CNN’s president Jeff Zucker held a meeting in London on May 28th and told staff that the international channel was losing almost $1 million a month.   

A separate report on May 6th talked of 300 jobs going across the CNN group, and mainly affecting long-term staffers. CNN International’s highly-regarded EVP/MD Tony Maddox announced he was leaving the network after 21 years with CNN, he said it was “time for a rest”.

Not all the staff losses are terminations with reports that more than 100 staff have taken voluntary redundancy.

According to reports the London bureau will lose output of programming equal to some 90 minutes a day. In place of trimmed programming the channel will show more repeats as well as simulcasting output from the broadcaster’s news headquarters in Atlanta, and more hours out of its Abu Dhabi bureau.

One report says that 13 editorial jobs will go, while some tasks will be relocated to Atlanta. A spokesperson said the company’s overall headcount would not be affected.

However, not helping matters overall is a collapse in CNN’s US ratings, with April’s prime-time ratings crashing 26 percent compared to the same month last year. Fox News had three-times the number of viewers (according to Neilson).  

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