B&C profiles CNN International and newsgathering chief Tony Maddox in this week’s issue (subscription required).
Maddox got his start in journalism after a motorcycle accident got him kicked out of a band he was in. He ended up taking some post-graduate journalism courses, and he secured a job at the BBC:
After landing a job with the BBC in 1985, he quickly rose through the ranks and by his late 20s, he was running a newsroom>—highly unusual for the BBC in that era…
AdvertisementSimilar success followed at CNN after he joined the network in 1998. By 2007, Maddox was put in charge of CNN International, arriving at the top post at a time when the global news business was facing serious economic issues. Many broadcasters had been cutting back on international bureaus for years, a trend that accelerated with the global recession, and the number of cable and satellite news channels around the world exploded, creating new competition for CNN.
“The cost of entry has gone down and a plethora of new news services have entered the market, so all the margins have been squeezed,” Maddox notes.