CNN+ Officially Done for as Employees Receive Crushing Pink Slips on Morning Call
CNN has reportedly laid off the last remaining staff of its extremely short-lived CNN+ streaming service.
Verbal “pink slips” went out to about 20 staffers during a Wednesday-morning phone call, multiple unnamed sources told The Daily Beast.
The eliminated jobs included members of “The Interview Club,” a team designed to allow subscribers to “connect directly with anchors, experts and special guests in live, interactive conversations,” according to the report.
Two CNN insiders also said this group of staffers had been “strung along” with a promise of jobs elsewhere on the digital side, according to The Daily Beast report.
Some people were surprised to learn that CNN+ still had any staff left, as the network’s new parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, pulled the plug on the service April 28, less than a month after its launch.
via @thedailybeast – Five months after the network axed its much-hyped but short-lived streamer, it gave pink slips to the remaining staffers on the failed endeavor.#CNN #media #layoffs https://t.co/5y3WVo5tbZ
— Joe Ferullo (@ironworker1) September 28, 2022
The CNN+ streaming service was not a cheap venture. CNN spent close to $100 million in development costs on the service, not to mention “huge expenses on promotion,” Deadline reported.
It was one of the first to go on the chopping block after the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, according to The Daily Beast.
“Hundreds of employees, some of whom had just joined the network, lost their jobs” at that time, the report said.
Earlier in the week, CNN also let go “a number of employees in its podcasting unit,” MSN reported.
Insider reported the number of layoffs in that instance was “about eight… impacting editorial and sales.”
“Audio is an important growth area for the company,” a CNN representative told Insider, according to the report.
“Over the last several years we’ve learned a lot about the topics and productions that most resonate with our audiences. As a result, we’ve refined our strategy to focus our resources more specifically in those areas.”
Bloomberg quoted one of the laid-off audio employees, Alexander McCall, as expressing his disappointment on Twitter.
“It’s just a bummer to watch companies pull the plug on or disinvest from business units that are so young,” McCall tweeted, according to the report. “Especially when you’ve seen firsthand the work of so many people to make it profitable.”
The cuts are a result of the network’s change in ownership, Bloomberg reported.
“Warner Bros. is seeking $3 billion in cost savings since its April merger with Discovery. It let go of around 100 sales employees earlier this month, after laying off about 70 employees who worked on programming for HBO and HBO Max in August.”
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