Chris Licht Has a Few Ideas About the Future of Media

Chris Licht has had nothing however time since leaving CNN practically a yr and a half in the past.

The veteran information and media govt stated Tuesday that he has been performing some consulting, taking conferences (about 275, to be exact), educating a class at Syracuse College on the future of media, spending time together with his household and attempting to get his pilot’s license. However he additionally appears like he is able to get again into the media enterprise, although in what type stays to be seen.

“Whatever I do next, I don’t want it to be something that isn’t building and forward looking, but no one really knows where things are headed,” Licht stated at the Yahoo Finance Make investments convention in New York Tuesday. “There’s a lot of people working on satiating what is a massive desire to consume content, whether it’s in entertainment or news, and finding ways to do that outside the current legacy system. Eventually, some of these things will bubble up and be either co-opted by the legacy companies, or will just propel past them. But there’s really smart, interesting people that are, I think, going to be the future of where the business goes.”

Whereas Licht is “bullish” about the information and knowledge enterprise general, he additionally acknowledged that the present second is fraught, and that cable information enterprise is more likely to proceed its decline.

“There isn’t a media executive that doesn’t know that there’s a problem. There isn’t a media executive that isn’t actively working on that problem,” Licht stated. “The facts are that people have lost trust in legacy media. That’s not me saying that. That’s a demonstrable fact that has not happened in the last six months … So can legacy media reinvent itself in a way that then can reconnect with people and become relevant in their lives again and become trusted?”

“You can’t exist in a low trust society, which is where we are right now. And I think it’s important to delineate between two things,” he continued. “There is trusted sources of information, and then there’s trusted opinion. And I think those two worlds need to be very separate. And I think part of the problem is they’ve kind of commingled. And you know, media organizations will try very hard to say, no, no, this is our news gathering and this is our opinion. But in the world, people don’t have distinction.”

“We used to have one set of facts, and then you could have 30 discussions around that set of facts,” he added. “Now you have 30 sets of facts and 1,000 discussions around those sets of facts. And that has to change, or we’re in big trouble as a society.”

Actually, Licht argued that in a world the place opinion and reality are more and more intertwined, info might develop into a commodity into themselves.

“Perhaps there becomes like a Bloomberg Terminal for truth?” Licht hypothesized. “That people who operate in the world, whether you’re in finance or government or you operate where you actually have to know what’s happening, that can almost be a wholesale product. I think that’s the direction we’re moving in. If you’re one of these talents that could then take that truth and interpret it for your people that are in your community, that will be the pathway to success.”

And he famous that with a second Trump presidency looming, such a product might develop into much more pressing, although he added that “these are issues that are larger than just a Trump presidency.”

As a substitute, he says “my completely unsolicited and I’m sure annoying advice is swing at the pitches that are thrown.”

“There will be enough things that are going to be controversial, but he and his people know exactly what they’re doing when they try to gin up what one of my former colleagues called ‘outrage porn.’” he continued. “You know, if everything is an 11 and everything is outrageous, then you’re able to kind of slip through some things that actually should create that outrage.”

As for the future of cable information, Licht believes that it’ll survive in some type, although precisely the way it finds its manner into properties stays to be seen.

“I think it’s like the death of radio, right? I think it will absolutely decline, the sub fees will decline, and that’s why you’re seeing cost cutting,” he stated. “I think there’s a floor. I don’t think that one day you’re going to wake up and there is zero cable subscriptions. But there might be different ways to distribute said signal, because at its heart, news is a passive it’s something you have on in the background.”

And requested if he would do issues in another way have been he to take over CNN right this moment, Licht stated “oh yes … that’s really between me and my therapist.”

“In all seriousness, I have spent an enormous amount of time not worrying about the situation I was in. But how could I have handled those situations differently, the things that I could have controlled?” he added. “Remember, I left the greatest job in the world with Stephen Colbert, and I never wanted to get back into news. And I did it because I felt it was a calling, and because I’m a journalist at heart, it’s devastating to me that it didn’t work out.”