The Rise and Fall of CNET Networks: Corporate Greed, Scandal, and the Age of AI Journalism

Author Note: I worked at CNET Networks as a senior software engineer from 2003 until 2012 during the CNET and CBS eras. Then again during the Red Ventures years of 2022 and 2023. This piece reflects my firsthand experience of CNET’s golden era, and its eventual downfall.

A Cautionary Tale

The story of CNET isn’t just about one company. It’s about what happens when workers’ voices get drowned out first by corporate mandates and later by machines. At its peak, CNET was more than a brand. It was a community of writers, editors, engineers, and designers who believed that explaining technology was a kind of public service. Over time, that mission was chipped away by shareholder pressure, short-term thinking, and ultimately automation.

The rise and fall of CNET mirrors a larger pattern across tech and media: people doing meaningful work are slowly replaced, their judgment overridden by executives chasing quarterly numbers and algorithms chasing clicks. This story isn’t just history; it’s a warning about where we are headed if workers don’t fight to be heard.

The Birth of CNET Networks

In the mid-1990s, before the internet was whatever it’s turned into today, before everyone was chronically online, before “content” became a euphemism for click and rage bait, there was CNET. 

Founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, CNET (short for Computer Network) wasn’t just another tech publication. It was built with the kind of earnest vision that feels almost alien now: to help regular people understand the new and ever-changing world of technology.

By the late 1990s, CNET was airing tech shows on cable, building a real web presence, and explaining the fast-moving digital world like it actually mattered… because it did.

Tech journalism back then wasn’t built to sell. It wasn’t gaming SEO or squeezing ad impressions. It was built to make sense of a changing world and for a long time it didn’t just survive, it thrived.

The Defining Voice of Tech Journalism

Through the late ’90s and into the 2000s, CNET became the default voice of tech news and product reviews. If you wanted to know whether that $2,000 Gateway tower (yes, I had one. I’m old, stop laughing) was worth it, or whether this new thing called “MP3” was going to change how you listened to music, you didn’t go to Best Buy. You went to CNET.

The site’s reviews weren’t just filler like many sites today; they were rigorous. Objective, yet human. They weren’t trying to game Google’s algorithm, they were trying to speak directly to the reader. And while other publications danced around conflicts of interest or let advertisers influence tone, CNET’s walls (at least back then) were solid. Church and state stayed separate. The tech world respected it. Consumers trusted it. It’s what made them such a success in the early days.

This was a time before SEO was king. Before the editorial team had to sit in meetings about “brand alignment” or AI writing tools. Writers were… well, writers. Some were former engineers. Some were reporters with newsroom grit. Some were just nerds who loved technology and gave a damn. And that gave the place a soul.

What Made CNET Different

CNET had its own unique voice. Not in the “snark-for-clicks” style that would later infect tech blogging, but in the sense that the site spoke like a person who knew what they were talking about. 

Reviews read like advice from a trusted friend or family member who actually tested the thing themselves, not like the AI-generated sludge we often get now that’s rewritten from press releases or “scraped” from Amazon listings.

Perhaps more importantly, CNET had depth. Articles weren’t clickbait back then. If something took 2,000 words to explain, so be it. There was an editorial culture of getting it right, not just first. That trust, built over years, gave CNET the kind of brand power that couldn’t be bought or manufactured. Readers stuck around. So did a lot of the writers. So did a lot of the engineers, myself included. 

Like many others, it was a home for me. A place where I felt I belonged. A place where it felt like we were doing something that mattered.

That feeling is something that is sorely missing from tech companies today.

There was an ethos to the place, a sense that tech journalism was a public service, not an infinite growth engine. 

And while CNET wasn’t perfect, it was principled in ways that mattered. Especially today as so many sites are little more than affiliate link farms first, journalism a distant second.

Inside the Golden Era

When I joined CNET in 2003, it wasn't at the headquarters in San Francisco but in Louisville, Kentucky. CNET had recently bought a small startup based there called TechRepublic. TR, as most called it, was similar to CNET but catered more toward IT professionals rather than general tech and reviews for the masses. During my time there, I got to work on dev teams that supported TR, CNET, ZDNet, and a startup site called BNET.

I moved to Louisville from Nashville that spring. I had no idea what I was about to walk into. Even less about how much it would shape me as an engineer and, maybe more importantly, as a person.

