On April 28, 2010, soon after wrapping up the show he ran for MSNBC, Morning Joe, Chris Licht’s brain exploded. Well, not the whole brain, but an important part of it. (Are there unimportant parts?) A cerebral aneurysm left him in the ICU for nine days.
A major health scare often makes people with high-pressure jobs see life differently — making them want to slow down, smell the flowers, and appreciate the things that don’t come with hard deadlines. The title of Licht’s book about his aneurysm — What I Learned When I Almost Died: How a Maniac TV Producer Put Down His BlackBerry and Started to Live His Life — might prepare you for that cliché. Not so much:
You sometimes hear that illness is a way of telling the victim to slow down. That’s not the message my illness sent me. Mine said, “Get moving.”
Or, as one anonymous CBS staffer told the L.A. Times: “Maybe he is more Zen when he goes home at night. But he’s a guy who knows what he wants, and he wants it done the way he wants it.”
Given all that, it shouldn’t be surprising that Licht — the incoming CEO of CNN — was brutally swift in murdering CNN+, the streaming service that was supposed to be the network’s passport from cable bundles to cord-cutters. As CNBC’s Alex Sherman reported, CNN+ will shut down on April 30, barely a month after its launch on March 29. (CNN, grimly, matched the story almost immediately.)
It’s an embarrassing flop — it couldn’t even attract 10,000 viewers a day — not to mention a case of spectacular mismanagement by CNN. But it’s almost certainly the correct move for CNN’s streaming future.
It’d be one thing if the decision to pull the plug was based solely on CNN+’s underperformance over its first few weeks.
It reportedly has 150,000 paying subscribers; at the $3/month bargain rate they’re nearly all paying, that’s less than $500,000 a month in subscriber revenue, or $6 million a year. Considering the network hired “hundreds…