CNN president Jeff Zucker spoke at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference today.
A good chunk of the conversation (you can see the entire transcript here) was about topics we have covered, but Zucker did reveal that he believes CNN’s future is digital, not analog.
To that end, Zucker says they expect to add a number of “digital correspondents” in the coming months. Kelly Wallace was just the first of many.
You know, if you go back to the Boston bombings, more people learned about what happened in Boston from CNN than any other source in the world. And that’s because they watched it on CNN. They watched it on CNN International around the world, and they accessed it through CNN.com or CNN Mobile or any of our digital assets.
And I think that really is the future of CNN is we’re not going to care what screen you’re watching CNN on, as long as there’s a CNN red logo on whatever asset you’re accessing. And to us, mobile is probably the most important part of our future, but digital as a whole is where we’re concentrating everything.
We are integrating digital and our newsgathering efforts to make it one, as it should be. I mean, these organizations grew up separately and there was CNN that — you, obviously, have been through this as well.
It’s going to be digital first for CNN going forward. And that is as important a part of our strategy as anything.