THIS WAS CNN: CNN Prepares for the Afterlife.

So, what then for CNN? As you may have surmised, running a 24/7 global news network with foreign bureaus is expensive, and the underlying unit economics only make sense to the people inside the building. With the industry in inexorable decline, CNN’s ratings at a nadir, and younger audiences turning to user-generated schlock on YouTube and TikTok for news, those costs are increasingly hard to justify. The high-seven-figure salaries (or eight-figure, in a couple of cases) once seemed only slightly ridiculous. Now they seem appalling—especially since there’s no longer a market for this talent, or many of the producers that stand them up, at comparable rates.

Meanwhile, Fox News, which is built around relatively inexpensive studio programs, not newsgathering, has demonstrated an ability to effectively quadruple CNN’s audience—not just on any given weeknight, but increasingly during major national and international breaking news events where CNN once dominated. Inevitably, Gunnar will look at CNN and decide he can maintain relatively similar profits at a mere fraction of the cost.

This will have perceptible ramifications on the talent side. Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary? (Of course, by the time Gunnar gets around to it, Anderson will likely have determined that he no longer wants to read the day’s news to less than a million people every night, either.) Does the network need more than a handful of marquee names hosting a few key hours, or can it pay younger, reasonably attractive talent mere hundreds of thousands to read the same transcripts off the teleprompter? Jake Tapper is locked into his own low-eight-figure multiyear deal, so will be the face of the network for a while longer—but is surely the last CNN talent who will ever come close to netting that kind of income.

“No more Jake Tappers” has a nice ring to it.