Ioan Petras The rise of new media and Internet power schemes: An impact study of social media rise

on CNN

Introduction
Television, with all it's quick quotes and snappy headlines, can't keep me informed. It's so shallow and you can't really learn anything because just when you get interested in the story it's actually over. Then I have to go online to find out what happened anyway. (Krcmar 2009:34)

The appearance of the Internet, the switch from Web 1.0 to the so called Web 2.0 and later on blogs, social media platforms and video streaming services meant so much more than pure entertainment. For the masses, it was entertainment, for enthusiasts of the Internet it soon became more, after that it spread to the masses. We're talking about social news reporting, or, in other words, we're talking about how the masses took control from the massmedia giants and became themselves the news reporters, or did they? Mass-media networks, which includes but is not limited to newspapers, have had, and some still do, a hard time adjusting to the rather quick rise of the social media. Many newspapers just closed shop, many more soon understood that no online presence was basically a death sentence for them. In theory, the rise of social media was, for many newspaper, a cease and desist notice. Newspapers, but not only, adapted and managed to survive but their future is considered uncertain, at best. But as the first years of the 21 st century ticked away, newspapers, while still in many
journalistic senses definitional, were not surviving. And neither was the craft of gathering and telling America's story. Major daily newspapers collapsed into bankruptcy, venerable chains teetered on the brink of collapse, publications that had survived depressions, wars and the centuries that went with them, - The Christian Science Monitor, Denver's Rocky Mountain News, Seattle's Post-Intelligencer were stopping the presses, permanently. (McChesney et al. 2010:9).

Newspapers are now offering paid subscriptions for reading online, many of them even gave up on hard copies and now only exist in the online environment. Amateur blogs, news-vines, e zines, newsletters and in other words social media as a whole forced them to adapt in this way. People not only just stopped buying hard copies, they stopped reading the said newspapers altogether, because there were now at least 100 different sources for a given subject, at any time, on-demand, online, rather than 3 or 4 newspapers that may or may not cover the subject.

Newspapers are just an example, many other mass-media networks, including and maybe most importantly television networks, giant conglomerates like CNN or FoxNews but not limited to the U.S, for in Europe there is BBC: Over many decades, the BBC has, in addition to its national radio and television news services, provided world news to the world and regional television and local radio news to the UK (Ursell 2001:187). These conglomerates have been forced to adapt, to change and to innovate in order to survive, because, if the alternative to newspapers are blogs, then the alternative to CNN is video sharing websites, like YouTube.

Hypothesis
This study has it's focus on particularly this subject, television networks, namely CNN. We're going to try and see how did the rise of social media influence the power structures and the power relation in the global mass-media scheme, given the fact that CNN is one of the biggest news stations in the world, onto which many other national and local news stations rely. We are trying to answer such questions as: How is the CNN doing in the social media field? How did social media impact CNN? Did the rise of social media diminish the power and capacity of CNN of controlling and dispersing their own news or did CNN manage to innovate and adapt adequately in such a way that it not only survived but maintained it's market share? Did CNN gain even more awareness and control thanks to social media?

The rise of social media

In the last few years, namely since 2004 onwards, the social media aspect of the Internet started developing faster and faster until mass-media giants which used to formerly control the media market were now being pushed out of the game by seemingly small companies which were turning, literally over night, into empires, because, for example, a 98 million viewer coverage is dwarfed by the sheer size of Facebook, now with over 800 million members worldwide. Clearly, newspapers and news TV stations such as CNN were not properly equipped to compete with such communities, so they started adapting. However, communities were not something new for traditional media, forums and daily or weekly newsletters were common long before the rise of social media, but people were still relying on traditional media to get the news and at some point, this turned into an uncommon

