CNN: Far From Broken, but They’re Fixing It : Entering its second decade, Cable News Network is making changes--and drawing criticism--in a bid for ratings

ATLANTA —  It is a busy day in the global village. George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and South African President F.W. de Klerk are all making front-page news. West Virginia is under a court order to close an overcrowded prison, the Toronto city council is considering a measure to curb the greenhouse effect and Japan is introducing a new bullet train.

Around a large conference table in the Atlanta headquarters of Cable News Network, the senior executives and producers of CNN gather at 8 a.m. to determine the run-down of stories and the deployment of troops--which stories should be covered live, which ones will be reported and shot by CNN’s own correspondents and crews, and which will include video footage from international news services.

Since CNN, as advertised, is a 24-hour news channel with newscasts throughout the day, the pressure is to get the stories on the air as soon as possible, with updates for several newscasts through the day. “The broadcast networks focus their resources on their half-hour evening newscasts,” Ed Turner, the CNN executive in charge of news-gathering, will say later in an interview. “Our charter is to get it in and get it on. Get it right, but get it on.”

Yet, at the same time, there’s another pull at CNN these days. Although producer Bob Furnad wants to know why a Washington reporter can’t “turn a quick spot preview” of an upcoming speech by noon, he says of a feature on an endangered species, “Can we run it at 2? Don’t ruin it.”

“That’s promotable,” Turner says of a piece about an inventor who is successfully suing big auto companies.

The word promotable-- meaning an upcoming story that can be teased to keep zap-happy viewers tuned in--may never replace the word now at CNN. But as Cable News Network approaches its 10th anniversary in June, it is facing something of an identity crisis. Even as it grows, CNN is grappling with its vision of the future.

CNN has made its reputation with its round-the-clock, no-frills format and extended live coverage, from the revolution in China to the stock-market crash on Wall Street. In pointed contrast to the broadcast networks, CNN has prided itself on making the news--not the anchor--the star. But despite recent gains, CNN’s Nielsen ratings have hit a plateau, averaging a 0.7 in the Nielsens over the course of a day in February (meaning that about 645,000 households are tuned in at any given time). Although the company is not under broadcast-style ratings pressure, having generated operating profits of $134 million in 1989, CNN executives are thinking about ways to bring in more regular viewers--and to provide the kind of in-depth analysis that its critics say it needs to grow beyond being a video wire service.

Does that translate into the high-profile investigative team that made its on-air debut last week? Will there be more “network”-style anchors like Catherine Crier, a former Texas judge who was hired last fall to co-anchor a CNN newscast without any experience in journalism? Says one CNN producer, “We’re at a crossroads.”

Once derided as the “Chicken Noodle Network” by broadcast-TV executives, CNN has upped the ante in broadcast news, forcing ABC, CBS and NBC to increase their live news coverage and regularly fly their anchors around the world to the scenes of big stories. So entrenched is the upstart that CBS executives recently went to Atlanta to court CNN founder Ted Turner, their old nemesis, about possibly sharing some news-gathering facilities. Now seen in 90 countries around the world, CNN has become such a force in video-geopolitics that President Bush is reported to have watched CNN to see how the invasion of Panama was going, and a recent CNN report that Gorbachev was considering resigning his position as chief of the Communist party immediately affected financial markets around the world. CNN won the prestigious Du Pont Award for its live coverage of the turmoil in China last year, which was anchored by Bernard Shaw and included dramatic on-camera negotiations with Chinese authorities trying to pull the plug on CNN.

“CNN has become an international habit . . . for catching fast-breaking news,” says Ben Bagdikian, a professor at the graduate journalism school of UC Berkeley. Comparing CNN to a video wire service, Bagdikian says, “They operate around the clock and around the world, offering straight accounts of events without necessarily having it in depth, the way the networks try to achieve. The broadcast networks have countered by offering the big story in depth. But with their own cutbacks, the network are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“I believe we’ve established ourselves as the network where people know they can tune in when something happens, knowing we’ll be there to stay with the story,” Ed Turner says. “News is our only story, and we don’t have to break into ‘Major Dad’ to do it.”

Indeed, a major news event has an immediate impact on CNN’s ratings. The Bay Area earthquake last October gave CNN its highest average audience: The day after the temblor, an average of 1,273,000 households watched CNN throughout the day. The ratings were only slightly smaller the day after the U.S. invasion of Panama last January. The highest ratings for one 15-minute period were registered during the rescue of Jessica McClure from a Texas well in October, 1987, when 3.1 million households were tuned in.

