American Morning Fallout…
The New York Times’ Brian Stelter picks up where Page Six and Robert Feder left off and writes about American Morning’s apparent imminent demise. Stelter breaks new ground here…
The latest round of overhauls started last December, when the co-anchor John Roberts left the program and joined Fox News, and continued in July, when Kiran Chetry left. It is unclear whether the interim anchors of “American Morning,” Ali Velshi, Christine Romans and Carol Costello, will retain any role on the new morning programs.
Mr. Velshi, a business reporter, is expected to anchor a business program on CNN International.
What? More CNNI changes? A business show for Velshi? Isn’t that Richard Quest’s beat? How is Quest going to feel about that?
Update: TVNewser’s Chris Ariens writes that the new shows probably won’t launch until the first of the year which is what I would have figured. A December launch isn’t enough time and with the silly season in full swing a bad time to be launching a show.
October 30, 2011 at 3:17 pm
probably fit to be tied
October 30, 2011 at 3:19 pm
CNNI has a bunch of business programs. Quest doesn’t have a monopoly on that beat. I don’t think Velshi will crowd him out.
October 30, 2011 at 3:19 pm
I’m not touching that.
October 30, 2011 at 3:27 pm
CNN has World Business Today and Quest Means Business. The rest are a hodge podge of 15 minute programs under the Marketplace banner. But my point, which you don’t apparently see, is that Quest was the big fish in the tank…the one that went globe hopping and going to all the big business events. Velshi is too big a presence to be kept confined to a desk all the time on something like World Business Today so his presence is definitely going to eat into Quest’s profile, though I’m not certain to what extent.
October 30, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Sounds to me like Ken Jautz thinks Velshi should be hawking flowbee’s and is booting him to CNNI until his contract runs out!
Now, if only Blitzer could pimp bamboo steamers beside Velshi will CNN domestic start to make gains via addition by subtraction.
October 30, 2011 at 4:59 pm
There are only four people at CNN I would consider untouchable: Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Fareed Zakaria, and Piers Morgan. Everyone else is expendable/disposable. Interesting that all four were Jon Klein projects, though Blitzer’s hire pre-dates Klein.