CNN announced major layoffs earlier this week, cutting around 6% of its workforce, or nearly 200 jobs. The struggling news network is also shaking up its weekday show lineup as it attempts to recover from shedding millions of viewers since the first Trump administration.
Is the move a sign that CNN is crashing and burning? Puck News founding partner and senior correspondent Dylan Byers spoke to Morning Wire host John Bickley to provide more insight into the changes at the legacy media network.
***
John: CNN has announced hundreds of layoffs of employees in their 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 in the position as CEO for well over a year, has been sort of alluding to this grand digital transformation that he was going to make, that CNN could no longer think of itself as a linear first network. It was not about TV anymore. It needed to be about meeting people where they are. And that of course meant digital. And this I guess ostensibly was another step forward in that direction. He laid off about 200 people, 6 percent of the remaining staff of somewhere between 3,000 and around 3, 500. And he says he’s going to rehire people with a new 70 million investment, so he will create new jobs that will be focused on digital. They will be product engineers and data researchers and this, that, and the other. I think the problem, which has been sort of the perennial problem since he took over, is that there is not a lot of concrete evidence yet about how exactly that digital transformation is going to be successful, and how it is going to make up for the losses in revenue, and the losses in ratings, and the losses in influence that CNN has now versus say even just eight or 10 years ago.
John: Yeah, potentially the fatal pitfall they’re facing here. I want to talk about some of the attempts that CNN has made to rebrand itself. It’s trying to pivot to a more neutral tone. It’s been described as awkward and morale-damaging for some of the staff. Do you think this transformation risks alienating the network’s core audience, or is this a necessary step if it’s going to try to rebuild itself into something that’s viable?
Dylan: Well, I don’t say this cavalierly: CNN does not have much of a core audience left at this point. And, yeah, so the answer is in many ways it already did alienate the core audience that Jeff Zucker had built up during the first Trump administration, which was one that relied on CNN to serve in a sort of a “resistance”-style posture toward 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 business calculus behind saying we are going to be a more neutral and less emotional, and certainly less partisan, less polarizing news organization – ostensibly that means you would have a bigger market to reach, right? That half of the country that doesn’t trust you, maybe they could come back around and trust you for reliable and dispassionate news. I think the problem is that news is a commodity. People are getting their news from so many other sources, and – outside of rare instances of major breaking international news or major breaking national news, although increasingly less so even on that front – there’s no real reason for people to go to CNN. It has lost its value proposition in that regard. And so I think that the thesis might be noble to be less partisan and less polarizing, but in practice, it is not bringing them the audiences that they have lost since making that pivot.
John: Now you mentioned the move toward a more digital offering. Do you see ways forward for CNN to make that succeed in the new landscape?
CELEBRATE #47 WITH 47% OFF DAILYWIRE+ MEMBERSHIPS + A FREE $20 GIFT
Dylan: Well, I think it’s really hard. I think the advantage is that they have a built-in brand that is – despite everything that it has endured over the course of the last five or six years – it is still sort of a brand that globally is synonymous with news. It’s sort of the Coca-Cola or McDonald’s. One other advantage they have is their heavily trafficked digital presence. A lot of people go to CNN.com on a monthly basis. The problem is people don’t really stay there and people don’t really engage with the content in a meaningful way that CNN has figured out how to monetize. And so I think the big challenge for them is, in a world in which you can get news from so many different places and you can get it for free, what is the value proposition of a CNN? Why do I need to go to CNN? And doing so, you know, creating a CNN digital brand as something that people are like, “This is where I have to go. This is my homepage. This is where I live. I need to have the app. I’m willing to pay for the app.” [That] is going to require getting really creative in terms of thinking about what you are providing the consumer that all of the myriad other news organizations and social media platforms and other services out there are not. And I don’t think anyone at CNN has answered that question yet.
John: Right. There are some questions about whether their existing staff is even willing to go in these new directions. I think you commented in your piece about Trump’s second inauguration, the coverage from CNN lost a fifth of its viewership from the Biden inauguration, but also just the way that the anchors and hosts appeared in it – their demeanor, their mood. Are they going to have to completely just revamp all of their key staff?
Dylan: Yeah, well, first of all, the damage on the ratings front was far worse. They didn’t lose a fifth. 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 reflects not only a sort of partisan divide, which I think a lot of people who might’ve voted for Trump might’ve watched on Fox News anyway. It’s not just about that. It’s that they have completely alienated the audience of people who usually came to television for big news events. They have lost that audience. And that is an existential challenge for them.
