CNN’s many channels and sites net roughly $600 million in annual profits, through advertising revenue and subscriber fees. But the channel is leaving ad dollars on the table, as one executive put it, because its prime-time ratings are lagging, and it is putting future fee increases at risk by appearing irrelevant in the eyes of some cable subscribers.

One problem dates back to CNN’s creation in 1980: when there is a lack of news, there is a lack of viewers. Kiran Chetry, a CNN morning anchor from 2007 to 2011, said her time there was like being on a news treadmill: “We were running, sweating, doing the work, but never getting anywhere ratings-wise,” she said. This stemmed, she said, from uncertainty about “what we were, who our audience was and how we best served them.”

As Fox News and, later, MSNBC put on confrontational political programs with partisan points of view, CNN sold itself as proudly nonpartisan, but it fell from first to second to third place in the cable news wars along the way. This should have been an “up” year for the channel, thanks to the presidential election; but through mid-November the channel had drawn 412,000 viewers at any given time, down 16 percent from the previous 12 months.

The dwindling ratings have given rise to a popular sport: prescribing solutions for CNN. With news headlines now always a click away, what should the original cable news channel become? Among the unsolicited proposals: that CNN’s channel in the United States act more like its harder-news sister CNN International; that it add more reality shows; or that it apply a filter to the news like those from Jon Stewart or the “Newsroom” character Will McAvoy.

“They don’t want to be Fox and they don’t want to be MSNBC. Fine. But ‘neither nor’ is not an identity,” said the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. “It can’t tell you what talent to hire, or what programs to try. They keep circling around the answer: declare jihad on the talking points and make that your identity, along with on-air fact-checking.”

Tom Johnson, the chief of CNN in the 1990s, said he would like to see “a leader who will position CNN as The New York Times of television news — not The New York Post or The National Enquirer. Do not attempt to outfox Fox.” Mr. Johnson suggested an emphasis on investigative and enterprise journalism.