Media organisations together with CNN have struggled to develop audiences and income and are attempting new choices.
CNN is eliminating roughly 100 jobs and plans to debut its first digital subscriptions earlier than the top of the yr because the information community leans into reshaping its enterprise.
In a memo despatched to workers on Wednesday, CNN CEO Mark Thompson famous the information organisation was chopping simply 100 jobs out of a complete workforce of roughly 3,500. He stated that open roles had been closed wherever doable in an effort to minimise the entire layoffs.
Media organisations, together with CNN, have struggled to develop audiences and income, and have sought to diversify what they provide to clients.
Thompson stated that CNN’s digital technique should be “bold sufficient to ship the audiences and the income we have to preserve our distinctive journalistic firepower and succeed as a enterprise”.
The manager stated CNN will create subscription-ready merchandise that provide information, evaluation and context in new codecs. He emphasised that there shall be an effort to maintain customers on CNN.com’s web site longer and discover methods to get them to return extra usually.
Whereas CNN’s digital merchandise have primarily targeted on textual content articles, Thompson stated there shall be a shift to supply extra video content material.
“Sooner or later, our digital merchandise have to do a much better job of reflecting CNN’s huge energy in video and anchoring/reporting expertise,” Thompson stated.
The organisation can also be going to develop extra “information you need to use” for its viewers, with existence and options content material. Thompson stated these merchandise will present the corporate with numerous monetisation alternatives, together with sponsorships, new promoting and direct-to-consumer subscriptions.
CNN will even be pushing extra into synthetic intelligence, Thompson stated, and can have a look at the way it can safely use the expertise to serve its viewers.
Thompson, a former chief govt of the BBC and The New York Occasions, was named as the pinnacle of CNN in August 2023 and took over the position in October. He changed Chris Licht, who was fired in June of that yr. Thompson was credited with serving to the Occasions transition to a digital-first organisation that was extra depending on paid subscribers than the collapsing promoting market that has doomed many newspapers.
In January, Thompson outlined a technique to his workers that included a “drastic modernisation” of the CNN.com web site.
