CNN announced major layoffs earlier this week, eliminating about 6% of its workforce, or nearly 200 jobs. The struggling news network is also shaking up its weekday show lineup as it tries to recover from losing millions of viewers since the first Trump administration.
Is this decision a sign that CNN is crashing and burning? Puck News Founding Partner and Senior Correspondent Dylan Byers spoke with Morning Wire host John Bickley to provide more insight into the changes at the former media network.
***
John: CNN announced hundreds of layoffs as part of its post-inauguration restructuring. This has been going on for a while. What do we know so far about CNN’s plans and what are you hearing behind the scenes?
Dylan: Well, look, CNN’s plans for the future are now sort of evergreen. Mark Thompson, who has been CEO for over a year, sort of hinted at this big digital transformation that he was going to make, that CNN could no longer think of itself as a linear-first network. It was no longer about television. We had to meet people where they are. And that of course meant digital. And I guess this was apparently another step forward in that direction. It laid off about 200 people, or 6 percent of the remaining staff, or between 3,000 and about 3,500 people. And it says it will rehire staff with a new investment of 70 million, which will create new digital-focused jobs. . They will be product engineers and data scientists and this, that and the other. I think the problem, which has been sort of a recurring problem since he took office, is that there’s not a lot of concrete evidence yet about exactly how this digital transformation is going to succeed and how it is going to make up for CNN’s lost revenue, lost audience, and lost influence today compared to, say, just eight or ten years ago.
John: Yeah, potentially the fatal trap they face here. I want to talk about some of CNN’s attempts to rebrand itself. He tries to shift to a more neutral tone. This was described as embarrassing and damaging to the morale of some staff. Do you think this transformation risks alienating the channel’s core audience, or is it a necessary step if we want to try to rebuild into something viable?
Dylan: Well, I don’t say that cavalierly: CNN doesn’t have much of a core audience left at this point. And, yes, so the answer is, in many ways, it has already alienated the core audience that Jeff Zucker had built during the first Trump administration, who relied on CNN to serve in a sort of “resistance” style posture. towards the Trump administration. It was sort of portrayed as a battle between the truth-telling journalists and the corrupt president, that was their framing.
THE It’s a business calculation that underlies the claim that we’re going to be a more neutral and less emotional news organization, and certainly less partisan and less polarizing – that apparently means you’d have a bigger market to reach, don’t isn’t it? Maybe that half of the country that doesn’t trust you could come back and trust you for reliable, unbiased information. I think the problem is that information is a commodity. People get their news from so many other sources and – outside of rare cases of major international news or major national news, although less and less even on that front – there is no real reason to that people turn to CNN. It has lost its value proposition in this regard. And so I think the thesis may be noble because it’s less partisan and less polarizing, but in practice it doesn’t bring them the audience that they’ve lost since this pivot.
John: You now mention the evolution towards a more digital offer. Do you see ways for CNN to succeed in this new landscape?
CELEBRATE #47 WITH 47% OFF DAILYWIRE+ SUBSCRIPTIONS + A FREE $20 GIFT
Dylan: Well, I think it’s really difficult. I think the advantage is that they have an integrated brand that – despite everything it’s been through over the last five or six years – is still somehow a brand that, on a global scale, is synonymous with news. It’s a bit like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s. Another advantage they have is their busy digital presence. Many people visit CNN.com every month. The problem is that people don’t really stick around and really engage with the content in the meaningful way that CNN has figured out how to monetize. And so I think the big challenge for them is, in a world where you can get information from so many different places and get it for free, what is the value proposition of a CNN? Why do I have to go to CNN? And in doing so, you know, creating a CNN digital brand as something that people say, “This is where I need to go.” This is my home page. This is where I live. I need the app. I am willing to pay for the app. (It) will require being really creative in terms of thinking about what you offer the consumer that the myriad of other news organizations, social media platforms and other services don’t offer. And I don’t think anyone at CNN has answered that question yet.
