CNN announces more layoffs as it preps for a future beyond cable TV

CNN is cutting jobs and restructuring its quality operations arsenic portion of ongoing efforts by the company to boost its integer offerings and beryllium little babelike connected its cablegram quality channel.

The changes, arsenic reported by The Hollywood Reporter from a memo sent to unit connected Wednesday by CNN CEO Mark Thompson, see layoffs of “around a hundred” staffers, representing little than 3 percent of the company’s workforce of much than 3,500 employees. The cuts follow layoffs successful 2022, including jobs mislaid erstwhile the network’s streaming service, CNN Plus, was unopen down little than a period aft launching.

Today’s memo besides outlined Thompson’s plans to merge CNN’s TV quality and integer quality teams into a azygous “Global News organization” that volition trim duplicated efforts and let “domestic and planetary quality desks” to enactment unneurotic for “big breaking stories.”

As quality delivered done societal media and different integer sources continues to trim the viewership of cablegram quality channels, Thompson has been pushing to amended CNN’s integer quality offerings since taking implicit the CEO relation past October.

Thompson besides emphasized a stronger dependence connected video, including the motorboat of 2 further ad-supported streaming channels coming aboriginal this twelvemonth and the instauration of a caller TV Futures Lab that volition beryllium liable for creating streaming programming for CNN Max and processing caller ways to bring the company’s quality to different integer platforms.

CNN.com volition besides motorboat its archetypal direct-to-consumer subscription merchandise earlier the extremity of the year. Specific details astir the caller subscription merchandise weren’t revealed, but it volition beryllium portion of a wider postulation of paid offerings CNN has planned, including news, analysis, and manner content.

The memo besides addresses however artificial quality volition perchance origin successful to the aboriginal of CNN’s expanded integer offerings. “This effort volition see a strategical propulsion into AI to find however champion to safely harness this emerging caller exertion to service our audiences and present our journalistic goals much efficaciously and responsively.”