Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Greetings from Los Angeles, where the Paramount people are debating whether it’d be better to be bought by Sony-Apollo or Skydance-RedBird (seriously, I was just outside their Hollywood offices). I’m headed to New York on Monday for meetings, then to Washington for the brunches, dinners, parties, and afterparties surrounding the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—including Puck and WME’s very own Fourth Estate party, where my partners Matt Belloni and Peter Hamby will host a conversation with the one and only Aaron Sorkin. I’m sure many of you will be on the same circuit, and I look forward to seeing you over passed canapés.

In tonight’s email, more CNN tasseography as Hudson Yards grows impatient and disillusioned with Mark Thompson’s lack of a strategic plan for the network’s digital transformation, or at least his decision to keep it under wraps. In his latest press engagement, the CNN chief was reliably long on ambitions and short on specifics—save for confirming that this will all take years, not months, and that more layoffs are almost certainly inevitable.

But first…

💰 Shot, via WSJ: “David Zaslav received pay valued at $49.7 million [last year], a 27 percent increase from 2022. … That is more than three times as much as the $15.6 million median pay of S&P 500 CEOs whose compensation had been disclosed through late March. … Zaslav’s stock award was tied to … free cash flow, which nearly doubled to $6.16 billion last year as the company moved aggressively to pay down debt.”

💸 Chaser, via NYT: “Warner Bros. Discovery is not exactly a portrait of health. Losses totaled $3 billion in 2023, which was actually an improvement from $7 billion in losses the year before. Revenue fell 4 percent, largely because of the company’s atrophying cable television business, which includes CNN.” … Oh, and: $WBD shares are down 66 percent post-merger.

💨 Meanwhile…: Warner Bros. Discovery board member and Zaz Svengali John Malone has announced that he is stepping down from his director emeritus position on the Charter board due to potential violations of the Clayton Act, which prohibits people from sitting on the boards of competing companies. This is the same antitrust measure that recently forced Advance representatives Steven Miron and Steven Newhouse to resign from the WBD board.

👀 And finally…: Former CNN chairman and C.E.O. Chris Licht was spotted at 30 Rock this week, where his appearance set off a minor flurry of speculation among NBC and MSNBC insiders about a new career move (why is Chris Licht standing next to Al Roker?!, etcetera). In fact, I’m told, Licht had been invited by his friend Col. Jack Jacobs, the network’s military analyst, to talk to West Point students about broadcast news.

Thompson, after all, was greeted last October as a serious leader with serious credibility—and thus, perhaps, a savior. Six-and-a-half months on from his arrival, however, optimism has been replaced by impatience and, increasingly, disillusionment. “Here’s a question for you,” the journalist wrote to me, rhetorically. “Why is Mark doing interviews with the FT when he has no strategic initiatives or wins to announce?”

Indeed, Thompson, the network’s genial and cerebral and still semi-new leader, had given the Financial Times an interview—his second press session so far this year, not counting sit-downs at the Blackstone C.E.O. Conference and The Century Club—in which he said, simultaneously, quite a lot and nothing at all. Such innocuous engagements might not warrant much attention among Thompson’s charges, were it not for the fact that, per the journalist’s point, they have no other means to gauge their leader’s strategic plan for the network—presuming it has come to fruition.

Thompson has now run CNN for nearly 200 days, half the tenure of his predecessor. Of course, that’s a tiny passage of time at any significant organization. And yet, just as obviously, it’s a near eternity in CNN years. This journalist’s impatience and borderline incredulousness may be reflective of the culture that expelled Licht, but it also neatly demonstrates the character of the attention-starved, twitchy, generally insecure creatures who rule the roost. But this person isn’t incorrect, either. In that time, Thompson has abstained from making almost any programming or editorial changes, which is the traditional bailiwick of television news executives, other than effectively canceling the morning show and forfeiting those hours to Morning Joe.

