"We are regionalising our online news content. This will be in line with our television regionalisation strategy," said CNN International senior vice-president Rena Golden.

CNN.com is scouting for partners in India to build local content. A similar exercise is being conducted in other parts of the world.

CNN is also bringing its online and television news room under one roof to encourage interactivity among the reporters. The news room in Hong Kong is being relocated within six months. "We have moved our content from television to the Internet. Now we are building a `two-way' traffic. We will value-add content from the net and put it on the TV channel," Golden said.

CNN announced recently that it would be launching a new channel for South Asia on July 1, 2000. CNN already transmits four separate channels that broadcast to the Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the US. "We have become profitable because of our regionalisation progamme in Europe and Asia. If we had not done that, we would have been in the same boat as the other international news channels," Golden said. CNN adopted the "regionalisation" strategy in September, 1997, and split up the broadcast to tailor some of its programmes to the Asian and European regions. "We find that the Asian audience is too diverse. Which is why we are creating a channel in South Asia region," Golden said.

The new channel will air region-specific programming on prime time before focussing on the morning band. "We have followed that model successfully in other regions where we quickly move to morning programming after starting with prime-time hours," Golden said.