CNN Drops Over A HUNDRED Staffers Amid Ratings Collapse
CNN Drops Over A HUNDRED Staffers Amid Ratings Collapse. CNN has dropped over 100 staffers amid a 'restructuring' and a move to a new studio. We are also learning that VICE will end several of its brands and push them under the VICE.com umbrella.Lastly, Gizmodo network will see around 25 layoffs.CNN's ratings have been in decline for a while with a loss of over 26% since last year to a new 4 year low. Following this news it is unsurprising we see CNN dropping so many staff members.As these companies start fading away they become more like far left activists and less like journalists. Their stories become focused on rivals in the digital space in order to generate ratings and new subscribers. But the leftist social justice push isn't working and these companies are on the way out. Far left media is taking a big hit as times change and they lose audience and this is just another story in the collapse of media.Fox News on the other hand, while still losing viewers, is doing well with over 3M viewers in its primetime slots.
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CNN has just dropped more than 100 employees through a voluntary buyout program.
The initial rumor was that CNN was going to lay off a large portion of its staff as it moves to a new studio in Hudson Yards.
But as it turns out, it was a voluntary buyout program.
Now, it's not too dissimilar from layoffs.
They just gave their staff the choice to leave in exchange for money, instead of choosing who had to leave.
Now, this news makes sense.
We heard just about a week ago that CNN's ratings are down 26%, so it follows that they're going to downsize the company.
The bad news isn't only for CNN, though.
We recently heard that Vice Media was going to collapse several of its brands back under the umbrella, essentially shuttering various websites.
We're also hearing that Gizmodo will be laying off around 25 of its staff members as well.
There are a lot of reasons why media is collapsing.
Business mistakes, bad politics, but also the monopolization of the digital ad space by Facebook and Google.
Today, let's take a look at what's going on with CNN, why they're downsizing, why these other companies are downsizing, and we'll take a look at some of the reasons why this is happening.
But before we get started, make sure you follow me on Mines at Mines.com slash Timcast.
I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket, which is YouTube, because YouTube can be biased, and so can Twitter and these other platforms, so it's important to have a backup channel.
As these media companies start dying out, they become desperate, they smear people, and they also want to end their competition, which makes it particularly dangerous to have all of your content on one platform.
Now if you want to support this video, just share it on social media to help spread the news.
From Deadline, more than 100 CNN workers take voluntary buyouts amid move to Hudson Yards.
The story says, CNN is the latest division of AT&T's WarnerMedia to feel the effects of company-wide restructuring, with voluntary buyouts being taken by more than 100 seasoned workers at the cable news network.
A network spokesperson tells Deadline the exits are purely related to the buyouts and do not involve any layoffs, contrary to a press report earlier on Monday.
A WarnerMedia rep said there was no truth to the initial reports of layoffs.
The buyouts are consistent with similar offerings at HBO and Turner and will see dozens of seasoned employees leave the news brand.
WarnerMedia parent AT&T is looking to restructure and reduce what was a $170 billion in net debt as of the end of 2018.
The story goes on to say, WarnerMedia has been executing restructuring moves beginning at the earnest after the federal government lost its appeal of a lawsuit challenging AT&T's $81 billion takeover of Time Warner.
The company has been lowering that leverage through various means.
Among them, setting a deal to unload its 10% stake in Hulu.
The story goes on to say that CNN is moving to Hudson Yards, a new studio space where it has already begun broadcasting.
This news comes only about a week after we saw this from Forbes.
CNN drops 26% in prime time as Fox News dominates April cable ratings.
Now, CNN says these are voluntary buyouts, there are no layoffs.
But the initial rumor was that it was a layoff.
That's probably bad press they didn't want, because CNN isn't doing too well.
They need to maintain some kind of status so that people continue to watch them.
Because if the narrative becomes CNN is old guard and they're dying off and there's no reason to watch, then people will probably stop watching faster.
CNN's chief media correspondent Brian Stelter addressed this by saying, there's a rumor making the rounds today about big impending layoffs at CNN.
A CNN spokeswoman is knocking it down on the record.
No layoffs.
There were voluntary buyouts throughout the organization, and about 100 people opted for it.
But, again, if you're going to ask me, buyouts are what happen just before the layoffs.
If your company's ratings are down 26%, and then you do a buyout, I wouldn't be surprised if you then push for layoffs shortly thereafter.
Forbes says April ranks as CNN's lowest-rated month among total viewers in nearly four years, since October 2015.
