In May, Madison Square Garden featured a new headliner: Mark Thompson, the media executive who had recently gone from being an éminence grise to the chief executive of CNN. He was there for upfronts, television’s foray into theater, a glad-handing tradition in which stars share the stage with suits, imploring representatives from Arby’s and its peer institutions to commit advertising dollars. Thompson—who is sixty-seven, not merely British but a knight, appointed by Charles III—wore a navy suit and a pink oxford; his beard was a shadow of gray. “The world needs the truth now more than ever,” he said. “It needs honest reporting. It needs journalists it knows and trusts. And no news brand on Earth is better placed to deliver all of those things than CNN.” The event—hosted by CNN’s corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery—had the theme “Make It Happen Here.” For Thompson, that may have been an ultimatum.
He told the crowd about being offered his job: It was last summer, when he was on vacation with his wife in French wine country. His phone rang: David Zaslav—the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery—was calling. “I’d certainly heard of him,” Thompson said. “And I swear to God, in the second or so it took to get the phone to my ear, I pretty much figured it out.” That was only part of the story: Back in New York, CNN was in utter disarray. Zaslav had just sacked Chris Licht, whose thirteen-month tenure as CEO ended with an explosive profile in The Atlantic detailing how his leadership style and programming decisions had alienated the staff, tarnished the network’s brand, and induced a ratings decline that, at times, placed CNN below Newsmax in the coveted twenty-five-to-fifty-four demographic. Licht had promised a reset, aiming to win over Republicans who believed Donald Trump when he called CNN “the enemy of the people.” Now the network was losing money. In 2020, CNN had brought in a billion dollars in profit; by 2023, the amount was 892 million dollars, and headed south fast: In the past four years, almost a third of cable subscribers have cut the cord. This year, for the first time, advertisers are projected to spend more on digital video platforms than on television.
Thompson had experience turning around struggling news companies—first as director general of the BBC, then at the New York Times, where he’d recently completed an esteemed tenure as CEO. More recently, he’d been a paid senior adviser to Blackstone, the investment management company; he served on the boards of the International Fund for Public Interest Media, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Ancestry.com; he was tinkering with short stories; he spent time at his home in Maine. The call from Zaslav made business sense—and it was on trend, as Thompson was to join several Brits steering American newsrooms. His agreeing to take the role was, perhaps, less obvious; even for an executive of his experience, CNN posed any number of vexing challenges that could blemish his reputation as a turnaround artist. America’s TV news business, Thompson opined in 2021, seemed “completely unchanged since the nineteen-eighties” and was in “dead trouble,” because of its shrinking viewership and inability to engage with smartphone users. “News feels like a particularly old-fashioned style of broadcasting aimed entirely at older audiences,” he said. At CNN—where the median age of viewers is sixty-seven—Licht’s misadventure seemed to prove that the network was not, nor could it be, for everyone, and certainly not MAGA fans. “We’re never going to get ’em back,” Rick Davis—CNN’s longtime executive vice president of news standards and practices, now retired—told me. For Thompson, failure was a possibility.
When he arrived, employee morale was sagging; he embarked on a listening tour. “We need to recapture some of the swagger and innovation of the early CNN,” he wrote in a memo in January. “It’s time for a new revolution.” He hired Alex MacCallum, who had worked under him at the Times, then as the general manager of CNN+ (until it was shut down, after a month). Upon her return, the announcement went, her task was to develop a “comprehensive new strategy for CNN’s digital products and services and propose whatever organizational changes and investment options are needed to deliver it.” Thompson established working groups, each with its own mandate (“building our digital future,” “developing new sources of revenue”). “He’s a very thoughtful man, and he has a very analytical view of the issues that he has to solve,” said Richard Tait, a journalism professor at Cardiff University and a former British television executive whom Thompson worked under when he started at the BBC. “He doesn’t operate on improvisation. He operates on working out what needs to be done and then working out how it can be done and identifying good people to help him do it.”
