corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery — nearly gutted the cable outlet Thursday by cancelling Meade’s “Morning Express,” which has been on the air in some form or another since 2001. The company also declared that it would not longer produce new live programming for the network and that Kathleen Finch, not CNN chief Chris Licht, would take over the true-crime shows, which would be made part of another cable outlet, ID, known for similar stuff. Meade is to be replaced by a simulcast of CNN’s morning programs.

Meade “is not only an exceptionally popular anchor, but also one of the longest-running morning hosts in history,” said Licht, in a memo to staff last week. “I know the HLN audience will miss her and the other HLN talent.” Meade signed off December 5, telling viewers in an attenuated one-hour version of her show that “budget cuts” and “a changing industry” meant her show was being taken off the air,

Licht made no comment about why the company had failed to build a business around a popular anchor, but the fact of the matter is that HLN has been in decline for some time. And the media world faces many other problems like it. NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Walt Disney together own dozens of underperforming cable networks that are quickly losing relevance in the age of streaming.

Such properties range from Warner’s American Heroes Channel to Paramount’s MTV2. Only NBCU has taken on the problem aggressively, shutting down in recent years everything from Esquire to Chiller to NBC Sports Network. Even the bigger cable networks are in danger of falling. Just check out the bulk of the schedule of Comedy Central, which this month bids farewell to the current host of “The Daily Show.” The network’s grid is largely filled with repeats of “The Office” and “Seinfeld.”

Cable and satellite distributors lost approximately 655,000 subscribers in the third quarter, according to a recent analysis from media-research firm MoffettNathanson. The numbers represent “the largest third quarter loss ever; last year’s loss was, by our estimate, 617K, and the year before was just 91K.”

Those declines remove a good chunk of support for big cable outlets. As more people who once subscribed to cable turn to streaming alternatives, media companies “are going to have to make hard decisions about whether keeping those networks lit up makes sense,” says John Harrison, leader of the Americas media and entertainment practice at EY.

In a different era, those same networks flourished. HLN launched as “CNN2” in 1982, offering half-hour rundowns — known internally as “wheels” — of top stories but also delved into business, pop culture and sports. It was seen as a complement to the main network, and had its own team of anchors. By the mid-2000s, it even had its own primetime block of talk shows and played a big part in launching both Grace and Glenn Beck. But the original format was showing signs of strain. “We were already seeing that the utility of a wheel was declining” in the 2000s, says Scot Safon, a CNN executive who oversaw HLN at the apex of its court coverage between 2010 and 2013. “The numbers were going down.”

Little wonder that in 2014, the former Time Warner mulled turning HLN over to programmers from Vice Media.

Executives at CNN have tried many strategies aimed at keeping the network relevant, while not stepping on the flagship brand. Under former chief Jeff Zucker, HLN tilted toward millennials, trying to cover viral videos and trending topics and even featured movie nights and mulled a game-show concept developed by Ellen DeGeneres. Next the network tried a new set of talk shows. Only Meade’s program prevailed. In recent years, CNN has produced original true-crime serials for HLN, with the hope that many of them could also fare well on streaming venues.

The numbers haven’t improved. HLN is projected to wrap 2022 with a 7% dip in subscribers, according to Kagan ,a market-research firm that is part of S&P Global Intelligence. Estimates call for HLN to see ad dollars and operating revenue each fall 4%. What’s more, cable and satellite operators don’t pay extra fees for HLN. They get the network for the same money they earmark for CNN, something insiders say is likened to “a gift with purchase.” Warner Bros. Discovery may have little choice but to consider the outlet a target for cost savings.

Cable is likely to have a tough time regaining momentum. Consumers are not only moving money into streaming subscriptions, but they have started to examine a dizzying array of new so-called “FAST” channels that use stuff from old programming libraries to create binge-watching opportunities around western movies or repeats of MTV’s “The Real World.”

If media companies are going to keep pulling original content off cable, consumers are likely to realize they can get old stuff via FAST for free and keeping cutting the cord. “These big media companies have dozens of linear channels that need to be fed, and there simply isn’t enough viability to keep feeding them when most directly relevant content is nearly a click and a stream away,” says Tim Hanlon, CEO of Vertere Groupe, a consultant to media and advertising companies.

HLN may not fade away immediately. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, has become known for “flipping” his cable holdings. If one concept doesn’t work, maybe another will. That’s how a cable network once known as Planet Green became the Oprah Winfrey Network, and how DIY, a cable outlet devoted to instructional programming on repairs and improvement, was recently turned over to programming from home-arts gurus Chip and Joanna Gaines.

But the media companies will eventually have to find a way to dispose of lackluster cable properties. Some are being propped up with more sports telecasts. Others with devoted followings, like FX or TCM, are being transformed into curated hubs on streamers. At some point, many of the cable outlets will “become loss makers,” says EY’s Harrison. And the prognosis isn’t optimistic. “I think it’s entirely possible they die,” says Michael Smith, professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.

Perhaps some signs of HLN’s future have already surfaced. During Thanksgiving, the network served as a destination for a marathon of old episodes of “The West Wing,” a Warner Bros.-produced property. Or maybe the parent company has other ideas. The current form of the network, says Safon, “feels like an interim step.”

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Whatever Happened To Robin Meade?

Robin Meade's career on HLN captivated viewers for over two decades. Read about her journey from local news to national fame and find out what she's doing now.