CNN's Cuomo primetime, which has been the network's highest-rated hour, drew a total audience of 917,000 viewers in April.
The show's worst ever performance.
But to make it worse, they say, among viewers 25 to 54, the demographic most coveted by
national advertisers, the falloff for CNN was even more stark, down 41 percent.
CNN drew 198,000 viewers in the demo, behind MSNBC and Fox News.
All three networks saw year-over-year declines in April, with MSNBC down 36 percent and Fox
News down 19 percent.
Taking a look at the scoreboard from just five days ago, we can see that CNN doesn't even break a million viewers anymore.
Now, their ratings have fluctuated.
This is just their ratings over the past year.
But looking at MSNBC, consistently over a million, with Maddow at 2.79 million, and Fox News consistently over 2 million, With Carlson at 3.1 and Hennedy at 3.5, CNN is faring the worst among primetime ratings, especially in the key demographic.
And I'm gonna do this because I love doing it.
My ratings in the key demo are higher than CNN's, and actually, my total ratings for the day are higher than CNN's.
So it's no surprise there's buyouts.
They are the old guard.
No one really watches the TV that way anymore.
Sure, maybe they go online and watch a stream.
Sometimes CNN has coverage that makes sense to watch on TV, but for the most part, the joke is that CNN is the airport news network.
Many people think that the only reason they have ratings is because the network is playing in hotel lobbies and at airports.
They're not doing too well.
And it results in some pretty dangerous things.
As someone is drowning, they start thrashing about violently in the water, trying to stay afloat.
Quite literally, grasping at straws.
And then we see these ridiculous reports where their media reporters complain about info wars.
And if you were to ask me the reason they're so concerned about certain personalities on YouTube and Facebook, It's because it generates controversy, and they're trying to build audience online.
Address an online controversy, get audience online.
That's at least my opinion.
I can't say that's for sure, but it seems to me that they're looking for a reason to stay afloat, and they're becoming increasingly more activist-y.
They're specifically targeting certain brands and not others.
They complain about Mafic Media, which has backing from Ruptly and Russia Today, but they don't care about Al Jazeera.
Because to me, it seems like CNN is just trying to find a reason to get viewers, and they don't actually care about being a news brand anymore.
This is why they have documentary shows, and this is why they're targeting InfoWars.
But it's not just CNN.
Last week we heard Gizmodo and The Onion's new owner lays off 25, including their top editors.
The story says Geo Media, the newly formed company comprised of the assets of the former Gizmodo Media, will lay off 25 employees, according to a memo that company CEO Jim Spanfeller sent to staffers on Tuesday.
Among those departing are some of the company's top editors, including executive managing editor Alex Dickinson and editorial director Susan Bannik-Haram.
Tim Marchman, who headed up Gizmodo Media's investigative special projects division, was also out, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to The Wrap.
The story continues by saying the cuts are an early embarrassment for Stanfeller and the company, which promised only days ago that it would be able to proceed without layoffs.
Of course he's going to claim they didn't have to lay people off, but I predicted they would.
told Variety in an interview published on April 25th.
We are confident we can make this a profitable, fast-growing business.
Of course he's going to claim they didn't have to lay people off, but I predicted they
would.
There's no way there's going to be an acquisition of a failing enterprise where they're not
going to lay people off and try and find where they can grow the business.
And of course, Univision sold it for less than they bought it for, which means it's
probably holding them back.
Layoffs, in my opinion, inevitable.
And now we're hearing from Vice, because Vice is collapsing several of its brands.
Of course, when it's reported, Vice makes it seem like a good thing.
Waypoint is joining the new Vice.com.
New URL, same us.
However, the Vice unit framed it rather differently, saying, as of today, Broadly, Tonic, and Waypoint no longer exist.
and have been folded into Vice.
This change has been and continues to be challenging for many,
and we urge Vice management to, at the very least, keep the spirits of these publications alive through these
workers.
Fortunately, the noisy music, munchies, and motherboard brands
will continue to exist under one Vice, as management has taken to calling this restructuring.
Although our situation is difficult, Vice Union will use this restructuring as an opportunity
to build solidarity between our three separate bargaining units,
editorial production and post-production, during a trying time for vice workers.
We'll call ourselves One Vice Union.
Now here's something very interesting.
The waypoint joining vice.com, new URL same us, was published May 6th at 9.09am.
However, The Vice Union tweeted at 12.05pm that Broadly Tonic and Waypoint no longer exist.