The CNET Louisville office during its prime wasn’t just a place where we built websites and deployed code, it had its own pulse. Sometimes, its own weather patterns, literally.

Every spring, the creek behind the office would flood, turning the parking lot into a water hazard and occasionally finding its way through the basement doors. More than once we joked that the building needed a lifeboat policy. 

The floods weren’t the only regulars, a gang of resident geese made that parking lot their territory. They strutted around like they owned the place, hissing at employees, chasing them to their cars, and more than once blocking an entire row of parking spaces like a honking picket line.

It was weird. It was ours.

That kind of unpolished, real-life texture bled into everything. There was a time when a handful of the younger hires decided to give each other Mohawks, right there on the front lawn of the office one afternoon. Someone brought out clippers. No one stopped them. That sort of spontaneous chaos wasn’t just tolerated, it felt like part of the place. A goofy, semi-feral brand of team bonding.

And then there were the tools and systems. We favored open-source tools. We used Bugzilla (from Mozilla), and we had an early and primitive (by today’s standards) internal CI tool called the Goose Build, which was probably named before anyone realized it would be confused with the territorial birds outside. 

The internal software systems we built had names so strange and specific that only those who were there would remember them. Medusa, our in-house A/B testing tool, sounded terrifying but was just another part of the daily grind. Quirky names, duct-taped pipelines, and yet, we got stuff done.

We shipped products. We rolled out redesigns, too many redesigns, honestly. There were times when the whole dev team had UI refresh fatigue. It felt like every spring brought a new coat of paint, another co-lo move, another set of meetings about how wide the gutter area of the page would be, or another way to squeeze more pixels above the fold.

But through it all, there was this feeling, a real, tangible sense that we were doing something that mattered. That our work helped people. That tech journalism still had a soul. 

Sure, we cracked “that’s what she said” jokes around the office constantly and ran fantasy football leagues like they were startup incubators, but we also believed in what we were building.

We weren’t just engineers, product owners, or writers. We were part of something that, for a while, had a clear purpose.

This wasn’t corporate tech media in the modern sense. There were no daily meetings about “brand alignment.” No discussions about how to trick Google into boosting our SEO score (that would come soon enough though). No AI-written summaries or affiliate link-heavy articles with no substance. We wrote code in Java on Linux. We pushed pixels. We collaborated, laughed, argued, and shipped it.

It was messy. It was human. And it was good.

The CBS Era: A Shifting Culture

By 2007, CNET Networks was still a heavyweight in tech media: profitable, influential, independent. But independence comes with risk. 

The company’s stock had taken a dip, its growth wasn’t what Wall Street wanted to see, and that was all the invitation activist investors needed. 

Hedge funds started circling, eyeing CNET not as a legacy brand worth nurturing, but as an underperforming asset ripe for gutting. 

The loudest of them was Jana Partners, a firm that acquired a sizable stake and pushed aggressively for board seats and cost-cutting.

It wasn’t subtle. Inside the company, you could feel the pressure mounting. The leadership had two options: get eaten alive in a hostile takeover or find a suitor that wouldn’t immediately strip the place for parts. That suitor turned out to be the CBS Corporation.

In May 2008, CBS announced it was acquiring CNET Networks for $1.8 billion. On paper, it made sense.

CBS wanted a digital foothold. CNET wanted a lifeline that wouldn’t involve being disassembled. To the public, it looked like a smart move. And so, CBS Interactive was born.

How We Found Out

I still remember the moment I found out about the sale. It was a Monday morning at the Louisville office. I walked in after a quiet weekend and noticed a few coworkers standing around together, talking quietly. One of them turned to the group and said, “Don’t tell him. Let’s see his reaction when he reads the email.”

Expecting the worst, I sat down at my desk, opened my inbox, and there it was:

“CNET Networks has been acquired by the CBS Corporation”

I read it once. Then again. Not because I didn’t understand, but because I did. I knew, deep down, that everything was about to change and I had mixed feelings about it. 

I knew that we could stop worrying about hostile takeovers. And that being backed by a huge media company with deep pockets would be beneficial. But, what worried me was how CBS, an old-school corporation, was going to mix with a Silicon Valley-style internet media company.

Optimism Gives Way

At first, not much changed. If anything, the CBS years began with a sense of optimism. We had more money, more visibility, access to the resources of a major media company. The idea of being backed by a “real” network felt legitimizing, even exciting… for a while.

