CNN IS CUTTING HUNDREDS OF TV JOBS IN A DIGITAL PIVOT. Read the memo CEO Mark Thompson sent to staff.

• CNN said it would cut about 200 roles focused on its TV operations.

• The news organization also plans to hire about the same number in digital-focused positions.

• CEO Mark Thompson said last year that he wanted to “future-proof” CNN.

CNN, the cable-news giant owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said it would cut about 200 TV-focused roles as part of a digital pivot.

The company also said it would hire about the same number of staffers in digital-focused roles and aim to fill 100 of them in the coming months.

The cuts would affect about 6% of CNN’s workforce, though the new roles mean total head count is unlikely to be significantly affected.

WBD is providing $70 million in funding as part of a drive to reach $1 billion in digital revenue by 2030.

Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN, told staff in a memo on Thursday that he aimed to “shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

CNN also said it planned to introduce a streaming-news product accessible on devices in the US and elsewhere.

In October, CNN brought in a paywall, charging some of its most loyal readers $4 a month for access to digital content.

I think the Daily Wire is getting a bit over its skis with this headline, but even asking this question would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Is This The End Of CNN? An Interview With Puck News’ Dylan Byers.

John [Bickley]: 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.

Related: Coal miners become computer coders.

—CNN Business, April 22^nd, 2016.