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For Thompson, running CNN may not be the swan song he expected.

  For Thompson, running CNN may not be the swan song he expected.  As his Times tenure was winding down, there were rumors he was interested in the presidentship of Magdalen College at Oxford, his alma mater (though he was a Merton College guy). Most recently, he’s been chairman of the board at Ancestry, the online genealogical service. In 2020, Thompson did an exit interview for Quest Means Business on CNN International, hosted by his former BBC colleague Richard Quest, who asked what might come next in Thompson’s career. Beamed in from a rustic kitchen in Maine,  Thompson replied, “I like big challenges, that should be fairly apparent. That might come in the shape of another big executive job, but it might not. I’m interested in the puzzle of how you help organizations confront the present and the future…. If I can help one or more organizations in the future, I’d love to do that.”
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Making it work will involve the tall order of reviving CNN’s ratings, stemming a drop in profits,

  Making it work will involve the tall order of reviving CNN’s ratings, stemming a drop in profits,  managing the decline of the network’s traditional television business while finessing its shift to streaming. CNN took a big step in that direction last week with the announcement of CNN Max on WBD’s Max service, which will be a mix of certain shows broadcast live from the main feed and programming developed exclusively for the new platform.  Then there’s the more fundamental task of bringing sustained order and morale to a company that has effectively been in a state of turmoil ever since Jeff Zucker was shown the door almost 19 months ago for having an undisclosed romantic relationship with a fellow CNN executive. Thompson has already been calling around to certain figures within the organization, and he will begin making the rounds in person in the coming weeks, starting with the CNN command center at Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s far West Side. In a memo to employees on ...
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