Few cable channels, let alone cable news channels, have the history that CNN does.
The network is synonymous with cable television, and has covered some of the biggest stories in the world over the course of the past 45 years.
And yet, CNN is also the bellwether for not only the cable industry, but the news media as a whole.
Bill Smee, who has worked at CNN — along with time spent at NBC News, Huffington Post, Discovery, The New York Times, and most recently as the Vice President of News for Audacy — is setting out to tell the story of the network. But not just the linear history of CNN, but how it relates to the media industry as a whole.
Smee and his associates are producing a documentary podcast called Breaking the News, a double entendre about the news media industry and the business aspect of the medium in 2025.
“I think what is really compelling is this is a story that seems to have more relevance for each passing week and each passing month,” said Smee. “It is a story about what has happened to journalism and the media industry over a period of now decades that is accelerating. And it is the story of what has happened to truth, quite literally.
“We live in a time when people’s versions of reality are questioned. So how did we get to this moment where we no longer can agree on that? And it is really a story about how CNN’s evolution over time reveals a lot about that.”
Smee wanted to make it clear he and his team don’t believe CNN is the culprit for what can be described as the downturn of legacy media. But the network does hold a complex place in that narrative.
“It’s a story about the corporate side of media and what happens with mergers and consolidation,” he added. “So it’s going to cover a lot of ground. But we feel like the CNN life story, in many ways, is a great object lesson to what has happened to modern media.”
The production of the documentary podcast is still in the early phases. Bookmark Media, who is producing the project, is still in the midst of lining up interviews with high-profile figures, highly influential people in the network’s history, and doing extensive research on some of the largest topics in the network’s history.
Smee said that it’s a passion project to be able to be so retrospective about his time with the network but also where the state of journalism and news media sits in 2025.
“I think a lot of people, as they get on in life and go to work other places, they reflect back on their time at CNN often with fondness,” he shared. “But I would say also examining and looking back on what CNN stood for matters a lot to people. So I think there’s a kind of inherent draw for those of us who are part of the CNN, if you will, fraternity. But for me, what’s compelling is I’ve worked in a lot of different places in this industry, and television and digital and radio, and I’m at a point in my career where I’m sort of looking at our business and seeing what has happened to it, and sort of want to tell a story that I think encapsulates it, tries to explain how we got here, I guess.”
The company is in the midst of a round of fundraising to help the project come to fruition. And that can be a challenge at this junction.
“This is not a great time for serial, narrative podcasts. Period. Full stop,” Smee admitted. “That being said — and this is why we’ve chosen to kind of go there — we’ve established a nonprofit entity we’re working with, and they are allowing us to take in, we’ll call it crowd-sourced donations.
“So we have a strategy to tap into folks who we believe will donate because they care about this cause. And then we have a strategy for hitting up some deeper-pocketed folks on the fundraising side, just that we can get to our goals,” he continued. “We have a plan, a budget, and we also have a fair amount of material already in the can.”
Overall, Smee said he’s looking forward to diving deeper into the juxtaposition of CNN, it’s history, and the media landscape today, and what the future might look like.
“What’s exciting is we feel like the story of CNN and its journey over these 45 years, it really works for our larger narrative on two levels,” he shared. “There’s the question of what’s happened to reporting and news, of how news is consumed. There’s also the question of CNN’s journey through mergers and consolidation in the 90s. That itself is also a really interesting object lesson about the current state of our media.
“And I think with all that you’re reading lately about what’s going on with Paramount and elsewhere, I just feel like those lessons are also pretty ripe. And how Ted (Turner), who started as an independent operator of CNN as part of Turner Broadcasting with great gusto for 15 years, it was then the Time Warner and the AOL, two mergers in a row that sort of really set this on a course. It changed CNN in a lot of ways, and it’s an object lesson for where we are media today.”
Smee added that he hopes Breaking the News is ready to be released at some point in the second half of 2026.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
