CNN Begins Layoffs Hitting At ‘Heart And Soul Of This Organization’

CNN boss Chris Licht told the network’s employees the company had begun a series of layoffs, suggesting in an email that the job cuts were “a gut punch” that would hit at “the heart and soul of this organization.” A CNN report said the layoffs would ultimately involve hundreds of CNN staffers, marking the deepest round of job cuts at the network in years. “It will be a difficult time for everyone,” Licht said in his message.

Licht’s email, addressed to “my CNN colleagues,” confirmed rumors of widespread layoffs that have been swirling inside the company for weeks—and adding to a sense of anxiety even among some of CNN’s longtime journalists, editorial and production staff. Licht said that while “it is incredibly hard to say goodbye to any one member of the CNN team, much less many,” but said the cuts were “part of a recalibrated reporting strategy.”

Licht’s email said CNN’s paid contributors were first in line for job cuts, suggesting that the network would be moving away from a format CNN has used heavily over the past few years: panel discussions of news and politics featuring panels of partisan contributors.

The cuts come amid an ongoing ratings crisis at CNN, which began the year with a massive drop in prime time, where ratings collapsed by 69% among viewers 25-54, the key demographic most valued by national advertisers. Part of the drop was due to the reduced viewership across cable news as the intensity of news coverage in 2020, which saw both a pandemic and a presidential election. But CNN’s inability to compete with Fox News and MSNBC in prime has only intensified, leading to Licht’s stem-to-stern reconsideration of what CNN is.

What’s still unclear is what Licht’s “recalibrated reporting strategy” looks like. Licht—and his Warner Bros. DiscoveryWBD
bosses—have spoken repeatedly about shifting CNN away from opinion and back to its core mission of journalism. Licht insists that does not mean moving the network into a both-sides center of the road format. “One of the biggest misconceptions about my vision is that I want to be vanilla, that I want to be centrist,” he told the Financial Times. “You have to be compelling. You have to have edge.”

If the recently-launched CNN Mornings is any indication of viewers’ appetite for Licht’s vision, it suggests the network has a hill to climb in bringing back viewers who have deserted CNN over the last eighteen months. The revamped morning show was a ratings flop on its debut despite heavy promotion and the shift of Don Lemon from prime time. Lemon left a prime time schedule that has been a work in progress for nearly a year, since the firing of Chris Cuomo, who was at the time CNN’s most-watched prime time host. The network has yet to name a permanent replacement for Cuomo in the 9 p.m. ET time slot, with Jake Tapper’s turn at 9 p.m. struggling to compete against MSNBC and Fox News.

But Licht’s vision extends far beyond prime time, with the network announcing last month that it would kill off its highly acclaimed documentary films and original series, including Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy and the long-running Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, which have filled significant parts of the network’s schedule, especially on weekends. The network cited increasing production costs as the prime reason for the decision.

Earlier this month, CNN announced another documentary series, This Is Life with Lisa Ling, would also be cancelled. The show examined issues like homelessness and mental illness in deeply personal ways, giving voice to people who rarely get attention on network televisoin. Ling said she hoped the show, which debuted on CNN in 2014, would continue on another network, telling the Los Angeles Times “I’m not done. I personally don’t want to live in a nonfiction world of cooking shows and true crime. I think there is an audience for depth.”

The move to cut costs is driven largely from the top, with Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav promising investors he would deliver more than $3 billion in cost savings across the organization. It’s believed the layoffs announced today are part of a $100 million round of salary cuts.

With CNN finishing November as a distant third in the key prime time ratings race (CNN failed to crack one million viewers, delivering an average audience of just 749,000 viewers in prime, compared to MSNBC’s 1.2 million and Fox News Channel’s 2.4 million), the network faces a critical question: can deep cost cutting possibly lead to improved ratings? The brutal truth for CNN and any network is that programming—and particularly news reporting—is expensive, and right now, CNN’s losses seem to be piling on top of each other.