As first reported last year by Puck’s Dylan Byers and then confirmed last week in detail by former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, CNN pulled the trigger Thursday on massive layoffs — to the tune of roughly 200 people — at the once proud network-turned-Resistance-hive-turned-ratings gadfly.
CNN boss Mark Thompson announced the six-percent workforce cut would be accompanied by a massive expansion on its digital side (so, CNN.com) and huge changes to its TV schedule starting in March. They include Wolf Blitzer taking The Situation Room to mid-mornings Eastern time and team with Pamela Brown.
Unfortunately for carnival barker Jim Acosta, his role at the network is in serious limbo and could reportedly end up at midnight Eastern (if he doesn’t quit outright).
Darcy reported last week that Thompson had floated the notion of having Acosta keep his job, but be banished to midnight to 2:00 a.m. Eastern, which one could argue is the TV equivalent of Point Nemo. The New York Times made no mention of that possible midnight assignment and instead “[t]he network is in talks with Mr. Acosta about another role.”
Acosta closed 10:00 a.m. Eastern CNN Newsroom the day after said call from Thompson with this showboating tomfoolery and, on Thursday, he implicitly acknowledged the hubbub:
.@Acosta “Still reporting from Washington”And we are grateful pic.twitter.com/0kHOLDPmmK
— Jeff Storobinsky (@jeffstorobinsky) January 23, 2025
Thompson confirmed other minor changes, such as Kasie Hunt finally getting a 4:00 p.m. Eastern show (that she will hope exists for more roughly 20 days) and thus pumping Jake Tapper’s The Lead an hour later.
In Hunt’s place at CNN This Morning, Darcy’s scoop was again (sadly) proven right as it’ll be split between CNN International host Rahel Solomon and then former NPR host Audie Cornish.
All told, Thompson insisted in a staff memo that the changes would deliver “energy and competitive edge.” He better hope that doesn’t include any further defamation suits, like the one CNN lost last Friday (and covered extensively since June by our Nick Fondacaro).
Thompson — who came to CNN in October 2023 after a career at the BBC and The New York Times — told The Times that he believes “[t]his is a moment where the digital story feels like an existential question” and not pouring resources into that would bode ill for CNN’s “future prospects” and it’s ability to remain “an indispensable way in which many, many millions of people get their news.”
Concerning the Web side’s expansion (which began in October with a paywall), The Times also said Thompson will look to “hire 100…people in the first half of the year” and, hilariously enough “a new streaming service, similar to its TV product, that it will charge for.”
CNN better hope it, unlike CNN+, lasts longer than New Coke or the Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock marriage, and that these millions of dollars aren’t flushed down the drain.
The Times helped him try to put on an optimistic spin (click “expand”):
The changes to the TV side of the business could be a blow to the newsroom’s morale during an uncertain time in the news industry. But in many ways, the challenge in front of Mr. Thompson, 67, is similar to what he faced at his two previous jobs, as chief executive of The New York Times and as director general of the BBC. At both of those stops, major sources of traditional revenue were in long-term decline.
The traditional cable TV business remains CNN’s main revenue driver, but the network has been stuck in last place in the ratings among its main competitors, behind MSNBC and Fox News, the longtime leader. Its prime time ratings have plummeted since the election, and its digital audience has also shrunk.
In December, the network saw its lowest period of web traffic in two years, according to analytics firm Comscore, with 90.5 million unique visits, down from a high point of 175.5 million in March 2020, during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNN said that other news sites have experienced similar declines, adding that CNN.com was the top news site in terms of total audience last year.)
During a town-hall meeting with staff in the network’s Hudson Yards headquarters this month, Mr. Thompson presented a series of slides that underscored the necessity of CNN’s digital pivot, flagging its underperforming advertising business and the lack of energy on its website.
(….)
One of those priorities has been vertical videos, which have become important to media organizations because they can be viewed easily on mobile phones.
CNN has begun increasing the number of vertical videos and eventually plans to publish 50 to 100 of these videos per day.
