By BENJAMIN MULLIN NYTimes News Service
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Give people news when and where they want it.

That, says Mark Thompson, CNN’s CEO, was one of the brilliant insights Ted Turner had when he started the network at the dawn of cable TV. And if CNN doesn’t follow that advice for the digital age, Thompson says, the company may no longer exist.

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“This is a moment where the digital story feels like an existential question,” Thompson said in an interview. “If we do not follow the audiences to the new platforms with real conviction and scale, our future prospects will not be good.”

Thompson has been spreading this message inside CNN during his first 15 months in the job. But now, he is taking the biggest steps yet to overhaul the company, steering it away from its reliance on traditional television and trying to cash in on digital audiences wherever they are, at the same time that President Donald Trump has sent the news cycle into hyperdrive.

On Thursday, the company said that it would eliminate about 200 jobs focused on CNN’s traditional TV operations, and add about the same number for new digital roles like data scientists and product engineers. CNN is aiming to hire 100 of those people in the first half of the year, Thompson said.

CNN also previewed a new streaming service, similar to its TV product, that it will charge for. Thompson said CNN would also release a new subscription product this year around “lifestyle” content — examples include food and fitness — though he didn’t specify what the product would be. The digital efforts, Thompson said, were financed by a $70 million investment for this year from CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

Thompson also announced a number of changes to CNN’s TV schedule, replacing Jim Acosta’s 10 a.m. show with “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown,” and introducing a new morning show anchored by Audie Cornish. The network is in talks with Acosta about another role.

“In the end, this is about CNN being — as it has been in its history — an indispensable way in which many, many millions of people get their news,” Thompson said in the interview.

The changes to the TV side of the business could be a blow to the newsroom’s morale during an uncertain time in the news industry. But in many ways, the challenge in front of Thompson, 67, is similar to what he faced at his two previous jobs, as CEO of The New York Times and as director general of the BBC. At both of those stops, major sources of traditional revenue were in long-term decline.

The traditional cable TV business remains CNN’s main revenue driver, but the network has been stuck in last place in the ratings among its main competitors, behind MSNBC and Fox News, the longtime leader. Its prime-time ratings have plummeted since the election, and its digital audience has also shrunk.

In December, the network saw its lowest period of web traffic in two years, according to analytics firm Comscore, with 90.5 million unique visits, down from a high point of 175.5 million in March 2020, during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. (CNN said that other news sites have experienced similar declines, adding that CNN.com was the top news site in terms of total audience last year.)

During a town-hall meeting with staff in the network’s New York City headquarters this month, Thompson presented a series of slides that underscored the necessity of CNN’s digital pivot, flagging its underperforming advertising business and the lack of energy on its website.

Thompson has been sounding the alarm about CNN’s digital progress since he joined, and he has told the staff repeatedly that big changes would be coming. In May, during a summit in Atlanta organized by Thompson, executives were told that CNN’s reliance on its traditional TV business — which then encompassed roughly 72% of revenue — had only increased in recent years.

By October, CNN introduced a paywall to its website and app that targets readers who visit the site most often. At the end of last year, Alex MacCallum, a former New York Times executive who is CNN’s executive vice president of digital products and services, said at a town hall with staff that the paywall had exceeded CNN’s expectations for subscribers but did not provide specific figures.

Thompson and MacCallum have also appealed to David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, for additional investment in CNN’s digital priorities. Zaslav greenlit this year’s $70 million investment.

One of those priorities has been vertical videos, which have become important to media organizations because they can be viewed easily on mobile phones.

CNN has begun increasing the number of vertical videos and eventually plans to publish 50 to 100 of these videos per day. Executives have been encouraged by the results so far, with video engagement — a key metric at CNN — up 20% last year.

They have also been prototyping a new video news service that allows users to swipe through vertical videos as they do on apps like TikTok and Instagram. Thompson said it’s not clear yet whether that will exist as a stand-alone product or as a section of CNN’s mobile app.

“You can use your thumb to flick from a CNN news story to a CNN anchor to a reporter,” Thompson said. “That’s a really interesting experiment.”

Trump, since his first run for president, has regularly criticized CNN’s coverage of him and his administration. Jeff Zucker, the company’s CEO during Trump’s first term, leaned hard into accountability coverage of the Trump administration and aired strident on-air criticism of the president during prime-time opinion shows. His replacement and Thompson’s predecessor, Chris Licht, tried to steer the network toward a more neutral posture, an attempt to broaden the network’s viewership among conservative viewers.

In the interview, Thompson said he wanted CNN journalists to avoid falling into any preset assumptions while covering Trump’s second term, adding that “typecasting” any newsmaker “is bad journalism.”

Some news organizations have agonized over whether to carry Trump — and his penchant for falsehoods — live on air. Thompson said that CNN would continue to carry Trump’s remarks live, with fact-checking, saying that Americans had a right to hear from the president of the United States and “form their own view.”

He said he regularly talked about the news with his boss, Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery. But he said Zaslav stayed out of editorial decisions, and that the board of Warner Bros. Discovery had done the same.

“Everyone’s got an opinion about the news,” Thompson said. “That’s not the point. Have they been supportive of my editorial independence? A hundred percent. Have they been supportive of the strategy? A hundred percent.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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