CNN’s senior vice president of original series program development, Jon Adler, is exiting the cable news network by the end of the year. The news comes after the media company announced it would be pulling back on original series and documentary content commissioned by outside partners. Adler has been with CNN for a decade and helped launch the CNN’s original programming slate. He was promoted to this role in March, ahead of the debut and eventual discontinuation of CNN+.
Fox Nation Is Thriving Where CNN+ Imploded
Freeplay Music, an online production music library, is seeking $17 million from the cable news giant.
Exclusives
Ana Cabrera, an up-and-coming daytime anchor at CNN, is expected to leave the network and join NBC News, according to three people familiar with the matter — the latest in a series of CNN personnel who have defected to the NBCUniversal news unit.
CNN signaled to its employee base Wednesday that it had begun to cut some staff amid economic headwinds that are affecting its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. CNN CEO Chris Licht told employees in a memo: “Today we will notify a limited number of individuals, largely some of our paid contributors, as part of a recalibrated reporting strategy. Tomorrow, we will notify impacted employees, and tomorrow afternoon I will follow up with more details on these changes. It will be a difficult time for everyone.”
Phil Mattingly is being promoted to CNN’s chief White House correspondent, following the departure of Kaitlan Collins to the network’s revitalized morning show. Mattingly previously was senior White House correspondent covering the Biden administration. He previously was a congressional correspondent.
Welcome to the painful cable news reset of late 2022, a TV drama freighted with questions
about democracy, bias and the role of commercial journalism in what is supposed to a post-Donald Trump realignment of values — a premise that may itself be premature given the
former U.S. president is running for the White House again.
CNN hired Alex Charalambides, most recently chief technology officer at digital media firm Insider Inc., as its new CTO. Charalambides officially starts at CNN on Monday, Nov. 28. He reports to Patty Hirsch, global EVP of consumer digital for Warner Bros. Discovery.
Michael Bass, CNN’s longtime programming chief known for his work through former president Donald Trump’s political career, will exit the network at the end of this year. CEO Chris Licht announced the news Monday morning, saying “Michael has demonstrated incredible leadership and perseverance” in his nearly decade-long tenure at CNN.
With CNN getting ready for more layoffs, NewsNation, Nexstar Media Group’s cable news network, has mounted a billboard near CNN’s Atlanta facility that announces “we’re hiring.”
During an appearance on “On With Kara Swisher,” CNN’s chairman and CEO Chris Licht opened about who he sees as competition for the cable news channel, and it isn’t Fox News.
Chris Licht faces an uphill battle at CNN. He got the CEO gig in the midst of a prickly merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery and right after the shocking exit of beloved long-time boss, Jeff Zucker. In his first six months, he’s shut down CNN+, ousted Brian Stelter, and shuffled anchors around, including Don Lemon and Jake Tapper. This week, the network chief held an internal town hall meeting where he faced a staff of thousands and discussed upcoming layoffs. Shortly afterwards, he sat down with Kara Swisher— who grilled him, of course.
Chris Licht, CNN’s CEO and chairman, held a town hall meeting with his staff on Tuesday, where he provided more details about the network’s upcoming layoffs. The town hall was a follow-up to revelations that a six-month business review of the network, which Licht had ordered, had just been concluded, and one of the takeaways from it was that job cuts would be happening towards the end of the year.
Executives at the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed news outlet are considering the prospect of hiring a host from outside the network’s roster of correspondents to lead at least an hour in primetime, according to a person familiar with the matter. The plan surfaces after CNN CEO Chris Licht told a town-hall assemblage of CNN staffers Tuesday in New York that he intended to turn his focus to CNN’s 9 p.m. hour after debuting a new morning program led by Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins.
For the first time since 2004, the veteran broadcaster won’t be the network’s lead anchor announcing general election projections.