Staffers found Thompson to be seasoned and smart. Zaslav said, onstage at an event, that Thompson had “won the hearts and minds of the team.” There were some changes: Charles Barkley and Poppy Harlow, recent headliners, were out. Bill Maher and Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain were in. As the months went by, though, Thompson offered few details about what big moves he had in mind; “the Quad,” a team of four TV veterans who led the network post-Licht, returned to their posts in the executive suites. CNN’s angsty journalists, aware that Warner Bros. Discovery carried forty billion dollars in debt, give or take, worried that the lack of visible transformation meant Zaslav was prepping for a sell-off. As Frank Sesno, a former CNN correspondent and Washington bureau chief, told me, “Every time there’s a change in leadership, everybody holds their breath. It’s like, ‘Oh, somebody started the music again, and one of the chairs is going to get taken away. Or maybe more of the chairs are going to get taken away.’”
Thompson’s upfront presentation, against a digital backdrop of red and white, revealed glimpses of his plans. “First we’re going to double down on news,” he said. “In a world full of noisy opinions, CNN should stand for the facts, the judgment, the expertise. And yes, for being first when the really big stories happen.” Still, Thompson had started his career buoyed by Big Brother and Wife Swap; he defined news broadly. “Business and tech are news,” he said. “Climate and weather are news—big news, in fact. Health, wellness, and living longer are news. Sports is news. Entertainment and popular culture are news.” In the months ahead, he intended to broaden CNN’s reach by investing in verticals on culture and lifestyle, subjects that could be removed from partisan boxes. There would be an expansion of video, podcasting, and social media, he said, to reach audiences “where they are throughout the day.”
Then he had his own news to break: “Earlier this morning I wrote to President Biden and former president Donald Trump, inviting both of them to take part in a presidential debate to be broadcast and streamed on CNN from Atlanta on the twenty-seventh of June,” he announced, reading from a creased notecard. “And while this upfront has been taking place, we’ve received word from both candidates that they’ve accepted the invitation.” It was a coup, the first debate on the books. “When people have something important to say, they say it on CNN,” Thompson said. “I hope all of you will do the same.”
They had better do it soon. If Thompson works at a deliberate pace, the twenty-four-hour cable news business does not. The week of upfronts, CNN drew its lowest ratings since 1991. And on Wednesday, Warner Bros. Discovery announced nearly a ten-billion-dollar quarterly loss, writing down the value of its television networks, CNN among them, by more than nine billion dollars. “It’s fair to say that even two years ago, market valuations and prevailing conditions for legacy media companies were quite different than they are today,” Zaslav told investors. By Thursday morning, the stock price of WBD was down 12 percent. If you ask CNN executives about their sense of urgency, they’ll reply: it took ten years for Thompson to enact a digital transformation of the Times, and he’s drawing upon that playbook here. “Turning a great news organization towards the future is not a one-day affair,” Thompson wrote to staff in July. “It happens in stages and over time.” The fate of CNN may depend on whether, absent devoted support from a publisher-family, executives and shareholders can be expected to show patience.
A few years ago, when I asked Thompson about the scale of his youthful ambition, he demurred. “I joined broadcasting to become a journalist,” he said. “And I would have laughed at you if you talked about me as a senior executive in the future when I was in my twenties and thirties.” But from the start, as a BBC production trainee, he began to cement his stature as an adept C-suite operator, “the person most likely to succeed,” as Roger Mosey, a former colleague, told me. Mosey, who eventually became the BBC’s editorial director and is now a deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, recalled Thompson as “presidential” and “impressive.” He was tall, with a regal bearing. In 1988, at thirty, Thompson was named the youngest-ever editor of the Nine O’Clock News, the network’s flagship program. The same year, he bit a colleague in the arm—not drawing blood, but leaving marks in the man’s shirt. “I pulled my arm out of his jaws, like a stick out of the jaws of a Labrador,” Anthony Massey, a senior journalist, said years later. “The key thing is, we didn’t have a row first, or even speak, and I had never had any dispute with him.” Massey didn’t think it was personal; just before, Thompson had apparently been reading his horoscope. In the moment, Massey recalled, Thompson didn’t apologize or explain; Massey went to a supervisor, who said, “This whole place is full of fucking headbangers”—“a fair point,” Massey concluded, however unsatisfying, and “still true.” No one spoke of the incident again until 2012, when it spun through the gossip mill. A representative for Thompson said it was “horseplay.”