event, because social media were faster, on-demand, easier to access, free and some would argue, more reliable as sources. But all that was not enough for the consumer to switch, it was about trust built over decades, trust into television, it was about convenience and even more it was about habit. Everybody knows the stereotypical morning coffee with the newspaper in front of you and the TV playing the morning news, well that holds some truth. It was about habits, but habits soon started changing as more and more young people became of age and started consuming news, and they had a totally different set of habits. Again, CNN had to adapt. What is important to note is that CNN is not just your average TV channel. It is not considered local and it does not have local influence and local impact. CNN is such a huge aggregation of mass-media that it soon became, along with it's competitors, MSNBC and FoxNews a source for the world. As such, news broadcasting on CNN and/or BBC would be, and still are, picked-up by local TV channels world-wide and presented as their own. Not plagiarism, just your common agenda-setting, which now turned global. CNN, from a mass-media point of view was a trend setter, an agenda setter for the world, from a power scheme point of view, CNN had the power in such a degree that it was literally not heard of someone contesting the truth of a piece of news presented on CNN. More on the matter, CNN was not only broadcasting locally, in the U.S, it started broadcasting overseas and now has local branches, like CNN Asia or CNN Oceania. In present day, CNN holds 10 offices in the U.S and 26 offices internationally, all broadcasting. CNN still has influence on news channels world-wide, some of them even adopting the famous red tape news in which lower interest news are broadcast in writing, live, on the bottom of the screen, on a red scrolling sidewards tape, in the same time as the main news are being anchored.
The same global media companies, such as CNN or Reuters, deliver most of the news available to people in different locations. What applies to television does not necessarily apply to other media and communications. (Rantanen 2004:146).

CNN was launched in 1980 but it soon gathered a lot of influence and power and by 1991 it was one of the most important news channels in the U.S and soon, the world. But how did exactly did CNN become so big, so fast? Researching the history of CNN and looking at how it distinguished itself from the other news channel stations it soon becomes obvious that CNN relied mostly on a focal point: get involved in the most important events, be the first to do that, keep doing it even after the event is over. It sort of created a rule, which out of convenience we will define as the EIF rule (Exclusive involvement and follow-up). The EIF

rule was rather simple and CNN did a pretty good job on illustrating it. CNN was the first and only news channel to broadcast live coverage of the Challenger space shuttle which crashed and killed 7 crew members back in 1986. CNN was also one of the first to cover the Gulf War back in 1991, it provided the first of it's kind news coverage: live warfare, 24/7. People were watching a war, on TV, live, 24/7. This was later described by media specialists as the CNN effect, which is basically the effect that 24/7 coverage of a certain event had over the decision making process of the U.S government. Again, CNN was the first one to break the news about the 9/11 attacks when CNN suddenly broke a commercial break with the terrible news that a jet just crashed into one of the twin towers, this was just after 3 minutes the first plane hit. So what happened, where did the EIF rule go wrong? It didn't. The EIF rule still works, just not for CNN, because the rise of social media meant that the EIF rule was now being used by social media users also, which were many, many more than the entire CNN staff world-wide. As soon as the EIF rule started working for social media, people also started looking towards sources which could provide them the most real-time and accurate news possible and social media were now doing this better than CNN, and in some respect, they were more reliable because news found on the social media were produced by people just like the average consumer, with no intention of influencing or changing the story. It was just pure news either via twitter which was the fastest, Facebook, which was the most popular or YouTube, which had the option to add more information, in video format. The use of video news relating by social media users almost minimized and made the need for TV news channels irrational. However, they [news channels] started adapting, surviving, being led by no other than CNN.
Older media such as radio and magazines have experienced sizable adjustments to their original, dominant norms of practice; their role in daily life; and their characteristic content in the course of their longer histories. And television is now undergoing just such adjustment. It may evolve into a medium very different from the one we have long thought it to be, but it will indeed continue to exist. (Lotz 2009).

Looking at news being produced by CNN just 5 years ago and news produced today it soon becomes obvious for any person with the least sens of observation that even the format of the news changed in order to adapt and be able to compete with social media. As such, 5 or more years ago a piece of news was seen as something more than reporting. It meant investigative news, short documentaries if you wish. It meant research and days of planning

on a certain subject before reporting, but, the need for speed imposed on traditional media by the social media meant this was no longer possible in such a degree as it was 5 years ago and today, we barely receive any investigative news and we receive instead just news reporting, and by default, the average viewer, even if he's not using social media yet, will turn eventually to social media to retrieve more information about the insufficiently information provided by news channels like CNN. As such, the habit becomes obsolete and changes into the morning coffee in front of a laptop and not in front of the newspaper and TV, and as habits change, the power drifts away from CNN and into social media.
According to Nielsen Media Research, for the year to date (ending December 13) CNNs ratings among viewers 25-54 (the key news demographic) cratered in 2010, plummeting 34 percent in prime timethe biggest decline of any network." (Joyella

