Welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, coming to you from Los Angeles, where I’m doing meetings before seeing my White Sox take on the Dodgers, then hopping a plane for more meetings abroad.

This week, an examination of the streaming struggles ahead for CNN, a cable network trying to decipher the future of news when more than 75 percent of Gen Z audiences get their information from social media at least once a week, 48 percent of those audiences aren’t interested in cable news, and the linear TV model is slowly but surely melting away. David Zaslav has a much weightier challenge than simply a leadership transition.

In many ways, however, Licht was handed an impossible task. While the spotlight focused...