And if you were going to ask me, I would take the Union's word for it.
Vice obviously wants to save face.
They don't want to tell investors.
They don't want to tell new potential advertisers.
They're losing their cool and their company's in trouble.
But the union has other priorities.
The union needs to make sure people know if they're losing their jobs.
So here, the union is going to say, guys, these don't exist anymore.
That may mean several staff members are losing their jobs, and they're urging the company to keep the brands alive.
Now there's a lot of reasons for layoffs, and there's a really important one that has to do with censorship as well.
In this story from the American Prospect, they say, digital media is suffocating, and it's Facebook and Google's fault.
Newsrooms across the country are laying off journalists because the ad dollars generated from their work all filter up to big tech.
The story starts by saying roughly 2,400 journalists and media staffers in the U.S.
lost our jobs in the first few months of 2019.
The writer says I was laid off in January after nearly a decade in my newsroom.
The Huffington Post had hired me in November 2009 to write what Arianna Huffington called the flesh and blood stories of the recession.
People losing their jobs, plunging underwater on their mortgages, hocking their wedding rings to put food on the table.
My first beat was economic suffering.
I didn't understand at the time that journalism was staring down its own Great Recession.
She goes on to talk about the wave of layoffs that have hit all of these companies this year from BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Vice, etc.
Ultimately, the story goes on to talk about how Google is restricting third-party companies, how they take a big cut of ad revenue, and they essentially dominate the market.
Here's the thing.
A lot of these news brands built their companies off of Facebook and Google's algorithm.
If you Google search something, they wanted to be first.
Search engine optimization was so important for these brands to get traffic.
And there's only so many results you can get on Google.com.
For Facebook, these companies are trying to game the algorithm so that Facebook would show you new content when you logged in.
We ended up seeing rage-bait content to rile you up, get you to click, and get you to share.
When Facebook and Google changed their algorithms, all of these companies lost money and are now laying people off.
It's true for us on YouTube as well.
YouTube could just change the algorithm tomorrow and my videos disappear from your feed.
I've already seen many people saying they don't even get notifications for my videos anymore.
Why is that?
Well, it's because YouTube said in a video, That they only want to show notifications to people who they think are truly your biggest fans.
Which makes no sense.
If someone says they want the notification, then send them the notification even if their phone won't stop vibrating.
It's on them to decide, not YouTube.
Google and Facebook have too much control over the comments.
The public space where we communicate, where we see billboards.
It used to be that you'd drive down the road and you'd see a billboard.
There's your advertisement.
It used to be that you would go to a town hall meeting and have a conversation, or you'd go to a pub or the watering hole.
Now it's all condensed under a few tech monopolies.
It's destroying journalism, and it's also hurting independent creators.
But I'm not going to shy away from the fact that these companies, in their disgusting desperation, turn to smearing anybody who may be succeeding as they die off.
They're so angry that other companies are doing well, they lie, they cheat, and they smear.
They're playing politics.
They're lying about people like me.
They lie about other YouTubers because they just don't like the fact that we're succeeding where they are failing.
The old guard is dying off.
We do have big problems with tech monopolies.
Something has to be done about this.
But the solution won't come when other journalists drag us through the mud.
Because then all you're doing is ensuring we're against each other while the tech monopolies take over and destroy business for most big companies.
They're serious problems.
I don't know all the answers.
What I do know is CNN, Gizmodo, Vice, they're hurting.
They're laying people off.
They're buying people out.
It's going to keep happening.
It's not going to stop here.
And as long as they keep smearing people like me, I will not be sticking up for them.
Nor will anyone else.
I'd be really surprised to see independent journalists coming to the defense of these companies.
No.
They're going to gloat.
I don't think gloating is the right response, but they're going to do it because these media outlets keep smearing us.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
What do you think the biggest problem is?
One of the reasons I think they're losing audience is because when they make smears, when they lie, people know.
And they don't want to watch Russiagate conspiracy nonsense.
When people watch my videos, they know what I talk about.
They don't want to hear smears from activist journalists.
But the reality is, the activist journalists come about because the companies are dying.
It's a downward spiral.
They can't escape.
I think it's twofold.
The biggest problem in my opinion?
The monopolies.
But again, you let me know what you think and we'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Mines at TimCast.
Stay tuned.
New videos every day at 4 p.m.
And I'll have more videos for you on my second channel, youtube.com slash timcastnews starting at 6 p.m.
