Apple News Loses CNN (For Now?)
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In a rare upheaval for the service, Apple News has just lost one of its most prominent news sources. Over the weekend, CNN pulled all of its content from Apple News, marking the first time a major publisher has left the service in over five years.
While this means you won’t find any CNN coverage on Apple News today — even if you’re a News+ subscriber — there’s still hope for its return. According to Semafor, which was first to break the news, the publisher’s move is likely more of a negotiating tactic than anything else.
“The two companies are continuing to discuss a new deal that would restore CNN’s stories to Apple News,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported. Apple hasn’t responded to a request for comment, and CNN declined to comment.
CNN’s departure — temporary or not — follows a 2020 move by The New York Times. However, that one wasn’t simply a matter of the publisher trying to cut a better deal. The newspaper’s brass had long believed that Apple News — and news aggregators in general — were a bad fit for its business model.
While The New York Times had been on Apple News from nearly the beginning, Apple’s introduction of the paid News+ tier in 2019 seemingly created a pain point with then-Times CEO Mark Thompson, who spoke out vocally against it — and warned other publishers to stay away from it — believing it would dilute their brand and keep customers off-platform.
We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else. We’re also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of Magimix (blender) with everyone else’s journalism.
Mark Thompson, President and CEO, The New York Times, in 2020
So, it wasn’t a big surprise when The New York Times announced a year later that it was pulling the plug on its Apple partnership.
A Sense of Déjà Vu
However, this story has another twist — and the irony is palpable. The man calling the shots at CNN today is none other than Mark Thompson — the same executive who famously pulled the Gray Lady from Apple News in 2020. Thompson took over as CEO of CNN in 2023, and given his previous position, it’s unlikely his skepticism toward Apple’s walled garden has softened.
The Times was never entirely alone in its take; others in the news publishing industry have also been leery of Apple News+, but most seem to feel they’re better off hedging their bets, and few have the necessary cachet to successfully chart their own courses.
Still, not everyone takes a cynical view of news aggregators, and other publications that certainly could go it alone, like The Wall Street Journal, have not only remained on the platform, but have eagerly embraced the paid tier, letting News+ subscribers behind their paywall, at least in a limited fashion.
The list of others joining that club remains fairly small — The Los Angeles Times and The Toronto Star were the only other partners at launch, and they’ve since been joined by several other prominent names, including Canada’s The Globe and Mail, the UK’s The Times, and the English-language version of France’s Le Monde. One of the most conspicuous early holdouts, The Washington Post, also signed on this past September.
Prior to Thompson’s arrival, CNN had always been a cooperative partner, happy to be a part of Apple’s grand vision for news. Even in the early days of Apple’s paid tier, when publishers were strongly divided, we never saw any pushback from the network.
However, those easygoing days may be over. With Thompson at the helm — and a new digital subscription service to protect — CNN is likely far less interested in letting stories be aggregated on Apple News out of the goodness of its corporate heart.
While there’s likely already been some money flowing in CNN’s direction over the years for the privilege of featuring its content on Apple News, the stakes are higher since the network launched its own digital subscription service last month, putting some of its online content behind a paywall. That’s undoubtedly led to some conversations with the tech giant about what Apple News users get access to, and possibly even whether CNN — or parts of it — should be part of Apple News+.
There’s no word from insiders on where this deal is at or how it’s progressing, but it’s likely just a matter of the two companies coming to terms on a few sticking points, as it’s hard to imagine Apple letting CNN go without a fight.
