New leadership at CNN is looking to trim tens of millions of dollars from its annual spending, and new boss Mark Thompson is telling the network’s on-air talent that he’ll be drastically cutting their salaries in the coming weeks, according to insiders who spoke with The Wrap.
With ratings in free fall, Thompson is set to unleash his promised “revolution” at CNN starting with its talent roster. Top-earning anchors include Anderson Cooper at $20 million, Wolf Blitzer at $15 million, Jake Tapper at $8.5 million, and Chris Wallace at $8 million. Lower-level anchors including John Berman, Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner hold annual salaries between $1 million and $2 million, sources added. Others, like former anchor Don Lemon, have already been cut loose for performance reasons.
Last month, Thompson sent all staff a memo laying out his plans to reorient the network toward digital and subscription services while mentioning that current production costs of its primetime shows “now look difficult to support.” However, Thompson will have to wait until at least 2025 or even 2026 when contracts expire and he can renegotiate paychecks for his top stars.
“The first thing they need to do is dramatically reduce costs,” Rich Greenfield, a partner and media and tech analyst at LightShed Partners, told The Wrap. “If you work at CNN your compensation is going to go down dramatically over the next…five years, there’s just no other way around it.”
After taking over from Chris Licht in October, Thompson has been under heavy pressure to replicate the success of digital and subscription models he enhanced at the BBC and New York Times. CNN has been badly trailing rival networks Fox News and MSNBC for some time which was cited in the dismissal of Licht, whose tenure was marked by attempts to shift the network away from its anti-Trump posture and toward its traditional focus of unbiased coverage.
Greenfield told The Wrap that parent company Warner Bros. should cut its losses while CNN is still worth something.
“But they don’t seem like they want to,” he said. “The most likely scenario is they cut a lot of cost out of it,” he said.
Salaries at Thompson’s previous homes are drastically lower than CNN. The highest-paid BBC star, former soccer player Gary Lineker, earns $1.7 million annually, while New York Times staff are far below the realm of comparison.
The era of monumentally paid TV news talent is over, Green added. “It’s not like CNN will lose their talent, there’s nowhere to go that would pay that much.”
Another insider who spoke candidly said there’s no reason for CNN to have multiple anchors for an individual show.
“Don’t have three anchors anchor a show,” the person said. “What’s the point of that? It’s ridiculous.”
In his memo, Thompson said the demise of cable TV packages and a loss of younger viewers have contributed to CNN’s decline.
“CNN has been slow to respond to the challenge. Perhaps that’s not surprising: the CNN of today is no longer that buccaneering outsider but a tenured incumbent.”
He added, “You still see our strength when big stories break. We still sport brilliant on-air, digital and producing talent and have one of the world’s most visited news websites. But, despite all these strengths, there’s currently too little innovation and risk-taking. 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.”
