Targeting the Audience Abroad

CNN PRESIDENT TOM JOHNSON'S top priority has been to strengthen the network's overseas channel. Currently, CNN International is a mix of domestic CNN, Headline News (its news-radio-like companion service) and 3 1/2 hours a day of original fare aimed at the audience abroad. The channel broadcast most of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings but presented only half-hour daily summations of the Smith rape trial. Many overseas viewers, though glued to CNN during major events, find its day-to-day programming parochial and its international coverage thin. Viewers in some parts of Asia have been turning instead to the BBC's new 24-hour news channel.

Partly in response to that competitive threat, Johnson has speeded up efforts to improve CNN's international reporting and programming. Bureaus in Amman, Rio de Janeiro and New Delhi have just been opened; another, in Bangkok, will be in operation by March, giving CNN a total of 16 foreign bureaus, along with eight bureaus in the U.S. Two more hours of original programming will be added to CNN International's daily schedule by mid-1992. In addition, a growing amount of CNN's domestic fare (like World Report, a collection of stories by foreign broadcasters) seems geared as much to the ^ international audience as to the domestic one. Viewers and advertisers are responding: this year CNN International will turn its first profit.