8 Comments Add your own

• 1. Tim  |  August 30th, 2007 at 8:48 pm

  I find this incredibly ironic, for two reasons: 1) In the book, “CNN The Inside Story” by Hank Whittemore, they reveal that in the early days CNN got almost all of their worldwide content by forming sharing agreements with “affiliates” around the world which were basically local stations that traded with CNN - so they didn’t really own much content at all; and 2) their iReports are basically content they get from others for free.

• 2. andy  |  August 31st, 2007 at 5:09 am

  On the net there seems to be four ways to make money. Provide Tools (fees), Advertising , Services (fees) and Content (license). An ecosystem that seems to be working well together. It is tough to tell which is king when all are necessary. If the point of your business is to be a publisher of content and make money of the advertising then content would be king and the tools and services are a cost of doing business. If the point of your business is to provide tools and services to publishers then you hope the publishers have good content so they will pay for the tools. In both these cases good content seems to be the key to a healthy publishing ecosystem.

  The model that wouldn’t seem to care about the quality of the content but is focused on the quality of the tools or service is one where you make money off the transactions (e-mail, ebay, paypal, amazon, salesforce.com, google, blogger, netflix, yahoo,…). In many cases this is ad supported but they only get the transaction if they have a better mouse trap.

  When I look around at who is making the real money and impact on the net I’m not sure it is the publishers or content providers but they sure do provide needed fuel.

• 3. Anonymous  |  August 31st, 2007 at 8:25 am

  The question here is whether Reuters is being dropped over “content ownership” or because of ongoing concerns over the quality and accuracy of the reporting.

• 4. thedetroitchannel  |  August 31st, 2007 at 9:31 am

  looks like ib sites are getting alot more real estate on the cnn.com homepage. probably the big winner here.

• 5. joe  |  August 31st, 2007 at 9:36 am

  That whole “content is king” defensiveness is dead. Control is king. Media consumers have it, and media companies want it back! Thus NBC leaves iTunes, and CNN tries to take ownership of its content from Reuters.

• 6. Anonymous  |  August 31st, 2007 at 4:12 pm

  In an email to staff, the Reuters Media president Chris Aheam said that “regrettably, after a period of extensive discussions, no commercial agreement could be reached at this stage” with CNN.

  sounds like Reuters wanted too much money?

• 7. Amani Channel  |  August 31st, 2007 at 6:46 pm

  The comment from anonymous (6) makes sence. Content ownership is not king. Content is king… but not ownership. We’re quickly moving into a world where content is fluid. Plus pay attention to how often CNN credits a video source. If they owned it or captured it they wouldn’t have to put call letters in the upper right corner of the screen at all. In terms of the blogosphere, look how often bloggers link to mainstream sources. Its not about who owns the content its about getting accurate information when you want it.

• 8. aidian  |  August 31st, 2007 at 6:49 pm

  reuters is the source for a TON of CNN’s overseas video — I don’t know how much this will hurt CNN proper, but it sure makes their affil service less useful.

  Reuters is perhaps CNN’s main source for video coming from both global hotspots and pretty much anywhere off the usual network axis of London-Moscow-Jerusalem-Beijing.

  One other note from the world of local news that could help shed light on this: for years I’ve seen notices on CNN wires about Reuters footage being cleared only for use as “breaking news.” Sounds like an ownership issue more than a cost issue to me.

Leave a Comment

Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed