Kate Bolduan’s next shift on CNN hasn’t started quite yet, but she’s acting as if it has. A group of cameras is flocking around the news anchor in a New York studio that has recently been updated, and she presses producers to let her rehearse a story she needs to have mastered by the time she gets on air. “We don’t want to get this half right,” she tells those listening to her.
Neither does the news network.
Bolduan and five of her on-air colleagues, along with dozens of crew members and producers working in New York, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, are taking part in a major TV-news experiment that is going to play out each weekday for the foreseeable future at CNN. The question the Warner Bros. Discovery network is trying to solve: How to keep viewers watching TV news when they have video alternatives that are often faster paced, less formal and fueled by social media?
The answer, for now, may come in “CNN News Central,” six hours of daytime programming that are faster paced, less formal and fueled by CNN’s gargantuan newsgathering operation and massive video screens. Viewers have for the past two weeks seen Bolduan, John Berman and Sara Sidner holding forth between 9 a.m. and noon on a New York-based edition of “News Central” that has in the show’s early days spurred the audience to ask if the anchors are getting tired from all the standing. Berman has already taken to wearing fashionable sneakers, and Sidner says she will consider doing the same. Much of their coverage is transmitted by a Steadicam that two crew members swoop across the floor, creating interesting angles. A new afternoon version from Washington, D.C., led by Jim Sciutto, Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez starts Monday.
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The anchors on “News Central” rarely sit behind a desk. They stand and direct viewers’ attention to any number of ever-changing elements on shifting screens behind them. In one corner: seconds-old footage of President Biden climbing stars to Air Force One on a trip to Ireland. In another: a live politician ready to discuss the latest changes in U.S. policy. In a third: a far-flung CNN correspondent weighing in from another part of the globe. Interviews and image analysis are part of the job, and in weeks to come, viewers might see a Washington correspondent move quickly on to the set to talk about new information gleaned form a source, or an augmented-reality image rotate on screen to help illustrate a key point.
“Our newsgathering is amazing. It’s around the world and on every continent save for Antarctica,” says Eric Sherling, a CNN senior vice president of Washington and special-events programming. “We wanted to bring that sense of it to the screen and it was hard to do that with the production values we traditionally used.” Indeed, “News Central” aims to replicate some of energy CNN throws off during critical coverage of elections, when anchors like Jake Tapper, John King or Wolf Blitzer get out from behind desks and prowl the studio as new voting data gets tabulated.
CNN wants to gain similar notice for its daytime hours, part of an initiative developed under CEO Chris Licht to give viewers a new feel for the network’s newsgathering energy. “The look and feel of CNN during daytime is what people equate with CNN,” the executive told Variety in January. The maneuver also comes as CNN has been grappling with a viewership downturn since the end of the aftermath of the 2020 election.
To capture attention, however, CNN must vie with a horde of new-tech platforms looking to do the same. “News Central” attempts to mimic the immersive feel of a Vice report and assembles a jumble of images in a manner slightly different from TikTok. It is also borrowing some elements recently tested by major-market local stations, says Chris Halsne, who directs the journalism and digital storytelling masters’ program at American University’s School of Communication.
“If you’re going to report the traditional way, like CNN does on cable, in studio, you have to make sure that the story also translates to the YouTube crowd,” he says, while not upsetting the network’s older core audience. The “News Central” concept, says Halsne, appears to walk that line.
Others worry about the potential to turn off viewers with too much gee-whiz technology. “Television news has a long history of executives tinkering with studio sets in an effort to drive up ratings by giving a new look to a broadcast,” says Mark Feldstein, chair of broadcast journalism at University of Maryland. Executives ought to keep in mind, he says, that “there’s nothing that turns off younger viewers more than oldsters using gimmicks to try to appear younger and hipper than they are.”
Amid a flurry of programming changes and new assignments for anchors, the daytime concept is among the first to be embraced fully by the broader CNN staff, says one person familiar with the network. Producers are excited about the amount of information they can gather and make available on the screens, this person says, and Licht and Virginia Moseley, CNN’s executive vice president of editorial in the U.S., are said to be very involved in the concept.
Now six anchors must master a new way of delivering news. “There’s actual choreography,” says Berman. “There’s a lot more movement. You have to watch where the other anchors are, and also the cameras. It’s constantly stepping, moving, shifting, looking.” For Sidner, a CNN veteran who has for years delivered stories from remote locations, the “News Central” job feels like she’s still out there somewhere. “I’m immersed in the story because everything is larger than life. All of the walls are bigger than we are,” she says. She gets the feeling that she is out in the field, even though she is in the studio.
The Washington trio has been rehearsing possible scenarios for the past few weeks. “There’s so much going on behind the scenes. There are Steadicams that are flying around constantly. There a huge jib that’s taking up a chunk of space,” says Sanchez. “We have to figure out where to set up and where we are supposed to look. You develop muscle memory.” Sciutto sees the chance to augment his national-security reporting with interactive, on-screen maps and shot-by-shot breakdowns of key news scenes – sort of like football analysts taking step by step of a key play.
Producers and anchors have already developed an internal language that helps them figure out where to stand, and what part of the studio or screen at which they should look. The group talks about “Wall 1’ or “Wall 2” along with “channels,” “positions” and “verts” (or vertical monitors).
“If you heard what goes on in all of our heads, it would seem like complete crazy talk,” says Bolduan.
As for the physicality of the new role, Keilar would prefer it over sitting behind a desk. “If you’re reporting, you’re standing around,” she says. “Reporters are trained to stand around for hours.” If “News Central” gains the traction executives hope it will, these correspondents are going to be getting a new workout.
