Since leaving CNN nearly a year and a half ago, Chris Licht has had nothing but time.
The veteran news media executive spent Tuesday consulting, attending conferences (about 275 to be exact), teaching a class on the future of media at Syracuse University, spending time with his family, and working toward his pilot certification. He said he is doing so. license. But it also sounds like he’s ready to get back into the media business, although it remains to be seen in what form.
“Whatever we do next, we don’t want it to be anything other than constructive and positive, but who knows where things go?” Licht said Tuesday at the Yahoo Finance Investment Conference in New York. I don’t even know,” he said. “A lot of people are trying to satisfy a huge desire to consume content, whether it’s entertainment or news, and they’re finding ways to do that outside of their current legacy systems. The division will either bubble up and be absorbed into legacy companies or just be pushed aside. But there are some really smart and interesting people out there who I think will be the future of the business.”
Although Licht is “bullish” on the news and information business as a whole, he acknowledged that it is currently difficult and that the cable news business is likely to continue to decline.
“There’s no media executive who doesn’t know there’s a problem. There’s no media executive who isn’t actively addressing this problem,” Licht said. “The fact is that people are losing trust in legacy media. That’s not me saying that. This is an obvious fact that hasn’t happened in the last six months… So legacy media is losing trust in people and Can we reinvent ourselves in a way that we can reconnect and become relevant and trusted in people’s lives again?”
“You can’t exist in a society of low trust. That’s the kind of society we’re in right now. And I think it’s important to distinguish between the two,” he continued. “If there are reliable sources, there are also reliable opinions. And I think those two worlds need to be largely separated. I think part of the problem is that they’re mixed. And, you know, news organizations will argue very hard, “No, no, this is our reporting, this is our opinion.” But in the world there is no distinction between people. ”
“Before, if you had one set of facts, you could make 30 arguments based on that set of facts,” he added. “Now we have 30 sets of facts and 1,000 debates about those sets of facts, and that has to change, or we are in big trouble as a society. Masu.”
Indeed, Licht argued that in a world where opinion and fact are increasingly intertwined, facts themselves can become a commodity.
“Perhaps it will be like a Bloomberg Terminal for truth?” Licht hypothesized. “For people who work in finance or government or the world who actually need to know what’s going on, it could almost become a wholesale product. I think that’s the direction we’re going. If you are talented enough to accept that truth and interpret it for the people in your community, that will be your path to success.”
He also noted that such policies could become even more urgent as Trump’s second term looms, but added: “These are bigger issues than just the Trump presidency.” added.
Instead, he says, “The totally unsolicited and definitely unsolicited advice is to swing at the pitches that are thrown to you.”
“There will be a lot of controversy, but he and his cronies are trying to create what one of my former colleagues called ‘outrage porn’. “I know exactly what I’m doing,” he continued. “You know, when everything is 11 and everything is outrageous, you can kind of slip through some of the things that are actually supposed to cause that outrageousness.”
As for the future of cable news, Licht believes it will survive in some form, but exactly how it will penetrate homes remains to be seen.
“I think it’s like the death of radio, right? I think it’s definitely going to go down, and the ancillary fees are going down, so you’re going to see cost savings,” he said. “I think there’s a floor. I don’t think I’m going to wake up one day and have zero cable TV subscriptions. But essentially news is passive, it’s something that’s told in the background. So there may be other ways to deliver that signal.”
And when asked if he would do anything differently if he were to take over CNN today, Licht said, “Oh, yeah…that’s really between me and my therapist.”
“Seriously, I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time not worrying about the situations I’m in. But how can I approach those situations, situations that I could have had control of, in a different way?” Were you able to handle it?” he added. “Remember, I left the greatest job in the world as Stephen Colbert, but I didn’t want to go back to the news industry. And I did it because I felt it was my calling. But I’m a journalist at heart, so it’s shocking to me that it didn’t work out.”
