CNN’s Local Ambitions

WSJ reports: “In a strategy shift, CNN, known primarily for national and international news, announced a deal that will allow it to offer more local news on its Web site and, it hopes, land a bigger slice of the fast-growing market for local online ads.

The deal, with Internet Broadcasting, a privately held Minneapolis-based company that publishes the Web sites of 70 local TV stations, allows CNN to use local stories from any of those sites, and vice versa. As part of the deal, CNN is also taking a minority equity stake in the company.”

Ofcourse, the local advertising market is huge, and so far, the newspapers have had the best position of leverage. Gannet, Tribune, NYT, all have strong presence, alongside the Internet portal giants, Yahoo and MSN (via MSNBC).

So far, however, in our coverage of Time Warner’s strategy, while we have seen a steady move towards online and digital, the local ambitions seem slightly from the left field!

Not that I mind. Left field is where interesting strategies emerge from, and at this point of the game, experiments like this are precisely what the market demands.