CNN, the Cable News Network that began in 1980 as Ted Turner's dream of a 24-hour hard-news television network and came of age in the Persian Gulf War, is finding itself in a midlife crisis.

CNN's ratings were off about 25 percent for the first three months of 1994; its revenue for the same period fell about 7.5 percent.By the end of May, CNN's average daily rating was five-tenths of a ratings point (off two-tenths of a point for the same period last year). With CNN in 67.2 million homes, that works out to an average audience of 336,220 homes.

Why did all the viewers leave?

"There was a slow news environment this year," said CNN publicist Howard Polskin. "When we look at '93, we had the World Trade Center bombing, the blizzard of '93, the holdout in Waco and President Clinton's inauguration.

"The second reason is channel repositioning," he said. "Because of cable re-regulation, almost half of CNN subscribers have had CNN moved on their lineups over the past 13 months or so."

That makes CNN harder to find for people who don't regularly tune in, he said.

"And it's no secret that it's a more competitive news environment out there," he added.

CNN, CNN International and Headline News constitute Turner Broadcasting System's news division. CNN is generally thought to generate 70 percent of TBS' $250 million to $400 million annual operating profit.

On June 9, CNN President Tom Johnson named two of his top manager-producers, Executive Vice President V.R. "Bob" Furnad and Senior Vice President and business anchorman Lou Dobbs, to lead CNN's new programming development.

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Madison Avenue and Wall Street have taken the ratings slump in stride.

Media buyer Bill Koenigsburg said CNN's commercial time sales always have been "pricey and aggressive, but there's no doubt that they have to be realistic and come down in price."

Low ratings don't mean that much in the cable buy, said Jerry Dominus of the J. Walter Thompson agency: "Since cable is generally bought as a medium of audience accumulation, not a medium of broad reach, it's not a fatal illness."

Dominus, the agency's director of national broadcasting, said CNN has suffered from the onset of new channels, new regulations and other changes in the cable environment that have pushed CNN to new channel locations.

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