From a digital guru at CNN:

Don’t ignore your own platform

New advice from a CNN digital VP.

A decreasing presence in the Facebook algorithm and data issues (see below). The often toxic environment of Twitter. The surfacing of fake news in Google searches.

News organizations have realized more and more that their content is being held hostage to other platforms. Which is why this statement stood out recently:

“The homepage is not dead.”

This is what S. Mitra Kalita, the vice president for programming at CNN Digital, told a group of social media specialists in New York recently. Poynter wanted to explore that more, so David Beard reached out to her for a short interview via email. Here’s an excerpt:

Your comment has come after years of seeing many news homepages automated, de-staffed, de-emphasized from the “homepage is king” era a decade ago. What has led to the change, at least for media sites like CNN or the L.A. Times, which you ran before?

In the rush to get our content on other platforms, let’s not forget about our own. CNN has the most powerful news homepage in the world. Our loyal users come to us to be informed, engaged, educated, maybe a little entertained. We owe it to them to keep the experience as vibrant as both the news and the rest of the internet.

That being said, it would be impossible to value the homepage in a vacuum. We know we are contending with competition from other sites, feeds and platforms. We know there are audiences out there who aren’t among the CNN loyalists.

The challenge is to preserve and dominate a core audience even as we leverage the homepage and other platforms to find new users. I guide our thinking among content creators and distributors alike with three key questions:

What’s the story?

Who is it for?

How will we find them?

She has a lot more interesting things to say in the interview, which you can find here.

Posted by Tim Morrissey