‘We Take People All Over The World’

Jessica Dean, anchor for the primetime weekend edition of CNN Newsroom.

CNN

For CNN anchor Jessica Dean, the weekends are anything but quiet. Having just passed the one-year mark as host of the primetime weekend edition of CNN Newsroom, she leads around seven hours of live coverage every Saturday and Sunday — hours that often unfold against the backdrop of history in real time.

Since officially taking the role on August 3 of last year, Dean and her small team have found themselves at the center of some of the most consequential breaking news of the past 12 months. They’ve navigated the chaos of the assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Penn.; reported on the fall of the Assad regime; covered former President Biden’s cancer diagnosis; delivered updates on the Boulder fire attack; and tracked U.S. military strikes on Iran. “You have to think really fast and you have to trust yourself,” Dean says about the work. “And you also have to trust your team.”

That trust comes from years in the field — which, for Dean, has included stints doing local news in Arkansas and Philadelphia, joining CNN in 2018 and covering the midterms that year, traveling with then-candidate Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and reporting through the early Covid pandemic. Dean says her job now feels like the culmination of all those experiences. “People come to CNN when big things happen,” she says. “We take people all over the world… and there’s such value in that — to give them on-the-ground reporting and to help them through those moments.

“Going back to Iran, you know, we had Fred Pleitgen in Iran. We had Clarissa Ward in Israel. We’re able to take people there … It’s tough out there right now for news. It’s a moment for us, I think, where we really need to prove ourselves to viewers and they need to be able to trust us. And, especially on our show, I really try to honor that, and we work really hard to get it right and make sure people, if they’re going to spend their time with us, walk away knowing more and are better informed.”

CNN faces a new era as viewers shift to digital

Dean’s work, needless to say, also comes at a pivotal time for CNN and for cable news in general. The network, founded in 1980 as the first 24-hour television news channel, built its reputation on major live events — from the Gulf War to election nights. Today’s viewers, of course, don’t get their news the same way anymore. People might bounce between live TV and clips on social media — or even no TV at all, preferring to get their news in snackable bites from social media. For CNN, the challenge is holding onto its reputation for real-time, trustworthy coverage while finding new ways to reach an increasingly scattered digital audience.

Dean sees that as an opportunity. “CNN has a lot of exciting things ahead as we transition more into the digital world,” she says. “Right now, you can watch us on linear television, which is amazing. But being able in the next year to kind of expand beyond that is going to be exciting. And one thing I know for sure — there will not be a shortage of news.”

Cable news viewership has been under pressure industry-wide, with competition from on-demand content and shifting demographics. But when a major story breaks, audiences (or at least a portion of news audiences) still turn one or more of the big three — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Dean’s weekend broadcast is often where those first crucial hours play out for CNN. “It’s not my job to tell people what to think,” she says. “It’s my job to give them information and let them decide what makes sense to them.”

The pressure to be accurate, measured, and fast is real. “We don’t want to be alarmist, but we also want to make sure viewers are getting all of the information,” she says. “It’s not my job to tell people what to think. It’s my job to give them information and let them decide what makes sense to them. And I’ve found that people respond really well to that.”

The year ahead will bring continued experimentation for CNN as it looks to integrate more digital-first storytelling without losing its core live-news DNA. Dean, for her part, is focused on her lane. “Those seven, maybe eight, maybe nine hours each weekend — we can do that well. We can get it right.”