What's the strategy behind Licht's "green room massacre"?

The layoffs at CNN will reduce the company’s overall headcount by less than 10 percent. While some of the people affected will be very familiar to CNN viewers—contributors like Paul Begala and Preet Bharara, commentators like Chris Cillizza, correspondents like Alison Kosik and Dan Merica—the vast majority will be off-camera staffers. Some, surely, are replaceable, and some may have been in positions that were, to use the dreaded corporate buzzword, redundant. But many of those leaving CNN this week are folks who have historically been seen as crucial to the organization.

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Among them is Tommy Evans, a vice president and London bureau chief who oversaw news gathering for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. His title belied his true role at the company: Evans played a leading role overseeing CNN’s peerless coverage of the Ukraine war and other international conflicts—precisely the type of events that make CNN indispensable to viewers—and he was revered for his ability to shepherd CNN’s production teams in and out of war zones. He was a victim of a restructuring happening across bureaus, from Atlanta to London to Hong Kong, that will reduce headcount at the local leadership levels. David Ford, the head of programming in London, and Chris Eldergill, the head of sports in London, were also cut.

The biggest blow to the organization this week, arguably, is the loss of John Antonio, the vice president of programming in Atlanta and the number-two to Michael Bass, the head of programming and Licht’s conduit to the newsroom, who recently announced that he would leave at the end of this year. Programming a 24-hour global cable news network is a uniquely complicated task, and Bass and Antonio were the No. 1 and No. 2 leaders of a very small group of people who had an institutional knowledge of how that worked. With Bass and Antonio gone, that brain trust has been effectively dismantled, resulting in an even steeper learning curve for Licht and his longtime deputy Ryan Kadro, neither of whom has ever been responsible for more than a broadcast morning or late night show. The news of Antonio’s departure, which Bass announced on Friday, left people across the organization stunned. As it turns out, Antonio had fired himself, sources familiar with the matter said. He believed that by laying himself off and promoting his second in command, Nima Ahmed, he could save other people’s jobs. …

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In a memo to staff, Licht said the cuts would “strengthen our ability to deliver on CNN’s core journalistic mission and enable us to innovate in the years ahead.” Most of the several dozen CNN sources who I spoke to this week still don’t feel like they have a clear sense of exactly how these cuts will enable them to do that, nor where the innovation is going to come from.

[This looks more like the layoff scenes from “Broadcast News” than any strategic repositioning. That’s especially true of John Antonio, who almost exactly duplicated the Robert Prosky-Holly Hunter maneuver in that film. — Ed]

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