New CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker has made quite the impact in his week and a half at CNN. Following the madness yesterday, television critics and media writers are trying to analyze what the changes mean. You can read our take on the matter here.
Lloyd Grove in The Daily Beast argues that this is just the beginning of the changes. he also gets James Carville to comment:
More executive departures and arrivals are in the offing, CNN insiders predicted, and Zucker will likely recruit such longtime loyalists as Michael Bass, a member of Team Zucker at NBC and currently co-executive producer of Katie.
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The Baltimore Sun‘s David Zurawik was very impressed by the early changes:
It’s hard not to be impressed by what he’s already done: Started to make CNN suddenly seem a couple of decades younger. It’s like watching an aggressive and skilled general manager rebuild a baseball team from the bottom up — first adding younger but already tested major-league talent to the roster while releasing some one-time big names that were no longer productive.
In The Hollywood Reporter, Tim Goodman said the moves were bold ones:
Reading the tea leaves on these moves indicates a couple of fairly obvious points: Zucker did his advance scouting on talent he’d like to poach and wasted little time in securing their services to shore up some of CNN’s numerous weak spots.
Politico’s Dylan Byers and Mackenzie Weinger recap the day’s news:
The changes are part of Zucker’s larger effort to transform CNN from an old, tired, 24-hour breaking news channel into an entertaining, personality-driven network that no longer restricts the definition of news to “war, famine, pestilence and politics,” as CNN host Piers Morgan recently put it to POLITICO.