The bite had no evident impact on Thompson’s career. In some corners, it may have secured his reputation for being “ruthless,” the word that came to mind for Tim Luckhurst, a former BBC producer and the founding head of the University of Kent’s Centre for Journalism. “He’s appointed to do these jobs and to do them quickly, efficiently, and without excessive sentimentality about what is being lost,” Luckhurst told me. Thompson, he said, has not been afraid to make overhauls that involve significant job cuts, including in high-profile roles. “He’s good at looking at output and deciding what needs to go and outlining ideas with which to replace it,” Luckhurst said. “Is there a less brutal way of doing it? Well, those who hire leaders such as Mark Thompson clearly think that there isn’t a less brutal way of doing it. I’m not sure that he’s great company, but he’s a tough man who gets it done.” (Jill Abramson, who was ousted as executive editor of the Times during Thompson’s reign, declined to comment.)
Thompson was once described by The Guardian as a man who “looks and sounds posh, but isn’t.” Born to an Irish Catholic mother and British accountant father, he was raised in the middle-class, suburban enclave of Welwyn Garden City, about twenty miles outside of London. As a kid, he was sent to elocution lessons to undo the Irish accent he’d inherited from his mother; he was educated by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College. His father died when he was twelve, after suffering from depression and other chronic illness. At Oxford, Thompson majored in English and coedited The Isis, a student magazine. He started at the BBC in 1979. Throughout, he remained a devout Catholic—his nickname became “the Cardinal”—and he still attends Mass on a weekly basis.
I first spoke to Thompson in 2020, when he was winding down his run at the Times. “I’ve had eighteen years continuously as a TV executive and in the publisher role during a time of drastic challenge and change in all of media,” he said then. “I’ve been of that generation of executives who have had to try and figure out what to do about it. And my broad bias has been to lean into it and to see it as a worthy opportunity, at least as much as the threat—but to do it with a sense of urgency.” He marks the beginning of “the challenge and change” with the invention of the VHS, as it introduced the possibility of asynchronous viewing. He became a CEO in the early aughts, at the age of forty-four, leading Britain’s Channel 4, a BBC rival that was seeing a double-digit ratings decline and suffering its first money-losing year in a decade. It was clear, Thompson told me, that the privileged position of broadcast television “was going to be fundamentally taken away, and there was going to be an explosion of choice.” Within months, he briefed the staff on plans for a “radical” overhaul. He proceeded to close a floundering film division and cut roughly two hundred jobs—a fifth of the workforce—as part of a plan to reduce the station’s overhead by 30 percent and use the money to reinvest elsewhere.
Within two years, before he could see his vision through, Thompson was tapped to run the BBC. There, too, he arrived at a network in crisis; there were disasters of credibility, finance, and morale. In a bid to reduce costs by seven hundred million pounds a year, he cut thousands of jobs; he moved others from London to Manchester, in the northwest of England. He dramatically upscaled the BBC website, making it “fit to compete with its commercial rivals,” Tait recalled, and oversaw the introduction of iPlayer, a streaming service that allowed viewers to access programming from the past week. The iPlayer debuted in late 2007, the same year Netflix started streaming. “We were in the very first wave of this idea,” Thompson told me. “It’s not really about channels, it’s about individual pieces of content.” The service was available in the United Kingdom—eventually, he said, he hoped to export the BBC brand onto new platforms in view of international audiences. When iPlayer launched, the BBC expected that it would reach a million people the first year. Within just two weeks, 3.5 million programs were streamed or downloaded; by the year’s end, the number rose to 180 million. As of 2012, iPlayer was being used by 40 percent of the country’s online adults.
That year, Thompson landed at the Times. Like every newspaper—and now, every cable news network—the company was in a bind: advertisers were bailing in favor of digital alternatives; readers were going online to get their news for free. The Sulzberger family, which controls the Times, had taken steps to stay alive: they’d sold almost half of their newly built headquarters; borrowed millions from Carlos Slim Helú, a telecommunications magnate from Mexico; erected a paywall. But the amount that readers were willing to pay for digital access—and the ad rate to reach them—didn’t come close to matching the money generated by print. Thompson went in search of audience data. “You end up thinking that your audience is basically like yourself,” he recalled. “Of course, some of them are. But some of them aren’t.” A review of the paper’s strategy, the “Innovation Report,” found that, between 2011 and 2013, the number of visitors to the homepage plummeted from around 160 to 60 million. The report advocated a series of changes that involved greater collaboration between business and editorial, to the chagrin of some Times traditionalists, and a unification of print and digital. It was a landmark document, and a controversial one—which coincided, within a few weeks, of Jill Abramson being replaced by Dean Baquet.