But something else came with that deal. A subtle shift over the first few years. The language changed. So did the expectations. Editorial independence started to feel less sacred. Reviews were still honest, but the pressure to meet corporate goals was front and center. 

The first real layoffs happened around this time.

Historically, CNET didn’t let many people go. As unheard of as it is today, CNET felt very worker-friendly. If budget became a problem, their first choice was to find another place for the person or team to go instead of just laying them off. Can you imagine that happening today? Me either.

Now, as things were changing, I watched leadership pit teams against each other, a Silicon Valley-style Hunger Games, to see who got to keep their jobs. 

There was one VP, who will remain nameless, who we nicknamed “The Hatchet Man” because if he showed up at your office, especially if unexpected, it was bad news.

On one occasion, my dev team was pitted against a San Francisco team to see who could build the best new website to serve dynamic article content. Although it was never said out loud, it was clear that the Louisville team was under scrutiny and The Hatchet Man was looking to cut costs. We managed to survive that test.

Non-technical positions such as Community Manager and Product Owner got cut. I watched many friends get the news and leave the same day. Most, I never got to say goodbye to. Many I would never see again.

Eventually, only the engineers and engineering managers remained in Louisville. Along with a few editorial staff. 

It wasn’t a cliff, more like the beginning of a long, slow hill. We were still doing good work. There were still brilliant people on staff in both Louisville and San Francisco. But the old Silicon Valley culture, the one rooted in idealism and independence, had taken its first hit.

And we hadn’t seen anything yet.

The Dish Hopper Scandal

The CBS acquisition wasn’t the end of CNET’s independence, but it was the beginning of the end. 

At first, the company line was that nothing would change. But when your new parent is a publicly traded media giant with its own priorities, something always changes.

The first big public sign came in 2013, and it was ugly.

CNET’s editorial team had chosen Dish Network’s Hopper DVR as a Best of CES winner, on merit. The device was genuinely innovative. But Dish and CBS were in the middle of a nasty legal fight over ad-skipping features. CBS didn’t like what it saw. Quietly but forcefully, it pressured CNET to revoke the award.

And CNET did.

The team, rightfully outraged, wasn’t allowed to talk about it at the time. When the news broke, it was clear that a line had been crossed. CBS had interfered with editorial decisions for corporate gain, plain and simple. It was a textbook breach of the firewall that had once made CNET great. It didn’t just cost credibility, it cost morale.

There’s a reason most people don’t remember who did win Best of CES that year. But they remember who should have: Dish. That moment became a black eye for the brand. The old culture had taken a hit that wouldn’t heal.

After that, things started to drift. Slowly. Quietly. But undeniably.

From Bad To Worse

CBS had bigger problems than just wrangling a once-independent tech brand.

By the late 2010s, CBS was flailing. Linear TV viewership was collapsing. CBS All Access (now Paramount+) hadn’t taken off yet. Its corporate image was battered by scandal, including the high-profile ousting of CEO Les Moonves, and Wall Street wasn’t thrilled with how the old-school broadcaster was trying (and failing) to compete in a Netflix world.

To investors, CNET wasn’t a core asset anymore. It was ballast. And with ad revenues softening and no strategic plan to integrate it into CBS’s streaming-first future, the company started looking for buyers. Quietly at first. Then openly.

In 2020, just as the pandemic upended the world, CBS merged with Viacom, forming ViacomCBS, a Frankenstein’s monster of legacy media brands now scrambling to “focus on streaming.” CNET, like many digital properties, was seen as non-essential, a holdover from a different era.

And so in 2020, a sale was made.

The Fall Begins: CBS to Red Ventures

When CBS sold CNET to Red Ventures, Red Ventures was known more for its performance marketing chops than its journalism pedigree. The $500 million deal raised a lot of eyebrows, and for good reason: Red Ventures didn’t buy CNET for its newsroom, it bought it for its SEO traffic, its domain authority, and its ability to convert clicks into cash.

For longtime observers, this felt like a final pivot, not just away from CNET’s roots, but away from tech journalism entirely.

I returned to Red Ventures/CNET in 2022 after nearly a decade away. I didn’t know what to expect. But what I found surprised me. The vibe, at least for a little while, felt like the old CNET that I remembered.

