With prospective suitors from Comcast to Paramount eyeing CNN’s parent company, network staffers grapple with more uncertainty.
Just days after David Zaslav took the reins of a newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022, the chief executive shuttered CNN+, a $300 million streaming subscription service that barely got off the ground. Now, as the network prepares for next week’s launch of its streaming successor, “All Access,” Zaslav dropped more big news on staffers: WBD is for sale.
Launching yet another streaming service amid another possible deal marks the latest twist in the CNN ownership saga, as the network has shuffled between corporate parents over the past decade, from Time Warner to the AT&T-owned WarnerMedia, in 2018, to the eventual Warner Bros. Discovery, in 2022.
With the prospect of more changes coming, the mood inside CNN on Tuesday, one staffer told TheWrap, “is less concern about who buys us and more about the uncertainty of it all,” adding: “I think people just want to know they’ll have a job.” Such anxiety reflects the shifting stewardship and editorial strategies in recent years at CNN as the groundbreaking linear cable network charts its course in the digital world.
Another staffer was more blunt: “People want this phase to be over.”
Chatter about WBD selling off CNN alone has only ratcheted up amid the company’s decision to open itself for sale either as a whole or in parts, with Zaslav saying in a memo on Tuesday that “multiple parties” expressed interest in the company. This is separate from its prior plan to split into Warner Bros. (HBO Max, its film and television studios) and networks-and-sports-focused Discovery Global (cable networks including TNT and CNN, among others), and potentially accelerates the chaos to come.
It’s just the latest bout of turbulence for CNN, which has seen a string of different CEOs since 2021, from Jeff Zucker to Chris Licht and now Mark Thompson, a former New York Times chief executive whose two-year CNN tenure has been focused on carrying the network into the digital age and who faces his greatest test next week with the “All Access” launch. CNN laid off 200 staffers earlier this year as part of a digital-and-streaming pivot and is banking on cord-cutters’ willingness to pay $6.99 a month for a selection of live and on-demand programming.
The second staffer told TheWrap that, while their colleagues have sought some level of stability, they’re more eager to see a buyer who wants to let CNN fulfill its digital ambitions and capitalize on its expertise in international reporting.
“I don’t think that the folks that have been in charge — beyond Mark Thompson, the folks that write Mark’s checks — have really had a full vision of what CNN can be and what its mission should be going into the future,” the staffer said.