The company needed reinvention, Thompson sensed. In the months that followed, the Times introduced NYT Cooking, alongside other online products—including the paid post, a native advertising feature, and NYT Now, a mobile app targeting young potential subscribers—with which Thompson sought ten times as many “deeply engaged digital users” as the print paper had subscribers. “He’s not exactly somebody who was born in the digital age himself, but he was a guy who was reading everything, studying, really spending a lot of time understanding the problem, seeing the problem from different sides,” Baquet told me. “And he was very good at making his case. He was very good at articulating how much trouble we were in and working to break down the barriers that were keeping us from rolling up our sleeves and fixing it.”
Thompson invested heavily in the company’s data and analytics infrastructure and hosted weekly meetings with top executives, asking them, he said, to “prosecute every difficult question about what was happening in the outside world, about what we thought it meant to the New York Times, about where we thought we should land on things.” If the company didn’t double its digital revenue by the end of 2020, he warned, the newsroom would have to make devastating cuts. They decided to move from an ad-based to a subscription model—a radical notion, at the time.
Through a variety of changes—some intended to forge emotional connections between reporters and readers, others involving online marketing algorithms—the Times turned casual site visitors into loyal subscribers, driving them up through “the funnel of engagement.” There were some painful cuts, too: copy editors were let go, replaced by multimedia staff; beloved reporters took buyouts. But by January 2020, the Times announced that it had brought in more than 800 million dollars in digital revenue, meeting Thompson’s ambitious goal a full twelve months early. When he stepped down as CEO, the Times had 6.5 million subscribers; 4.4 million had signed up for digital news subscriptions (compared with roughly 840,000 in print), and an additional 1.3 million people subscribed to NYT Cooking, games, and audio products. “Mark’s biggest accomplishment was to give us a sense of urgency—he helped us all see that we were in an existential crisis, and I don’t think we fully understood it at the time,” Baquet said. Thompson didn’t have all the answers, “but he was a convener,” Baquet added. “He worked really hard to try to get everybody in the room talking, which is half the battle. And I think that’s half the battle at CNN, too.”
June’s presidential debate was, as Jon Stewart put it, “a highly anticipated affair, according to the network that was running it.” CNN determined the rules, which Thompson played a role in setting; he was also involved in the event’s presentation, from stagecraft to cadence. He envisioned a simple format, evocative of 1960’s Kennedy-Nixon debate, the first to be televised. There would be no studio audience. The microphones at Biden’s and Trump’s podiums were designed with a mute button. The moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, would avoid commenting on the answers to their questions—David Chalian, CNN’s political director, told the Washington Post that a presidential debate is “not the ideal venue” for live fact-checking—unless there was “some egregious mistruth.” The idea was to telegraph CNN’s position at the political middle ground, a civil meeting place in an era of extremes.
Unlike other recent debates, CNN’s would feature two commercial breaks. With tens of millions of people expected to tune in, the event promised to generate as much in advertising revenue. But the greatest benefit, to CNN’s leadership, was its marketing potential, as the debate received wide coverage and was simulcast by rivals. Other outlets were permitted to air the event if they included the CNN logo. Thompson’s aides sent along a graphic—a giant CNN leaving minuscule space for home network branding—to be used in promotions. Any mention of the debate, including its listing in onscreen program guides and promotions, had to include CNN in the title. MSNBC, Fox, and the rest could choose and charge advertisers, but they were prohibited from using breaks to feature their own anchors. In the lead-up, CNN counted the hours, minutes, and seconds to go. Phil Mattingly, the chief domestic correspondent, toured viewers around the set (“The podiums are eight feet apart”) and went viral on social media.