2010). But CNN has yet another disadvantage against social media that contradicts the very idea of news must come as fast as possible. It's the archiving part that troubles CNN. Social media has in inherently built-in system of archiving news. A piece of news online is never forgotten and archived by a passive process, not active. As such, archiving on the social media platforms is a sine qua-non condition whereas CNN has to actively archive and organize past events news. Users and consumers of news often make use of the Internet archive to search for a piece of news, whereas CNN, as a TV news station, rarely permits this.
What is the logic of the TV archive? Why has TV been saved by public and private institutions? How have nostalgia networks like Nick at Nite and personal recording systems like the VCR and TiVo affected the canon of programs saved? (Wasko

2010:67). Also, along with the archiving of the news itself, social media also archives the reaction to that news of a region, country or the globe, as such, for example relating to twitter.com, it does not only archive everything posted, but it also provides these opinions in real-time. As Mattison noted in his article "The end of the forgetting era".
"In 4 short years, Twitter [ http://www.twitter.com] has gone from being a fad to a phenomenon to an essential component of any social networking and online business suite." (Mattison 2010)

The data that we gathered for this study all points towards the fact that CNN is spiraling down in ratings and viewer count, a trend which continued for the past 3 years. Internationally and domestic CNN has lower ratings on television and international media which is discussing the subject are all seeing the statistics and agreeing on a central point:

CNN is going down. A recent piece of news in The New York Times noted:
"CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year. " (Carter 2010).

The ratings can be found online in databases such as the ratings for January 5 th which show a number of 124 for viewers between 25 and 54 and a number of 161 for viewers between 35 and 64. These numbers are Nielsen points, which represent (each point) the percentage of the total households in the U.S which have access to CNN. As such, on January 5th only 12.4% of these households tuned in CNN during prime-time ( 20:00 23:00 ). Some would argue that television is in under no circumstance on the verge of extinction but it's merely mutating and transforming into a different type of television. As Miller notes:
So it is silly to see the Internet in opposition to television; each is one more way of sending and receiving the other. The fact is that television is becoming more popular, not less. It is here to stay, whether we like it or not. I suspect we are witnessing a transformation of TV, rather than its demise. (Miller 2010:19).

And we agree, we agree that television is going through a big transformation and adaptation, but we also argue that this has always been the case, television has always improved and evolved to keep up with the demands but it always created [ new technologies and distribution channels ] based on a need, a need which today does not exist, and today the television is even more transforming than ever, but the need is not there, it is merely transforming out of trying to come up with something new, call it a trial-and-error process if you wish.
In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the three-network system in the United States, the increasing commercialization of public service/state-run systems, the rise of multichannel cable and global satellite delivery, multinational conglomerates, Internet convergence, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, the advent of HDTV, technological changes in screen design, the innovation of digital television systems like TiVo, and new forms of media competition all contribute to transformations in the practice we call watching TV.

(Spiegel et al. 2004:2). Also, Mayer notes that even with all these transformations:
In shortand to echo an earlier conjecture at a past conjuncturethe only things that died in the past decade were the industrial myths that television and new media

were totally separate entities. (Mayer 2011:97)