John: RIGHT. It is questionable whether current staff are even willing to move in these new directions. I think you commented in your article on Trump’s second inauguration, CNN’s coverage has lost a fifth of its audience since Biden’s inauguration, but also the way the anchors and hosts appeared there – their behavior, their mood. Will they have to completely reorganize all of their key personnel?
Dylan: Yeah, well, first of all, the damage on the ratings front was much worse. They didn’t lose a fifth of them. They had a fifth of what they had four years ago. So they went from 10 million to less than 2 million, in terms of viewers, which is drastic and not only reflective of sort of a partisan divide, which I think a lot of people who might have voted for Trump might have watched on Fox. News anyway. It’s not just about that. This is because they completely alienated the audience from the people who usually came to television for major current events. They lost that audience. And it’s an existential challenge for them.
In terms of personnel, yes – again, you may have different theories about what a news organization like CNN should be doing. You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump, hold him accountable, be the one who tells the truth, and build its business by somehow being the one who tells the truth. Or you may believe that there should be a more neutral and impartial approach that is a little more like, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, moving from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, then Trump 2.0 in 2024, will prove tricky. It’s inevitably going to be awkward because you’re going to have A-list talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once denounced the president, spoke out against him, who – after all they’ve reported, all this that they have railed against, all the warnings and warning bells and alarm bells that they have spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy to power and acting like he could have been Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.
And again – whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – it’s a very, very awkward pivot. And that suggests one of two things: Either all that first-term bombast was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, be auditioning for a best actor Oscar, rather than a news Emmy. . Or it suggests that you can be bought out and that in order to keep your business and continue to be on television and have the relative fame and reputation that you have, you are willing to let go of all the concerns you had last time . And that doesn’t reflect well, I think, on anyone on the network.
John: No not at all. And especially in the digital age where what you get immediately is people, pulling clips from past interviews and comparing them to Jake Tapper’s new take. None of this is flattering, as you say. These are terrible prospects for them. Taking a step back to take a broader look, not only at CNN but at other traditional media as well. Do you see any that are uniquely poised for success – better than CNN moving forward? Who else is going to struggle? MSNBC comes to mind. What do you think of the broader landscape that the future holds for traditional media?
Dylan: Well, it’s true. So the big undercurrent in all of this and the most significant thing happening, of course, is the inexorable decline of television itself. And so no one is safe from this. And if we add this decline, which has lasted for a very long time, but which is now recognized by the companies that own these linear assets. And they are starting to divest their cable assets – this decline is inevitable. This is inevitable for CNN. This is inevitable for MSNBC, despite the politics, even though the politics could have accelerated the ratings decline. Can MSNBC assert itself as “resistance” programming led by Rachel Maddow and company over the next few years? And can it be effective for them? And can they regain some of the audiences they’ve lost recently? It’s certainly possible. I don’t think they will do it in any significant way – like they did in the first Trump cycle, because I think the public has evolved.
And I also think that Trump now represents the establishment in many ways. He won the popular vote. He had a first term. We all saw it for what it was, and the American people re-elected him. This makes it more difficult to program resistance style programming. The network that is obviously doing very well is Fox News. Fox News is not immune to these challenges either. And yet, above all, she benefits from her own commercial success, namely that she does a very good job creating the product that she creates. It takes advantage of the politics of the moment and has now become America’s cable news channel. And they represent about 580 or 600 of the most watched news shows since the election. They represent 75 to 80 percent of the audience share of cable news audiences. If you need to say or do something meaningful on television these days, you need to do it through Fox News. They are therefore also well positioned in the short term. But, again, at some point, when their audience – which is a very old audience – when that audience disappears, they’re going to face the same challenges that every television network faces.
John: Indeed, this is a rapidly evolving landscape that all of us, as news stakeholders, must constantly negotiate. Dylan, thank you for joining us, it was a real pleasure chatting with you.
Dylan: My pleasure. THANKS.
