No Longer Flush With Cash, TV News Enters Belt-Tightening Era
The Hollywood Reporter — November 16, 2022
BY ALEX WEPRIN
As CNN, ABC News and others grapple with an advertising downturn and lower linear viewership, the new mandate is to trim costs and find savings however they can while staffers weather the storm.
The afternoon email hit some inside CNN like a ton of bricks. The cable news channel, now under Warner Bros. Discovery (its second owner in just a few years) was going to face budget cuts and layoffs. “There is widespread concern over the global economic outlook, and we must factor that risk into our long-term planning,” CNN CEO Chris Licht wrote in a late-October memo.
At a network town hall on Nov. 15, Licht confirmed to moderator Alisyn Camerota that layoffs will hit the division in December. Those cuts are part of an industrywide pivot, as media giants prepare for a difficult winter, seeking to reduce costs however they can. And news divisions will not be spared.
Continue reading TV News facing big cuts →