CNN considers former New York Times CEO Sir Mark John Thompson (Aug 2012-July 2020) for top job

7.57pm London / 2.57pm DC

The former New York Times and BBC chief Sir Mark Jon Thompson is a leading candidate to lead CNN.

Thompson, who left the Times in 2020 after 8 years, is among a group of candidates in the mix for the job.

Since the firing of CNN Chairman Christopher Andrew Licht in June, CNN has been led by a triumvirate of veteran network leaders as it struggles for a place in a partisan U.S. cable news environment increasingly dominated by MSNBC and Fox News.

Thompson’s name has not appeared in voluminous published speculation about the top CNN role, but he has obvious qualifications. He arrived at the New York Times at a desperate moment, and led a spectacular turnaround that turned the company into a dominant player in digital news.

But Thompson’s roots are in TV. Like many top television executives, he began his career as a star producer in the 1980s, and in his 30s led prestige U.K. news programs including Newsnight and Panorama.

Thompson, 66, held top programming jobs at the BBC before becoming chief executive of Channel 4 and then Director-General of the BBC, a high-stakes, intensely political job atop a complex public broadcaster.

Thompson was brought on to accelerate the NYT's digital transition and extend its global reach, and in this role he directs strategy and oversees business operations. Thompson invested heavily in the Times' digital products, and has attributed increased autonomy for the digital product teams as "the single biggest reason" for the news outlet's success.

In 2013, he hired Meredith Kopit Levien as chief revenue officer and promoted her to chief operating officer in 2017. In July 2020, he was replaced by Meredith Kopit Levien as CEO and president of the New York Times Company. As of May 2020, the company surpassed 5 million digital-only subscriptions, and 6 million total subscriptions, accounting for nearly sixty per cent of the company's revenue.

Levien was Thompson's first major executive hire, when he made her the Times chief revenue officer four years ago, poaching her from Forbes, where she had been pivotal in building that company's pioneering branded content business. In her four years at the Times, she has transformed its approach to advertising sales, re-skilling and re-training sales staff and moving profoundly to the kind of "consultative selling" model that many publishers talk about, but have been slow to execute.

"With Meredith, I find that things happen and they happen quickly, in repeated cycles," says Thompson, in explaining the promotion. Indeed, internally, her work is well-respected, and she's known as a tough-minded manager and a risk taker.

Thompson has been critical of Google and Facebook. He has said the Times seeks to be a destination and not reliant on the platforms, and hopes to "more reliably turn engagement into a regular revenue stream". In 2018, he gave a speech at the Open Markets Institute in Washington, D.C., in which he described Facebook's policy of labeling political news as ads as "a threat to democracy".

That is to say, Thompson’s credentials as a media turnaround artist and as a manager of giant, high-wire corporate cultures media are unmatched. That experience might make him an attractive choice for Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav after Licht, a star programmer who had not run a giant company, struggled in the role. April 2022, Zaslav oversaw the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia into Warner Bros. Discovery, and later the re-naming of the streaming service HBO Max into Max.

Friends say there’s no guarantee that Thompson would want the job, which appears likely to feature endless rounds of grim cost-control measures for a slowly declining cable business and an uncertain streaming future.

He’s said to spending time at his home in Maine and enjoying board posts at institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was knighted by King Charles of England in June. But television, former New York Times colleagues say, is in his blood, and it may be hard for him not to consider the top job at an iconic global company.

In September 2021, it was announced that Thompson would co-chair, with Filipino journalist, editor, Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, the International Fund for Public Interest Media.

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