When the big night came, of course, it made bigger news than CNN could have hoped: Trump was characteristically bellicose and mendacious, but Biden showed viewers a version of himself they had not seen before: an undeniably aged figure, pale and fragile, trailing off mid-sentence, struggling. There was some attention paid to the presentation; Tapper and Bash received criticism for not calling out lies. (“The absence of real-time fact checking is the biggest failure of this debate,” Anthony Coley, a contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, posted on X.) Notably, the event didn’t seem to transmit much of anything legible about how Thompson’s CNN differed from what came before. (“Tapper and Bash’s questions were unshapely, inelegant, not intended to draw out anything more than conflict,” Daniel D’Addario wrote in Variety. “This was a debate on and of CNN—the network that, in recent years, has distinguished itself with endless panel conversations in which talking heads talk past one another, ungoverned by any guiding insight beyond keeping a spirited, structureless conversation going.”) For the most part, though, the attention was on Biden, who had, as he would later put it, “a bad night”—one that would mark the beginning of the end of his campaign.
While the action unfolded, I was in Harvard Square, hoping to find a good view of CNN at the end of a bar. I stopped at a crosswalk, searching, and flagged down a passerby. He was avoiding the debate. “My dad watches CNN quite a lot,” Nathan Calper, age thirty-two, told me. “He’s sixty-two. When I’m over there visiting, I just don’t see the point. There’s nothing good that comes out of the TV.” Down the street, I poked my head into the Russell House Tavern. A soccer game was on. Nobody expressed interest in tuning in to CNN, though I did meet a middle-aged couple visiting from Chicago who said their son was preparing to watch the debate with friends across town; they’d come up with a drinking game.
I tried Grendel’s. The bouncer, Caleb Moulema—twenty-three, and a graduate student in neuroscience—told me that he hadn’t watched CNN since college. Inside, a group of twentysomething healthcare workers settled in with their drinks. They would catch up on the debate later. “TV is just hard for young people,” one said.
“I get a lot of my news from TikTok,” her friend chimed in. “Which is horrible. But it’s true. The little clips, that’s what I hear. Or from my patients’ TV, whatever they’re watching.”
Next up: Felipe’s Taqueria, on Brattle Street. There was a TV on; someone flipped through the channels and stopped at CNN. I caught a flash of Biden, looking befuddled, and Trump, sullen. They lingered on-screen for a moment—but then it was on to the soccer match. No one complained. “I just would rather be online than watch television,” Tatiana Vezeau, age twenty-nine, told me. “I would rather be doing something else, like painting.”
Finally, I landed at Toscano Harvard Square. “It’s an older bar crowd in general,” Andrew D’Alessandro, one of the owners, said. “We have some young ones, but I would say on average fifty and above.” I’d found CNN’s demo; the debate was on here. I took a seat beside two middle-aged women, their eyes on the television as they debated whether Biden had gotten too much Botox.
None of my debate-night findings would have come as much of a surprise to Thompson. (CNN declined to make him available for a catch-up; there was a nervous feeling after Licht’s calamitous experience.) In the end, a little more than fifty-one million people watched the debate, per Nielsen; about nine and a half million tuned in to CNN. That represented the largest share of the event’s viewership, but the audience was the smallest since the third debate of 2004 and represented a 30 percent drop from the crowd that had watched 2020’s first Trump-Biden debate. CNN said the telecast drew its largest-ever audience on streaming but declined to disclose figures; the event generated some thirty million views on CNN’s digital properties and on YouTube. The next day, CNN returned to its position far behind Fox and MSNBC. And in the week following, CNN’s prime-time ratings plummeted; in the demo spanning twenty-five to fifty-four-year-olds, only eighty-three thousand people watched. When I spoke with CNN executives, they attempted to spin the ratings drop-off as all part of the master plan. Sure, when a political story breaks, people run to their corners, the logic went, but for everything else—a solar eclipse, someone suggested—CNN can win the day. Nevertheless, CNN’s debate coverage continued with postgame: John King, the chief national correspondent, declared that Trump “broke the fact-check machine.” Panels discussed Biden’s mental acuity, their elderly relatives, and the rapidly fading chances that the president’s candidacy would recover.
