CNN’s Jeff Zucker: "Twitter Is A Frenemy"

Years ago, CNN became a household name with its 24-hour coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf and Operation Desert Storm. Never before had viewers been literally bombarded with nonstop news coverage. The formula glued them to television sets and cemented the Ted Turner-founded company as a media giant.

Fast forward to 2013 and things are less stable, writes Adam Popescu for mashable.com.

Besides plummeting ratings and competition from the MSNBCs and Fox News's of the world, CNN is going toe-to-toe with social media. And "the most trusted name in news" is starting to get cold feet when it stares into the eyes of its young opponent.

"Twitter is a frenemy," Jeff Zucker, CNN's president said last week at a luncheon at the Atlanta Press Club.

Jeff Zucker

Zucker, who joined the network in January, has made a host of changes and shakeups, taking over after some embarrassing moments in 2012, including faulty reporting on a major Supreme Court ruling. But his tenure, which has already featured countless hours of milking the Carnival cruise disaster and errors in last week's Boston tragedy, have brought to the surface some of the problems with the network.

Much of that criticism has been directed at John King, but the main issue is that CNN failed to follow the story as quickly as its new rival: social media, particularly, Twitter.

While errors in journalism are akin to bankers mishandling your money, in this new age of social media-propelled news, this latest mistake underscores the heightened appetite of consumers for immediacy as well as the issue old-fashioned news networks like CNN face. Not too long ago, news addicts turned to CNN for the latest. Those days are gone. Last week, key moments in the Boston saga played out on Twitter, not mainstream television. This shift is causing some to call Twitter the new CNN.

That's why “the network uses, relies on, and is scared by, social media,” Zucker said last week.

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On Monday at the Atlanta Press Club luncheon with Zucker, Rodney Ho of aj.com, had an opportunity asked one single question during the Q&A. He decided to ask him what he thought of critiques of CNN's February Carnival cruise ship coverage, which some perceived to be over the top.

His response: 

"What's interesting now is it gets referred as we received a lot of flak without recognition that it was from our competitors. Just because Jon Stewart makes fun of it doesn't mean it's right. He's a competitor. Others who sought to dismiss it missed the point... It was a human drama." He credited the vice president of newsgathering for CNN domestic Terence Burke to "be able to get us the resources, to be able to cover it ahead of everybody else. They were jealous they weren't able to do it."

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