CNN Bets Big on Chris Cillizza


Courtesy CNN

Courtesy CNN

CNN announced on Wednesday the formation of The Point with Chris Cillizza, a new multiplatform brand. As expected from the title, Cillizza will be the major star of the brand with daily columns, on-air appearances, an evening newsletter (also titled The Point), a podcast, daily news briefings, and trivia nights. The daily news briefings will be available as a podcast and through Amazon Echo Flash Briefings and Google Home.

Cillizza joined CNN from the Washington Post where he founded and ran the blog, The Fix. The Fix eventually grew to support several writers under its header. The blog has continued to operate even after Cillizza’s departure. The Point is effectively The Fix but at CNN. The trivia nights were an element of The Fix and are now being continued at CNN.

The newsletter comes out on weeknights and is co-written by Saba Hamedy. The newsletter replaced the Nightcap newsletter that CNN debuted a few years ago. The first newsletter came out Wednesday night and featured a top story, reports and analysis from CNN correspondents like Phil Mattingly, and closed with Your Daily Biden (a gif of former Vice President Joe Biden lifting weights).

Viewing The Point as a continuation of The Fix also helps explain and understand why CNN formed a multiplatform brand effectively around one person. Cillizza has experience having done this before, so it was not groundbreaking for CNN to do it for Cillizza when the Washington Post had already done it themselves. When pressing why CNN was doing this for Cillizza, a CNN spokesperson said that because of the high number of elements involved, it was logical to unify them under one name. When asked why Cillizza, the spokesperson countered that CNN has had brands based around news personalities before, like Hambycast (Peter Hamby), Being Moody (Chris Moody), and Maeve West (Maeve Reston). However, those were mainly digital video series with that one component, different from what The Point is.


About Tyler

Tyler is the chief media reporter for TKNN, with the news organization since its founding in November of 2010. He has previously served as chief political reporter and chief political anchor for TKNN.

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