For Thompson, CNN’s situation after the debate remained what it was before: bumpy ratings, falling ad revenue. Looming overhead: deadlines to set new contracts for carriage fees, as they’re called, which cable providers pay stations (or their parent companies) for the right to show their programs—hundreds of millions of dollars each year, accounting for most of CNN’s revenue. Last week, during WBD’s quarterly earnings call, an investor asked, “Are there any changes in terms of the number of carriage deals that come up in the next year or so?” Zaslav wouldn’t comment on specific negotiations. “We’ve been in that business for forty years,” he replied. “We’ve been very effective in that business.” However true that may be, Zaslav also noted, later in the call, “The market conditions within the traditional business are tough, and they’re challenging.” For reference: In 2019, the number of homes with cable was eighty-four million; by 2023, it was fifty-eight million. Between 2017 and 2023, paid TV revenue dropped from a hundred billion to eighty-five billion dollars.
Contracts with cable providers aren’t public, but the amount a network receives is calculated based on the number of cable subscribers per month, ranging from less than a dollar to as much as ten dollars per household. When it comes time to update these deals, WBD must make the case “that distributors get significant value,” as Zaslav put it on the call. (He declined to talk with me.) How much will that deliver back to CNN? “They’re going to get paid less,” Brent Magid, the CEO of an eponymous media consulting firm, told me. “Not even so much because of the subscriber fee, but simply that the number of subscribers they have has gone down.”
Magid believes there is likely a “floor” to how far cable viewership can fall, largely because 90 percent of sports programming is still delivered via paid TV and, for years, CNN has been bundled with TNT, which airs many NBA games. Several months ago, however, the NBA started shopping around and, in July, rejected a match offer from Zaslav. (WBD has sued to reverse the decision. “At this point, we’ve handed it off to our lawyers,” Zaslav told investors. “We have confidence in our position. The judge will decide.”) Magid told me, “If they lose the NBA rights, then for sure they’re going to lose some leverage.” There are other “powerhouse channels”—he mentioned Discovery Channel and Food Network—that help. But “it isn’t a slam dunk,” he said. “CNN’s ratings haven’t been good.”
By the time the battle for NBA rights got going, Thompson had already reached the same conclusion he’d come to at the Times: CNN had to transform its business model to survive. His answer, again, was to focus on subscriptions. (In a similar vein, Zaslav reportedly said at a conference that he was less concerned with ratings than with “the numbers around CNN as a trusted global brand for news.”) The first step: getting people to register with CNN’s website, which reaches some 160 million people per month.
As before, Thompson would develop his approach on the basis of audience behavior. He directed MacCallum to build a robust analytics infrastructure. Part of her job has involved asking WBD executives—the same group that managed her out when they pulled the plug on CNN+ a couple of years ago—to pay for that undertaking. “One of the components of the investment case is to build out capabilities that are required to run a subscription business effectively,” an executive told me. “Staff doing the analytics, the data, the growth, the acquisition marketing, thinking about reducing churn, understanding pricing and promotions—all of these things that are required to run a good direct-to-consumer business.” CNN is currently “at zero” on that front; Thompson intends to launch a new subscription offering by the end of the year.
He has a sense of the outline. When he was at the Times, a decision was made to elevate the profiles of contributors (even in subtle ways, such as moving up author bios in stories) to build an affinity with readers. CNN, to its advantage, already has stars, from Anderson Cooper to Fareed Zakaria. A CNN executive told me that the network will lean into its “brand permission,” mentioning Anthony Bourdain and Stanley Tucci, who hosted a show on Italy’s regional cuisines. Name recognition can translate into value, if CNN persuades fans to pay for digital content under branded verticals, and to make that part of their daily routine. No one could tell me what verticals we might expect to see, but you can imagine the possibilities: a health app with Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s face on it, for instance. Not on the docket: a vertical from Oliver Darcy, CNN’s senior media reporter, who announced last week that he was starting his own subscription-based site, Status, where he intends to cover, among other subjects, the network he’s leaving behind. (“I felt I had reached the end of the road, and I am excited to launch this new venture and tap into my entrepreneurial spirit,” Darcy said. “I think I can be a more effective media reporter outside CNN.”)