CNN’s Jake Tapper will return to his daytime show after the midterms after filling the 9 p.m. ET primetime slot on the network. A CNN spokesperson said, “As part of a special lineup, Jake agreed to anchor the 9 p.m. hour through the midterm elections. At the completion of that schedule, he’ll be returning to his award-winning program The Lead. We will announce post-election plans for that time slot in the coming days.”
At 30, the broadcast journalism prodigy leaves the White House beat for a bigger challenge: boosting the lagging ratings for CNN’s morning show.
As behind the scenes drama plays out, CNN anchors will have to put on a happy face Tuesday when the curtain goes up on a new morning show. CNN This Morning is the first major initiative under CNN Chairman Chris Licht, who took the reins in April after a successful run at CBS, where he turned around the network’s morning news program and Stephen Colbert’s late night show. Above, CNN This Morning‘s co-anchors (l-r): Poppy Harlow, Don Lemon and Kaitlan Collins — all familiar faces to the network’s viewers.
Food gurus like Anthony Bourdain and Stanley Tucci will no longer figure as prominently in the recipe for programming at CNN. Now, according to a memo from the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed outlet’s top executive, such ingredients are being put back on the shelf. “Our long-term plan will no longer rely on commissioned projects with outside partners,” said Chris Licht, CNN chairman-CEO, in a note to employees Friday. “This was a very difficult decision to make, and it was based, in large part, on the ever-increasing cost of commissioning third-party premium content. However, I want to be clear that longform content remains an important pillar of our programming.”
Athan Stephanopoulos, a digital entrepreneur who had previously been president of an upstart news company that aims for younger consumers, will take the reins of CNN as its new chief digital officer. The role is a critical one at the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed outlet, where the parent company recently scuttled plans for a new subscription-based streaming hub CNN+ — leaving CNN’s efforts to attract a new generation of digitally-savvy news aficionados unclear.
CNN will see layoffs and other cuts in the coming weeks, as the global news division responds to a worsening economic climate and as Warner Bros. Discovery continues its effort to bring together the WarnerMedia and Discovery businesses. CNN CEO Chris Licht explained the rationale in a memo to staff Wednesday, adding that “our aim is to have most of these decisions made by the end of the year so we can start 2023 feeling settled and prepared for the future.”
It hasn’t been very long since new leadership took control at CNN, but cable news consumers already seem to be noticing a difference, according to an exclusive new survey — and they like what they’re seeing. Fifty-eight percent of CNN viewers think the network has become more critical of President Biden, per the results of a survey taken earlier this month by Variety Intelligence Platform in partnership with consumer insights experts Maru. Nearly half of respondents also say CNN has softened how it covers former President Trump, while a majority (60%) think CNN has upped its inclusion of conservative viewpoints.
Many on social media have speculated that the network’s chief domestic correspondent would be the next to go.
The show will be called CNN This Morning, the network said on Wednesday. The program, with Kaitlan Collins, Poppy Harlow and Don Lemon as hosts, replaces the current New Day and will air weekdays at 6-9 a.m. ET.
With Jake Tapper launching his new CNN primetime show on Tuesday at 9 p.m., he will have to turn from the intensely serious (an interview with President Joe Biden) to the sublime (a chat with actor Dwayne Johnson). It will be just one of many pivots the anchor will have to make in days to come. The new show also represents the first big step that CNN has taken in months to try to parry with its rivals for primetime viewers.
UTHAI SAWAN, Thailand (AP) — CNN pulled a story on the massacre of Thai preschoolers and apologized Sunday over criticism its journalists entered the day care where the children were slain and […]
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., focuses primarily on the term “The Big Lie” about Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud that he says cost him the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.
Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo says he does not agree with changes that have been made at the network that fired him last year over assistance he gave to his brother, disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). “I have to see how it develops. They got great horses there. They have great resources. … I don’t like the idea that they’re saying they’re going to be more middle ground,” Cuomo told journalist Kara Swisher on her new podcast, On With Kara Swisher.