There was energy again. Real collaboration. Teams felt tight. The developers cared about the quality of the product. You could join Zoom meetings and feel the spark, the belief that we could build something meaningful. For the first time in a long time, it felt like we had a shot at bringing CNET back to something great.

But the honeymoon didn’t last.

What started as a rebirth, for both me and CNET, quickly became a slow-motion train wreck. 

Red Ventures had a different vision, one that revolved around affiliate marketing, SEO funnel optimization, and conversion metrics. You could feel the capitalist rot setting in.

Decisions weren’t made by journalists or engineers. They were made by revenue analysts and marketing strategists. Stories were rewritten, headlines were A/B tested into oblivion, and editorial direction began bending toward what Google’s algorithm would favor, not what readers needed.

Then came the first small waves of layoffs to cut costs.

One of my good friends, a person that I had worked with and had known for 20 years, sent me a Slack message about a month after I started at Red Ventures: 

“There’s a layoff happening, I just got let go.”

The AI Scandal

After the small layoffs had died down and everyone was starting to feel less uneasy, another scandal broke.

The Verge, among other websites, began posting stories that said in late 2022 Red Ventures had published articles on CNET properties (mainly in finance) that were written using AI without citing it as AI-generated. Instead, Red Ventures published these articles under the byline of “CNET Money Staff.”

To make matters worse, these articles clearly had no proofreading or fact-checking. Many of them contained incorrect information and were plagiarized.

In the following weeks, Wikipedia downgraded CNET’s reputation from “generally reliable” to “generally unreliable,” starting from November 2022.

Hearing all of this felt like a gut punch. Deep down, I knew what was going to happen, but I didn’t want to believe it.

More Layoffs and Unionizing

In early 2023, Red Ventures gutted the remaining CNET staff. It was so massive that around 10% of the workforce was cut. Veterans with decades of experience were let go overnight. Entire teams vanished, mine included. 

For many of us, it was déjà vu, only this time, there was no pretense about values or vision. The cuts were directly related to the AI scandal, costs, and to lean out CNET for another sale (this time to Ziff Davis later in the year). 

But even in the wreckage, something sparked. Soon after the layoffs, around May 2023, about 100 of the remaining CNET staffers announced they were unionizing under the Writers Guild of America East. 

Writers, editors, video producers, many of them long-tenured, stood up to demand transparency, fair pay, and most critically, editorial independence. 

At the heart of it was a fear that had been building for months: that automation and AI weren’t just tools, but Trojan horses. That journalism was being replaced by AI-generated content. That the soul of CNET: trusted, human, principled, was being hollowed out and filled with algorithmic sludge for as much cash as they could extract.

The union drive didn’t come from nowhere. It was a reaction to a clear betrayal of values. These were people who cared, who had watched a beloved institution get reduced to a hollow shell of its former self. The layoffs had lit the fuse. The union was the fight to preserve whatever was left.

But the truth is, content creators shouldn’t be the only ones standing up. AI is already eating into core tech jobs (coding, QA, design, support) and no role is safe from the fallout. Tech needs to unionize before it’s too late, if we ever want to fix what’s broken and protect ourselves against a future of near-certain AI job cuts.

What We Lost

CNET mattered. Not because it was perfect, but because it stood for something. It was one of the first major efforts to make technology understandable, accessible, and human. It was a place where journalism met curiosity, where engineers and editors collaborated, and where the original goal wasn’t clicks, but clarity.

We lost more than a brand when CNET became what it is today. We lost a rare example of editorial integrity in tech media. We lost a space where experts wrote with authority, not keyword-stuffed fluff. We lost a community of smart, passionate people who genuinely gave a damn. And in its place, we got something hollow.

The rise of AI-generated journalism only deepens the wound. What once reflected real reporting and real insight is now stitched together by algorithms, corporate cost-cutting dressed up as progress. It’s bad for workers, who are laid off in favor of machines. It’s bad for readers, who are misled by confidently wrong information. And it’s bad for society, which needs real journalism to hold power accountable and make sense of complex issues.

CNET wasn’t just another tech site. It was a cornerstone of the early internet, a trusted voice when we needed one. Its rise mattered. So does its fall.

This story isn’t just about CNET Networks. It’s about every newsroom, every dev shop, every job slowly being eaten by algorithmic cost-cutting. We deserve better. And the only way we’ll get it is if workers stand together and demand it.

-Bryan

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