In terms of the staff, yeah – again, you can have different theories of the case for what a news organization like CNN should do. You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.
And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.
John: No, not at all. And especially in the digital era where what you immediately get is people, pulling clips from past interviews and comparing them to the new take from Jake Tapper. None of this is flattering, as you’re saying. These are terrible prospects for them. Stepping back for a broader look, not just at CNN but other legacy outlets as well. Do you see any that are particularly poised to do well – better than CNN in terms of moving forward? Who else is going to struggle? MSNBC comes to mind. What do you think in terms of the broader landscape for legacy outlets the future holds for them?
Dylan: Well, right. So, the grand current over all of this and the most significant thing that’s happening, of course, is the inexorable decline of television itself. And so no one is immune from that. And when you couple that decline, which has been going on for a very long time, but which the companies that own these linear assets are now acknowledging. And they’re starting to spin off their cable assets – that decline is unavoidable. It’s unavoidable for CNN. It’s unavoidable for MSNBC, despite the politics, although the politics might have accelerated ratings declines. Can MSNBC reassert itself as “resistance” programming led by Rachel Maddow and company over the course of the next few years? And can that be effective for them? And can they win back a little bit of the ratings that they’ve lost recently? It’s certainly possible. I don’t think that they are going to do it in a meaningful way — the way that they did during the first Trump cycle because I think the audience has moved on.
And I also think that Trump now is the establishment in many ways. He won the popular vote. He had a first term. We all saw what that was, and the American people voted him back in. So it is harder 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 it is benefiting from, first of all, its own business success, which is they do a very good job creating the product that they create. It is benefiting from the politics of the moment and they have now basically become the cable news channel for America. And they account for something like 580 or 600 of the most top watched news telecasts since the election. They account for 75-80 percent of the audience share of the cable news viewing audience. If you need to actually say anything or do anything in a meaningful way on television these days, you have to do it through Fox News. And so, they are well-positioned now for the near term as well. But, again, at some point, when their audience – which is a very old audience – when that audience goes away, they will face the same challenges that all television networks face.
John: Indeed — it’s a rapidly changing landscape that all of us in news are constantly having to negotiate. Dylan, thank you for joining us, it was a real pleasure to talk to you.
Dylan: My pleasure. Thank you.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
CNN announced major layoffs earlier this week, cutting around 6% of its workforce, or nearly 200 jobs. The struggling news network is also shaking up its weekday show lineup as it attempts to recover from shedding millions of viewers since the first Trump administration.
Is the move a sign that CNN is crashing and burning? Puck News founding partner and senior correspondent Dylan Byers spoke to Morning Wire host John Bickley to provide more insight into the changes at the legacy media network.
***
John: CNN has announced hundreds of layoffs of employees in their 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 in the position as CEO for well over a year, has been sort of alluding to this grand digital transformation that he was going to make, that CNN could no longer think of itself as a linear first network. It was not about TV anymore. It needed to be about meeting people where they are. And that of course meant digital. And this I guess ostensibly was another step forward in that direction. He laid off about 200 people, 6 percent of the remaining staff of somewhere between 3,000 and around 3, 500. And he says he’s going to rehire people with a new 70 million investment, so he will create new jobs that will be focused on digital. They will be product engineers and data researchers and this, that, and the other. I think the problem, which has been sort of the perennial problem since he took over, is that there is not a lot of concrete evidence yet about how exactly that digital transformation is going to be successful, and how it is going to make up for the losses in revenue, and the losses in ratings, and the losses in influence that CNN has now versus say even just eight or 10 years ago.
John: Yeah, potentially the fatal pitfall they’re facing here. I want to talk about some of the attempts that CNN has made to rebrand itself. It’s trying to pivot to a more neutral tone. It’s been described as awkward and morale-damaging for some of the staff. Do you think this transformation risks alienating the network’s core audience, or is this a necessary step if it’s going to try to rebuild itself into something that’s viable?
Dylan: Well, I don’t say this cavalierly: CNN does not have much of a core audience left at this point. And, yeah, so the answer is in many ways it already did alienate the core audience that Jeff Zucker had built up during the first Trump administration, which was one that relied on CNN to serve in a sort of a “resistance”-style posture toward 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 business calculus behind saying we are going to be a more neutral and less emotional, and certainly less partisan, less polarizing news organization – ostensibly that means you would have a bigger market to reach, right? That half of the country that doesn’t trust you, maybe they could come back around and trust you for reliable and dispassionate news. I think the problem is that news is a commodity. People are getting their news from so many other sources, and – outside of rare instances of major breaking international news or major breaking national news, although increasingly less so even on that front – there’s no real reason for people to go to CNN. It has lost its value proposition in that regard. And so I think that the thesis might be noble to be less partisan and less polarizing, but in practice, it is not bringing them the audiences that they have lost since making that pivot.
