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Time for me to go
Leaving cable network to head up think tank
Walter Isaacson is bright and scholarly, and an able newsman, a mix of qualities not often found in one individual. And in many ways, Isaacson, who yesterday announced his resignation as president of CNN, just a day after Steve Case quit as AOL chairman, serves as a very human metaphor for the collapsed merger that is AOL Time Warner.
Case's resignation brought great sighs of relief in the halls of Time Inc. Isaacson's departure from a company where he had spent most of his career will be felt as a loss.
When he was the editor of Time, Isaacson was the quintessential Timer Inker in a period when the magazine empire seemed at its strongest.
But as with any merger, the best are moved up, so it wasn't long before Isaacson was promoted to head CNN.
It looked like a good idea on paper.
But the fit simply was not there. Isaacson didn't like TV, a foreign medium, nor Atlanta all that much. He missed working with ideas, as he had as Time's editor. TV newsroom are full of people, seldom ideas.
So it makes great sense that Isaacson is leaving CNN to head the Aspen Institute, a think tank, where he will think and write about global issues.
It seems equally fitting that Isaacson's place will be taken by a longtime CNNer, Jim Walton, an insider as Isaacson was an outsider, having started with the company almost at its inception.
Isaacson will be leaving behind a less grand news empire than he inherited less than two years ago. In that time, CNN has ceded first place in cable news to Fox News, in a bitter and very public defeat.
Too, CNN also seems sapped of much of its energy, a news operation by all appearances slapped in too many directions in too few years by executives, like Isaacson, who were brought in to do their magic, only to stumble and be shown the door -- or find it own their own.
Whether Walton or anyone can repair that damage is a looming question but one not answered anytime soon.
Isaacson wooed Paula Zahn and Connie Chung to CNN, but he also refused to get into a grudge match with Fox News Channel. The former scribe wanted to protect the highbrow values he felt CNN embodied. Unfortunately, the public seemed to clamor more for the controversial commentary delivered by FNC.
Regardless of his successes or failures at CNN, no one can argue with the man's intellect. An Ivy-educated Rhodes scholar, Isaacson should fit in just fine at Washington, D.C.-based Aspen, which will still be a commute from his home in New York.
At CNN, Isaacson was regarded for his solid journalistic background but from the first was clearly the outsider with no TV background and no real feel for CNN, as he was to admit.
He was also abrupt with people, insensitive to long-held loyalties and seen to be almost calloused in his handling of the recent layoffs of longtime on-air personalities, such as Garrick Utley.
But what likely drove Isaacson away was the huge pressure he faced as the network continued its slide against Fox.
He had made it clear early on that his commitment to CNN was limited, and when he was approached about the CEO job at Aspen in the fall, it seemed like it was the time to jump. Isaacson told his boss Jamie Kellner last week that he was leaving in the spring.
January 14, 2003© 2003 Media Life
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