Events in China and Berlin produced slightly higher numbers than normal but not nearly the same as Panama and the earthquake. “We had great stuff from China, and sometimes the very crudeness of it made it great,” says Furnad, vice president and senior producer at CNN. “But the ratings jumped and then fell off. It’s sad, but maybe that’s because American lives were not at stake.”

By contrast, Furnad said, issues such as abortion and animal-rights are emotional “spikes” that excite viewer interest. Furnad is encouraging CNN producers to identify such stories each day and use them to pace the newscast with emotion, not sound and pictures.

“This is a philosophy of pacing stories that has been around a long time,” maintains Furnad, a former producer for ABC’s “World News Tonight.” “The budget is an emotional story, too, if you tell it correctly, and so was (that day’s) story about a Supreme Court ruling on ‘nuisance suits’ by lawyers. The lead story is still the lead story, but if it’s dull as sin, the second story should have emotional appeal. We live in an environment where people are watching a channel for three minutes and then pressing that clicker. We’ve got to get them watching and keep them watching in that environment.”

The challenge for CNN now is to maintain its franchise (and influential audience) as the all-news network while enhancing its programming to attract new viewers and persuade its core audience to watch more.

“The spine of the network will be breaking news, live,” Ed Turner says. “We’re the network that brought you months of the Oliver North trial--and not just the Fawn Hall testimony--and, if people don’t want to watch it, tough, that’s what we ought to be doing. But to grow in the 1990s, we need to both expand our international bureaus and do more in-depth reporting.”

Apart from the prestige that its new investigative team may bring CNN, Turner maintains that it will also bring in viewers. “We’d like to win awards with it, of course,” he says, “but I’m hoping that it will give us material that will bring in serious news viewers, making our newscasts better and stronger.”

CNN began airing the first reports from its “Special Assignment” investigative unit last Monday--a four-part investigation into practices in college basketball. Originated by Ted Turner, the unit is headed by Pam Hill, who previously spent 10 years in charge of the award-winning documentary department at ABC News. Hill has recruited an impressive list of producers and reporters from both TV and print, from former NBC News political reporter Ken Bode to Brooks Jackson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from The Wall Street Journal, along with documentary producers from “60 Minutes” and “CBS Reports.”

With an annual budget of several million dollars, “Special Assignment” is a departure for CNN, which began on the cheap, with non-union talent, many of them young people just out of college, and continues to be a place where bureau chiefs literally have to account for the number of notebooks they use. But if there is occasional grumbling about the unit’s resources, it also is seen as a sign of the growth of CNN.

“When I started out here 10 years ago, newsmakers didn’t know who we were, and, on a public-affairs show here, I used to book the special assistant to the acting secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the President’s commission on the metric system,” jokes Wendy Walker, the 37-year-old Washington producer for CNN. “When we were in Poland recently, I saw Lech Walesa practicing his speech wearing a CNN T-shirt. The creation of the investigative unit is another good sign because it shows a real commitment to long-term, serious journalism.”

The hiring of Catherine Crier, however, seems to many at CNN to be a contradictory sign. Despite her lack of experience in journalism, Crier was hired to co-anchor the newscast that CNN introduced last October, “The World Today.” The move has been criticized by TV reviewers and some CNN hands. “If you think she’s got potential for television,” one staffer argues, “why not send her out to do reporting? Otherwise, we’re no different from the networks when they hire some attractive woman with little experience.”

Paul Amos, the CNN executive in charge of developing programming, defends the choice of Crier, saying, “She has skills in terms of questioning and interviewing as a prosecutor and judge. We hired her because we think she has the capability of being a good communicator, not simply someone reading copy.”

Amos believes that where CNN will make its mark in the next decade is in “coming up with breakthrough news programs that are more than news coverage.” He once considered a news quiz show but abandoned that idea. “Whatever we do will be consistent with our news coverage,” Amos promises. “We’re not talking about a musical-variety news show.”

So what will it be, a Nairobi bureau or a new satellite uplink from Eastern Europe, a high-priced “star” anchor or a team of researchers to pore over documents looking for fraud? Cable News Network doesn’t yet have to select among the competing visions of its future. But when it does, the choices it makes--among hard news, analysis and the entertainment values of network TV--will be televised live around the world.

“We’ve got to examine every possibility to stay competitive in an environment where we’re up against 50 different cable channels,” Amos says. “If you sit there and do business as usual, thinking you’ve captured your market niche, you’ll get buried.”