Thompson’s vision includes streaming—in an interview with the Financial Times, he called CNN+ “a big bold experiment, which was abandoned rather briskly”—but places greater emphasis on digital video that could, perhaps, draw viewers who favor YouTube and TikTok; open up the Gupta app, say, and you’d find a clip on the latest flu vaccine, short enough to hold the attention of the young people I met in Harvard Square. “In our digital products, we do not lean enough into thinking about how you can reimagine CNN for a vertical mobile-oriented format,” the executive said. Last September, WBD debuted a new twenty-four-hour streaming service—CNN Max—featuring some of the cable network’s biggest shows. Within a week, however, DirecTV sent over a letter stating that repurposing broadcasts violated the contract between their businesses. “We work with programmers to secure a wide array of content at the right value, and any time a company migrates or simulcasts programming on their own direct-to-consumer platforms or other networks it erodes that value,” a DirecTV spokesperson said. (No one could confirm action beyond that warning.)
Television, streaming, and mobile all call for something distinct—there are the various legal obligations, and then there’s strategic branding. That may be especially difficult to achieve at CNN, though, because of how strongly it’s associated with up-to-the-minute broadcasting. Magid has observed, too, that millennial and Gen Z audiences tend to view anchors as “bobbleheads.” Can that be overcome, at scale, with pithy clips? “The big revenue driver for CNN was always TV and cable subscriptions,” a CNN staffer told me. “You are not going to make enough money from digital to offset the kind of money you were making even a few years ago in linear TV. You’re just not. So it’s not a TV versus digital situation as much as it is a shrinking news organization situation.”
In speaking to current and former CNN employees, I kept hearing that Thompson has been aiming to “stabilize” the network. That means different things to different people (strategic assessments, staff relations) but the takeaway, it seems, for Thompson, is that old media-company chestnut: reorganization. One executive compared CNN’s existing structure to an eighties mansion (the company was founded in 1980) that has undergone a spate of renovations. In 1995, the network built an addition with its own kitchen and bathrooms to serve the digital business. Then came a second addition, to service international channels, followed by a third, for the Spanish-language properties. “Over the years, we’ve built this mansion with twelve different kitchens, all making dinner every night with a ton of leftover waste,” the executive told me. “We now have to go back and build a bigger kitchen in the main house to serve everybody who lives in the house.” In other words: a gut job.
In July, Thompson sent a staff-wide memo announcing a hundred cuts, affecting 3 percent of the workforce. “We’re moving today to a single global multimedia editorial operation to take on the challenges of our multi-platform, multi-product future,” he wrote. He outlined plans for “a consistent, centralized planning process to maximize coverage opportunities across platforms.” CNN needed to “follow the audience,” he argued, as news consumption had “changed beyond recognition.” To that end, the video team would be “at the heart” of CNN. “They will alert incoming video to the network for use on all platforms, TV and digital,” Thompson wrote. Digital video specialists would “work day-to-day alongside global news colleagues,” handle live shots, and liaise with both TV and streaming shows.
In the memo, Thompson touted “significant wins” since his arrival: “engaging with multiple technology platforms on how best to partner around AI, and signing our first multi-million dollar licensing deal to unlock the value of our 44-year video archive.” He told the staff that he would expand the network’s streaming “with two new offerings, one based on CNN Originals, and another based on CNN en Español.” There would be a “TV Futures Lab” for developing streaming programs and coming up with ways to translate traditional news in a digital context. He described this moment as “a key milestone in the transformation of CNN,” which should be cause not for despair but for “adaptation and innovation.” In practice, he wrote, “we plan to provide more opportunities for everyone to learn new skills and new forms of storytelling, and more chances to move from one part of CNN to another.”
Sorting out the particulars would take time (“He’s not a seat-of-the-pants manager,” as Tait put it) but the result, if all goes to plan, promised more digital content than the newsroom has delivered in the past. To oversee that process, Thompson drafted Virginia Moseley—until recently known as a Quad member, now serving as executive editor, and a veteran of TV land. That has left some on staff scratching their heads: When there are competing demands, will a doyen of linear television be willing to divert finite resources from the live broadcast to support the production of quick, slick content for a digital product targeting audiences on mobile? Under the new order, producers in the field are being asked for material that can be distributed across platforms—but whether they’re meant to focus on breaking stories or supporting new verticals is still uncertain. “The great bulk of CNN’s revenue is television,” Davis told me. “So it’s a balancing act. There’s no question. And they’ll probably have fits and starts in terms of how that works out.” He dismissed any suggestion that digital would wind up shortchanged; Thompson, he said, “is not going to stand for it.” Not everyone is so sure. When Thompson started, a staffer told me, there was “some hope that the digital side would be emphasized.” And yet: “If you’re on the digital team and you think this is good for you, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to what the trends in the business are.”