Back to the statistics presented above, we believe that they are representative because searching the archive it soon becomes obvious that the numbers started going down since 2006 and keep going down day by day. For a more detailed view, statistics for this particular day (January 5th 2012) can be accessed by following the link "CNN Statistics" in our bibliography. However, what we fail to capture with these ratings is the impact social media had on CNN. It can be asserted that ratings are going down because of social media, but it can also be asserted that CNN is merely moving the platform from broadcasting TV to the online media, and as such, for confirming or denying these two hypotheses we need to also take a look at the statistics concerning the CNN website which, duly noted, became much larger and had increasing traffic since the year the TV ratings started spiraling down, which are tended to be identified as being in late 2006 and early 2007. The CNN website has seen a massive increase in traffic which is directly related to the period social media efforts were put into the website, starting late 2006 when the website first started relating news in a consistent, blog-like platform, much like a daily newspaper and less like a TV station presenting it's schedule, compared to what it used to do. The CNN website traffic statistics which we extracted from both CNN archives and info-graph such as Felton's graph (Felton 2010) which shows a total view of over 121 billion views since the launch of the website in 1996 and over 192 nations world-wide using the website either as a primary or a secondary news source. However, even with such high numbers, CNN website is NOT a social media website and as such, the website has a certain degree of success when people started consuming less TV and more online, but there wasn't social media. Talking about social media power and directly relating the rise of social media we can easily see how social media has an impact on CNN. For example, as we showed above, the television rating is dropping year after year for CNN but, we would instead expect to see an increase in traffic of the CNN website, which was present in a higher degree up to 2008, mainly because more and more people gained access to the online world. However, looking closely, we can see that both television rating and website traffic is on a downwards spiral. "Although television companies remained the leading producers of video content,
their historic control of distribution seemed increasingly uncertain. As these changes unfolded, another daunting challenge emerged as Hollywood writers voted to strike

on November 5th 2007 in the very heart heart of the television production season. Late-night talk-shows were most immediately affected, and in December drama series were forced on hiatus as well, leaving gaping holes in the prime-time schedule. Ratings plummeted and, by the time a strike settlement was reached in early February 2008, it proved unexpectedly difficult to lure audiences back to network television.

(Turner et al. 2009:10). Alexa.com is listing CNN as rank #61 in the world (#18 in the U.S) with the average visitor being a person (male or female equal) of over 25 years of age, with no children, with college education with the browsing location being from work. This statistics is insignificant however for our study, what is significant tough is the fact that CNN is listed with the highest monthly visitor in June 2011 with over 180 million views in one month, but it is also listed as having a 4.2% monthly decrease each year in traffic, as listed by www.trafficestimate.com with the rate being rapidly increasing, www.alexa.com showing a 10.7% decrease as an average of the past three months. Where is the traffic going? The television ratings are dropping, websites visitors are dropping, CNN is loosing consumers. This relation is directly proportional to the rise and the establishment of social media as a preferred means of news source by more and more people world-wide. The reasons for this can be various, from ease of use, to accessibility and most of all, trust, because unlike TV stations, social news are recommended or created by people that you know or have some sort of connection with, which creates a relationship of trust between users. As a conclusion to this study, it can safely be asserted that social media is having a deep, negative impact on the user count of news giant CNN and that CNN did in fact took preventive measures against this, it adapted and learned quickly to use the online medium and to make use of social media platforms but even with all the efforts, if this downward spiral trend tends to continue, it can by assumed that it is only a matter of time until CNN will have the same fate as thousands of TV stations, newspapers, magazines and other forms of conventional media world-wide, and that is: being overwhelmed by social media, not coping, ceasing to exist. It may be a bold hypothesis to push forward, but we can see examples of this happening in other fields, for example the launch of the Kindle, the fact that it came free with a subscription to amazon.com and the launch of the iPad meant the end of the bookstore giant Borders, the third largest bookstore in the U.S. It happened over night.
"Borders Group Inc. is expected to file for bankruptcy early this coming week the result of declining annual revenues and mounting rent obligations as well as its

struggle to catch up to thee-book business that is credited with keeping the publishing industry afloat. Borders, which is based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is the third largest bookseller in the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal, Borders is turning to Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after failing to get publishers to agree to a plan that would have restructured a debt that currently totals over $500 million."

(Guarino 2011) Currently, the largest bookstore in the U.S (Barnes & Nobel) is headed towards the same fate. Who is it to say that CNN can avoid such a fate given the facts and numbers presented above which clearly show the deterioration of the power relation between CNN and the consumer mass?

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Other electronic sources:

http://feltron.tumblr.com/post/239368807/in-conjunction-with-the-relaunch-of-theirwebsite http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com# http://www.trafficestimate.com/cnn.com