CNN Shuffles Anchors Across Daytime Schedule

CNN said it would shuffle anchors across its weekday and weekend daytime schedules, grouping them together in new ways the network hopes will attract viewers as it attempts to work its way out of a longtime ratings shortfall.

John Berman, Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner will lead a three-hour mid-morning program from New York that lasts from 9 a.m. to noon, while Brianna Keilar, Boris Sanchez and Jim Sciutto will anchor a three-hour Washington, D.C. broadcast between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. John King will keep his noontime show “Inside Politics” on weekdays.

CNN intends to showcase an energetic “newsroom headquarters” concept that untethers anchors from their desks and tries to show newsgathering and reporting on screen most of the time. Chris Licht, who took over as CNN’s CEO last year, told Variety earlier this week that he wants to make CNN look more kinetic and energetic than the network’s rivals — and that daytime programming offers a good place to start. “The look and feel of CNN during daytime is what people equate with CNN,” he told Variety.

CNN said the new programming and format would roll out “in coming months,” though Licht indicated they could be put in place as soon as the end of the first quarter.

Read Related Also: Rebel Wilson Denies She’s Engaged to Ramona Aruma

Licht is working to move on from a heavily scrutinized year during which parent Warner Bros. Discovery scuttled an ambitious streaming-video hub called CNN+, then mandated staffing cuts at its news business as it grappled with massive amounts of debt it took on in order to buy up the former Time Warner portfolio from AT&T. CNN’s total day viewership among people between 25 and 54 in 2022 fell 35%, but it was bigger than MSNBC’s, though smaller than that of Fox News.

There are other changes in store.

More to come….