This week, CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson announced that he had
hired Wall Street Journal video content chief Amanda Wills to serve in the newly created role of chief content officer, facilitating the news network’s long-awaited digital transformation. (For those keeping track, Thompson is about 530-plus days into the job.) The news was notable on a few fronts, though it garnered little fanfare beyond boilerplate write-ups in the trades. Such is the nature of personnel changes in TV these days—and especially at CNN, which
is slouching through one of the most riveting periods in American political history with scant influence, a messy and archaic digital product, and averaging half a million linear viewers per hour of programming.

Last summer, Thompson spent months courting Josh Tyrangiel, the former wunderkind Bloomberg Businessweek editor and onetime Vice News programming chief, for this job.
Tyrangiel ultimately determined he didn’t want it—a decision that may have saved CNN veterans from having to placate a renowned internal operator, but also denied them a much-needed innovation injection. More than half a year later, Thompson finally came around to Wills, who is indisputably talented—she grew audience and engagement for video at the Journal, and won some awards—but quite junior compared to someone like Tyrangiel, and not necessarily a game changer.

To wit, the most notable detail about the hire was that it signaled a broader reversion. Back at the beginning of this decade, when Jeff Zucker was trying to stand up the oft-maligned CNN+, Wills served as vice president of content programming for the latent streamer and executive producer of breaking news for CNN Digital. She was part of a team working under then-digital chief Andrew Morse,
which also included Alex MacCallum, the E.V.P. of CNN Digital; Rebecca Kutler, the head of CNN+ programming; and Nancy Han, a CNN+ programming V.P. 

After Warner Bros. Discovery took control of the network in April 2022, killed CNN+ in the crib, and installed Chris Licht as C.E.O., all of the aforementioned executives left:
first Morse, who eventually became the president and publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; then, in a July exodus, MacCallum went to The Washington Post; Kutler went to MSNBC, where she is now network president; and Han started her own consultancy. Notably, all of those folks continued to receive handsome payouts from CNN—a cost referred to internally as “the Licht tax.”

Last January, Thompson started getting the gang back together. He hired MacCallum as E.V.P. of digital and tasked her with bringing his digital transformation to fruition. Now, in addition to bringing Wills back into the fold, he announced last week that he had rehired Han, too, as S.V.P. of video editorial. Much of the cohort responsible for CNN+ is thus back in charge of CNN’s digital video operations, pursuing a strategy to drive digital engagement and subscriptions. (One curious
aspect of this new-old structure is that Wills will report not to MacCallum, but rather to executive editor Virginia Moseley—an arrangement that would seem to confirm Moseley’s seniority over editorial, but also the need to make allowances to the digital side.)

Unsurprisingly, CNN veterans see Thompson’s latest hires as an admission that the Zucker regime had at least been directionally
right in building CNN+—a subscription-supported digital service that would ultimately become home for the linear feed—and that Licht and David Zaslav had been too reckless in dismantling it. “Everything they undid they have now reassembled,” one network veteran observed. 

Of course, that’s not entirely true, and it reflects some of the blind spots of the players in this drama. Thompson’s hires suggest a decidedly scaled-down,
less ambitious, and far less expensive iteration of the old plan. He’s bringing in talents to segue CNN for a vertical-video present rather than a streaming future. If Zucker’s intention was to take a subscale brand and attempt to turbo-power it into the next age, Thompson’s vision is the opposite: Take a waning brand and unsentimentally prepare it for a more humble and sustainable future without making a fuss.

Meanwhile, WBD announced this week that the company is looking to hire a
dedicated ad sales chief for CNN, a reversal of the company’s initial decision to streamline the sales function across the WBD portfolio into one team. That familiar cost-cutting measure would have inevitably deprived CNN of having its own dedicated sellers with important relationships and sector expertise. “It’s an admission that Discovery fucked up and now realizes they need a dedicated CNN seller,” one CNN veteran told me. 

At the very least, these shuffle-the-deck-chairs personnel moves are yet another reminder of just how much time the network has lost since the WBD takeover. Under Licht, CNN jettisoned its core linear audience while doing nothing to bolster its digital business. Annual revenues, which surged in the Zucker era (thanks in no small part to Trump), began declining in Licht’s first year, and have continued to do so outside of
election years. Kagan projects that CNN will once again lose linear subscribers this year, and anticipates ad revenue falling from $563.9 million in 2024 to about $499.2 million. 

And while Thompson remains clear-eyed regarding the very obvious and irreversible decline of linear engagement, and the need for digital innovation, he has yet to demonstrate a similar aptitude for ideating and executing
solutions—as my partner Julia Alexander articulated on The Grill Room this week, it’s possible they simply do not exist. Meanwhile, Kaitlan Collins’s return to Washington as both primetime host and White House correspondent showed signs of an actual effort to insert CNN back into the national zeitgeist, though doing so will
require a far more creative, aggressive, and comprehensive programming and marketing strategy. Kaitlan cut ties with the show’s executive producer, Kristin Donnelly, last month, and a lot may be riding on who they tap to replace her.

In any event, CNN continues to wait for its transformation… and wait, and wait. Beyond the existential crisis that seems to have presented for its journalists and the network itself, it’s also worth
noting, in light of global and domestic events, that it’s a particularly inopportune time for the nation to be deprived of a robust, relatively nonpartisan 24-hour news network. “CNN is not meeting the moment at all when it’s needed the most,” one veteran media executive observed. “If ever the world needed a strong CNN… now is it.”