CNN announced on Thursday that it is eliminating about 6 percent of its workforce — mainly across the network’s traditional television operations — as it aims to expand and prioritize its digital and streaming services as cable viewers continue to cut the cord and the network’s ratings continue to dip.
Roughly 200 employees will be laid off, though the network is looking to add roughly that same number of staffers to its digital side over the next year.
Additionally, the network is reshaping its weekday lineup, which will see Jim Acosta losing his 10 a.m. ET show and is in talks to move to a new role. Acosta’s program will be replaced by The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown, with Blitzer moving over from his early-evening slot. Audie Cornish will also be getting her own morning show.
Sources have told The Independent that Acosta is currently mulling a move to late-night, where he would host his program from midnight to 2 a.m. ET, a time slot that has been described as “the Siberia of television news.” The proposal, which was first floated to him last week, would also see the longtime CNN star move to Los Angeles and the show simulcast live across CNN International. It is also still possible that Acosta could leave the network altogether amid the programming changes.
“Our objective is a simple one: to shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” CNN chief Mark Thompson said in an internal memo.
In an interview with the New York Times, Thompson said that this “is a moment where the digital story feels like an existential question,” adding that if the network does “not follow the audiences to the new platforms with real conviction and scale, our future prospects will not be good.”
In his memo to staff on Thursday morning, while he acknowledged there would be significant short-term job losses across the network, Thompson said that he didn’t “expect total headcount to fall much this year, if at all.” That’s because of a recent $70 million investment corporate parent Warner Bros. Discovery made to help expand CNN’s digital plans, he said.
“Some of that money’s going in product and tech, but a lot is also going into new high-quality journalism and storytelling,” he wrote. “It’s what we stand for. It’s also the heart of every successful digital news strategy.”
The network plans on posting at least 100 new positions for digital roles within the first half of the year and is looking to actively recruit hundreds of more prospective employees in subsequent quarters.
In a staff meeting after the memo was sent out, Thompson reiterated that the hundreds of job cuts were “proportionally a relatively small number,” prompting staffers to savage the CEO for his lack of sensitivity.
“He gave the least inspiring remarks about layoffs that I’ve ever heard,” one CNN employee told The Independent, adding that Thompson’s comments were “just so tone deaf and insensitive to people who are getting cut.”
As for Acosta, it has previously been reported that the host – who remains an outspoken critic of Donald Trump even as the network has softened its overall tone towards the president – was approached by Thompson last week to move his show to the graveyard midnight slot. Acosta would also have the option of moving to Los Angeles, where the show would be produced. While Thompson told Acosta the proposal had nothing to do with his tone or editorial stance, critics wondered if burying Acosta – who the president despises – in late-night was an effort to curry favor with the new administration.
Others at the network, however, weren’t entirely sold that trying to bury him in the graveyard shift had anything to do with Acosta’s anti-Trump fervor. “Honestly, this place is such a mess,” one CNN on-air personality told The Independent. “I’d actually be relieved if ANY decisions had a rationale behind them. Even one like that.”
In a separate announcement on Thursday morning, Executive Vice President of U.S. Programming Eric Sherling revealed all of the changes to the channel’s weekday lineup. Besides the new Blitzer and Brown program, which will air for two hours daily beginning at 10 a.m. ET, CNN This Morning will now be a one-hour show hosted by Cornish and air at 6 a.m. ET. Kasie Hunt, who currently helms CNN This Morning, is moving to afternoons to host The Arena, which will be broadcast at 4 p.m. ET.
Additionally, Jake Tapper’s The Lead will shift later in the day and air from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET. Elsewhere in the morning, Rahel Solomon will kick off the network’s weekday morning slate with the 5 a.m. show 5 Things with Rahel Solomon, which will be produced by CNN International and simulcast in the United States. Kaitlan Collins’ primetime show is also now shifting primarily to Washington, D.C., after previously being produced in New York.
“In the end, this is about CNN being — as it has been in its history — an indispensable way in which many, many millions of people get their news,” Thompson told the Times.
Since taking over as CNN’s chief executive in late 2023, Thompson has made his intentions clear that he wanted the company to pivot more towards digital and streaming to reduce its ongoing reliance on television ad revenue. And with him relentlessly beating the drum of remaking CNN into a digital-first operation, job cuts were long expected to follow.
In fact, he alluded to the post-inauguration layoffs in a town hall meeting last month, saying he didn’t see them as a “simple cost-cutting exercise” but instead he was working to “change CNN” for the “better.” Meanwhile, the job losses are the network’s most severe since former boss Chris Licht announced at the end of 2022 that CNN was slashing hundreds of positions. Thompson also cut roughly 100 jobs last summer when he announced that CNN would soon be debuting a subscription-based digital model, which it unveiled in October.
The layoffs to the television production side of the network also come as CNN is currently suffering through slumping ratings, especially since Trump’s presidential election victory in November. CNN has seen double-digit declines in viewership across the board over the past few months, and suffered through one of its lowest-rated inauguration broadcasts in history on Monday.
After pulling in over 10 million viewers to watch Joe Biden take the oath of office in 2021, CNN attracted just a fraction of that number this year, nabbing an audience of just 1.7 million for Trump’s ceremony.
Elsewhere in his memo and meeting on Thursday, Thompson also teased new streaming plans for the network. While boasting about CNN Max being a “tremendous resource,” Thompson added that they are developing “a new way for digital subscribers at home and abroad to stream news programming from us on any device they choose.”
On top of that, CNN’s EVP for digital products and services Alex MacCallum is also expected to preview a new lifestyle-oriented product and announce a “further major pivot to digital video.”
Meanwhile, CNN is not the only new network slashing jobs. Both NBC and ABC are also expected to announce layoffs this week, though neither will be as extreme as CNN’s.