John: Now you mentioned the move toward a more digital offering. Do you see ways forward for CNN to make that succeed in the new landscape?
CELEBRATE #47 WITH 47% OFF DAILYWIRE+ MEMBERSHIPS + A FREE $20 GIFT
Dylan: Well, I think it’s really hard. I think the advantage is that they have a built-in brand that is – despite everything that it has endured over the course of the last five or six years – it is still sort of a brand that globally is synonymous with news. It’s sort of the Coca-Cola or McDonald’s. One other advantage they have is their heavily trafficked digital presence. A lot of people go to CNN.com on a monthly basis. The problem is people don’t really stay there and people don’t really engage with the content in a meaningful way that CNN has figured out how to monetize. And so I think the big challenge for them is, in a world in which you can get news from so many different places and you can get it for free, what is the value proposition of a CNN? Why do I need to go to CNN? And doing so, you know, creating a CNN digital brand as something that people are like, “This is where I have to go. This is my homepage. This is where I live. I need to have the app. I’m willing to pay for the app.” [That] is going to require getting really creative in terms of thinking about what you are providing the consumer that all of the myriad other news organizations and social media platforms and other services out there are not. And I don’t think anyone at CNN has answered that question yet.
John: Right. There are some questions about whether their existing staff is even willing to go in these new directions. I think you commented in your piece about Trump’s second inauguration, the coverage from CNN lost a fifth of its viewership from the Biden inauguration, but also just the way that the anchors and hosts appeared in it – their demeanor, their mood. Are they going to have to completely just revamp all of their key staff?
Dylan: Yeah, well, first of all, the damage on the ratings front was far worse. They didn’t lose a fifth. 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 reflects not only a sort of partisan divide, which I think a lot of people who might’ve voted for Trump might’ve watched on Fox News anyway. It’s not just about that. It’s that they have completely alienated the audience of people who usually came to television for big news events. They have lost that audience. And that is an existential challenge for them.
In terms of the staff, yeah – again, you can have different theories of the case for what a news organization like CNN should do. You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.
And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.
John: No, not at all. And especially in the digital era where what you immediately get is people, pulling clips from past interviews and comparing them to the new take from Jake Tapper. None of this is flattering, as you’re saying. These are terrible prospects for them. Stepping back for a broader look, not just at CNN but other legacy outlets as well. Do you see any that are particularly poised to do well – better than CNN in terms of moving forward? Who else is going to struggle? MSNBC comes to mind. What do you think in terms of the broader landscape for legacy outlets the future holds for them?
Dylan: Well, right. So, the grand current over all of this and the most significant thing that’s happening, of course, is the inexorable decline of television itself. And so no one is immune from that. And when you couple that decline, which has been going on for a very long time, but which the companies that own these linear assets are now acknowledging. And they’re starting to spin off their cable assets – that decline is unavoidable. It’s unavoidable for CNN. It’s unavoidable for MSNBC, despite the politics, although the politics might have accelerated ratings declines. Can MSNBC reassert itself as “resistance” programming led by Rachel Maddow and company over the course of the next few years? And can that be effective for them? And can they win back a little bit of the ratings that they’ve lost recently? It’s certainly possible. I don’t think that they are going to do it in a meaningful way — the way that they did during the first Trump cycle because I think the audience has moved on.
And I also think that Trump now is the establishment in many ways. He won the popular vote. He had a first term. We all saw what that was, and the American people voted him back in. So it is harder 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 it is benefiting from, first of all, its own business success, which is they do a very good job creating the product that they create. It is benefiting from the politics of the moment and they have now basically become the cable news channel for America. And they account for something like 580 or 600 of the most top watched news telecasts since the election. They account for 75-80 percent of the audience share of the cable news viewing audience. If you need to actually say anything or do anything in a meaningful way on television these days, you have to do it through Fox News. And so, they are well-positioned now for the near term as well. But, again, at some point, when their audience – which is a very old audience – when that audience goes away, they will face the same challenges that all television networks face.
John: Indeed — it’s a rapidly changing landscape that all of us in news are constantly having to negotiate. Dylan, thank you for joining us, it was a real pleasure to talk to you.
Dylan: My pleasure. Thank you.
“}]]
