People who want to see what Brian Stelter has planned for CNN’s “Reliable Sources” media newsletter won’t have to wait as long as they might think.
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Starting Monday, “RS” will publish each weekday morning, Monday through Friday, and the next edition — the first to be issued since Stelter returned to CNN last week after a two-year absence — could post as soon as 30 minutes after the article you are reading right now sees the light of day.
The A.M. posting and the new five-days-a-week schedule -– “Reliable Sources” had most recently been published evenings Monday through Thursday — are “experimental, in beta mode,” says Stelter, during a brief conversation Sunday evening, while he worked on the newsletter and prepared his kids to get ready for bed. “I also think there’s a space to be a little more forward looking to the day ahead,” he adds, noting that the “new iteration” of the newsletter “is going to be shorter. It’s going to be sharper.”
Stelter, 39 years old, returns to “Reliable Sources” and CNN at a heady moment. There’s a presidential election looming. Traditional media outlets ranging from Paramount Global to CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery are in disarray as they grapple with the rapid migration of their audiences from linear TV to streaming video. And the economics of the journalism “RS” examines are less certain than ever.
What’s more, there is new competition for the “RS” audience. Oliver Darcy, who took the reins of “RS” after Stelter was pushed out by previous CNN chief Chris Licht following a much-scrutinized decade-long run at the news outlet, recently launched his own independent media-news roundup, “Status.” On Sunday evening, that publication led with a Q&A with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who isn’t known for her yen for granting frequent interviews.
So “RS,” once the “Tonight Show” of media newsletters, now has a David Letterman of sorts (albeit one not backed by a mainstream media giant) with which it must joust.
“The more, the merrier,” says Stelter. “’Status’ is new, but I’ve been reading the newsletter and I think ‘RS’ is a great complement to what Oliver is doing.”
The decision to move “RS” to mornings also means that Stelter and a team of CNN journalists devoted to media-industry coverage will have to vie more directly with other newsletters that also analyze the topic. There are sundry Politico Playbooks and a regular morning issue of a media newsletter from journalism non-profit Poynter. Email boxes are already jammed to bursting with morning bombardments from players ranging from Ad Age to Axios. And some audiences have carved out room in their media-on-media diet for missives with less frequency launched by upstarts such as Semafor and Puck.
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“RS” won’t just be confined to morning duty, says Stelter. “We are also going to lower the bar on when we send out special editions,” he says. “There are times when media news breaks and the CNN team really shines. I want us to share that work as soon as it is ready, regardless of the time of day.”
He emphasizes that “RS” will spotlight the work of a broad array of CNN’s journalists. Hadas Gold is CNN’s media correspondent, he says, who will cover many breaking stories while he will have an analyst role, leaving him more free to offer scrutiny and review. And “RS” will also feature the work of CNN personnel including Liam Reilly, Jon Passantino, Donie O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Wagmeister and Clare Duffy.
The re-launch of the newsletter represents a unique moment for both the publication as well as the writer leading it.
Stelter has enjoyed a phenomenal rise, bootstrapping himself onto the scene by starting his own “TV Newser” blog about the ins and outs of boob-tube journalism. After selling the digital publication, he climbed aboard The New York Times, where his facility with social media and prolific reporting helped him gain greater traction.
His move to CNN in 2013 under previous chief Jeff Zucker expanded his profile. Stelter was anchoring the weekly “Reliable Sources” program, one of CNN’s longest-running series. And he took up scrutiny of a host of new topics, including disinformation; media coverage of former President Donald Trump; and , increasingly, the operations of Fox News Channel. By the end of his first tenure at CNN, Stelter was leading the show, the newsletter and a daily program that had been developed for CNN+, a subscription streaming venue that was scrapped after David Zaslav took the reins of a newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery.
Stelter would leave CNN in August of 2022 , after the TV show was cancelled by a regime that felt CNN had gotten too swaggering under Zucker, and was seen as too liberal by Republican audiences that might have otherwise watched the network. Some of their assumptions proved incorrect. Under Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN does seem to have made inroads with some right-leaning newsmakers and sources But it has also in many cases lost more viewers.
The future could offer new opportunities for “Reliable Sources” — and perhaps Stelter as well. Mark Thompson, the CEO who replaced Licht as the head of CNN, has sketched out a future that includes the launch of “verticals,” or digital publications devoted to topics such as wellness that are led by CNN experts. Stelter said he was not privy to any such plans for “RS,” but while his bosses make such determinations, he will have plenty of media coverage to occupy him.
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