Instead, he has ostensibly and quietly focused on improving CNN’s digital business and seemingly bided some time until Alex MacCallum, the digital executive who helped him steward The New York Times through its own digital transformation in the last decade, showed up at CNN earlier this year. (MacCallum is returning to the business fully empowered despite infamously partaking in the CNN+ experiment.) In his interviews and extensive memoranda, Thompson has waxed on about the urgency of adapting to technological change and growing multiplatform engagement—the standard corporate media talking points—but has been reliably scant on details. And many within CNN, who suffered through the Licht whipsaw and fear for their own careers amid this transformation, are increasingly curious where they might fit into his plans and broader vision.

Presumably, Thompson is content with the current pace. He has lived through multiple eras in media, as director-general of the BBC and C.E.O. of The New York Times Co., and prefers a philosophical approach. (He is, in fact, a member of the American Philosophical Society.) Thompson knows that a full-scale transformation of a legacy media institution, with deeply entrenched habits and muscle memory, can’t be rushed. Recall, it wasn’t until a year and a half after the Times identified its challenges in the Digital Innovation Report that Thompson articulated a new strategy in his own memo, “Our Path Forward.” One CNN journalist mused that Thompson interpreted his current task as “a cerebral experiment” more than a personal imperative. “It’s not that he doesn’t take it seriously,” this person explained, “it just feels like he’s a bit bemused by it all and unbothered. He’s got nothing to prove or lose.”

This is also why every town hall or memo or interview in the WSJ or FT inspires so much tasseography. It is, in essence, a monthly or quarterly opportunity to divine whether there is indeed a plan, a strategy, a roadmap toward the promised future—to see whether CNN in the Thompson era will become something with an identity and a mission and a sensibility rather than the milquetoast HLN-style news digest currently on air, and the cacophonous mishmash of Messenger-style clickbait currently online.

Alas, the FT interview reinforced CNN staffers’ worst fears. “There are plenty of things we have to fix at CNN,” Thompson said. (Yes, but how…?) The shift to digital platforms posed an “existential question” for the network. (Okay, how did he intend to answer it?) Thompson also pointed to CNN’s existing digital audience of some 160 million visitors per month, allowing “there’s a large number of things we could do” to drive more digital revenue and noting that “digital subscription is a serious possibility,” but didn’t elaborate on what things he would do or what the aforementioned subscription product(s) might be.

At the same time, Thompson managed to exacerbate the acute anxieties of the linear veterans who still believe CNN should at least try to make compelling television, as it has done for the better part of the last 44 years. “Do we want to get more competitive in cable TV and by strengthening our schedules? Yes, we do,” Thompson said. “But the rate at which people have been and probably will continue to cut the cord and not look at cable TV at all is a far, far greater strategic threat than the finer points of competition between individual cable channels.” He’s not at all wrong—but he’s also not reassuring, either.

Notably, Thompson seemed to address his own employees’ impatience by emphasizing just how long it would take for things to change: “We’ll know in a few years’ time if we’re beginning to make progress, even if that still doesn’t look like it because of the aggregation of declining platforms and growing ones,” he said. Most CNN employees understand that change does not happen overnight, but few were aware they were being asked to wait years to begin to make progress.

Then came the final twist of the knife. When asked about potential cost-cutting on the path to digital reinvention, Thompson said there were “likely to be significant opportunities for de-duplication of parallel organizations and structures and activities. I think we can and should be looking for ways of doing what we do both better, but also doing it less expensively.” In the vernacular, that ChatGPT-style corporate pleonasm translates to: layoffs.

And one of the challenges with layoffs, of course, is that they tend to breed further resentment toward the leadership—particularly if that leader is short on strategic initiatives or wins. “Where are they? What’s the plan? Literally no one knows,” the aforementioned CNN journalist said. I thought about suggesting here that there might be a plan, only that it hadn’t been announced yet. But the journalist preempted: “I also think, at this point, no one even cares,” they wrote. “The competitive spirit seems to be fading fast.”