By David Bauder, Media Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --CNN's new chief executive says the company needs to recapture the "swagger and innovation" of its early days — and that, he says, increasingly means embracing a future outside of television.
Mark Thompson, appointed CNN's chief executive last fall after stints at The New York Times and BBC, outlined a strategy to his staff Wednesday that included a corporate restructuring but few external specifics on how that transformation will take place.
Once a "scrappy outsider," CNN has been slow to respond to the reality of its primary television business shrinking, Thompson said in his memo. He was not made available for an on-the-record interview with The Associated Press.
"There's currently too little innovation and risk-taking," Thompson said in the memo. "Like so many other news players with a broadcast heritage, CNN's linear services and even its website can sometimes have an old-fashioned and unadventurous feel as if the world has changed and they haven't."
CNN needs to follow the audience, and smartphones are where most people under 40 first turn for news, he said.
To change the thinking, Thompson said the current national, international and digital teams need to be combined into one unit, under the leadership of Virginia Moseley as executive editor. Mike McCarthy will become CNN's managing editor.
Atlanta-based CNN is also hiring Alex MacCallum, currently chief revenue officer at The Washington Post, as an executive in charge of digital projects and services.
That's where Thompson, known for establishing the digital subscription service that transformed the Times as a business the past decade, will look for sustained revenue at CNN. It's not clear whether this will mean a paid subscription service or other products.
In the past, CNN hasn't always "gone the extra mile to squeeze every bit of value from the outstanding news and other intellectual property we create," he wrote. "No longer."
He said the CNN.com website needs "drastic modernization." The network also needs multiple digital projects to complement the CNN Max streaming service, he said.
With cord-cutting, the audience for cable television in the U.S. has fallen by one-fifth in the past two years, he said. CNN's full-day ratings averaged 479,000 in 2023, down 15% from a year earlier. Fox News Channel's 1.22 million was down 18% and MSNBC's 780,000 was up 6%, according to the Nielsen company.
Thompson said CNN's television personalities must find multiplatform audiences, and praised Anderson Cooper's "All There Is" podcast about grief.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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