There are also remaining questions about CNN’s sensibility in the Thompson era. Jeff Zucker, the CNN boss from 2013 to 2022, was “maybe a little bit louder, outlandish,” an executive told me. Licht “was very vocal about hating that, trying to dial it back,” which could be disorienting. Thompson’s message to anchors, I was told, has been to “just report, do the news, and call a spade a spade.” Those distinctions may be lost on viewers, however, and Thompson has mostly kept Licht’s on-air talent in place. The new stuff revolves around weekend entertainment: An American version of Have I Got News for You, a British comedy panel show that riffs on current affairs, is slated to appear on Saturdays this fall. Bill Maher’s show, which Thompson started airing on Saturday evenings (a day after episodes appear on HBO), has become CNN’s most-watched hour of the day.
Meanwhile, many CNN staffers are keeping an eye on the boss’s boss, Zaslav. “Back in the day, you didn’t have to worry about ‘What’s the ownership position going to be a year from now?’” Davis said. Now employees consistently see stories reporting that the situation is “unstable” at their company. “You start to think, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’” A CNN staffer I spoke with noted somberly that if Zaslav were to combine the network with, say, CBS News—part of Paramount, a recurring plot point in merger rumors—July’s layoffs would look quaint. (CNN and CBS News share third-place rankings in their respective categories, as well as some talent, though Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media this summer may lessen the probability of that union.) In the past year, the market capitalization of WBD has fallen by more than a third, to about seventeen billion dollars, close to half the company’s debt load. “We view our debt as an asset,” Zaslav said, during the earnings call. “We’re generating meaningful free cash flow. We’re investing substantially in content.” Recently, he announced plans to slash a thousand jobs.
In July, Zaslav set off furious speculation that he was looking to make a deal that would likely throw Thompson’s agenda for CNN into chaos: at a conference, responding to a question from a reporter about the presidential race, he said, “We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to be even better.” After that came reports that he was weighing merger and acquisition notions as well as the possibility of splitting the company’s digital streaming and studio businesses off from legacy TV networks. In the latter scenario, most of the debt would be housed within the TV group. “This is a public company management team, and we are very well aware of our responsibility to have a view on whatever strategic options are out there,” Gunnar Wiedenfels, the chief financial officer of Warner Bros. Discovery, said during last week’s call. “You shouldn’t be surprised to see us engaging in whatever M&A processes are going on out there. You shouldn’t be surprised to see us engaging in partnership discussions. David has been talking about this for quite some time.”
In an attempt, perhaps, to avoid unwanted surprise, anonymous executives gave quotes to the Financial Times: Splitting off CNN and other channels was not the best option for WBD “at this time,” they said. Doing so would create operational challenges, likely trigger a flood of lawsuits from creditors, and potentially interfere with efforts to use content across platforms and networks. Among those involved in the deliberations, a corporate breakup is considered the “nuclear option,” the story went. The employees of CNN (where Zaslav’s daughter happens to be a producer) would almost certainly agree. But the company line seems to waver by the day, as billions of dollars flap in the wind and journalists tremble. “Look, this global disruption is being felt by everyone,” Zaslav told investors. “It’s a challenge. It’s a transition.”
The conclusion of Licht’s run at CNN was dramatic. But the main cause, you could argue, was that he was taking too long to turn around a hurting network, in Zaslav’s view. “Everyone at CNN had long ago come to realize that Licht was playing for an audience of one,” as The Atlantic reported last summer. (Also important, it should be noted, is the opinion of his mentor, John Malone, who is on the board of WBD, a libertarian who has given money to Trump, and a man of extraordinary influence.) As Zaslav mulls his options, CNN’s journalists can only follow Thompson’s deliberate methodology, unsure of how long they have left to deliver on his plans. Baquet told me that Thompson, in his experience, doesn’t mind waiting for his work to pan out. “He was playing the long game,” he said. “The New York Times could play the long game because of the family. I just don’t know if CNN can.”
Adam Piore is a longtime CJR contributor and the author of The Accidental Terrorist, The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human, and, most recently, The New Kings of New York: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World’s Most Famous Skyline.