British media manager Mark Thompson is expected to be picked as the next CEO of CNN, an American cable network that has been rocked by leadership crises since last year.

The previous CEO Chris Licht was ousted in June following an unsuccessful year-long tenure that failed to reverse CNN’s slump in ratings and drew unsavoury headlines about Licht’s standing in the newsroom. Since then the network has been led by a group of interim leaders, while the search for a new chief executive has been underway.

On Tuesday Puck and The New York Times reported that the network’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has finalised a decision to hire Mark Thompson, a venerable media executive who most recently helped turn The New York Times from a struggling giant of the previous era to one of the most successful digital news companies as CEO. Before that Thompson led the BBC as Director-General for eight years.

As a new leader of CNN, Thompson will face a host of challenges, particularly improving declining ratings and profits and raising employee morale that has been racked by scandals of the past 18 months. “The 2024 presidential election will give Mr. Thompson the potential to lift ratings and drive profits. It also poses a high-stakes challenge”, The New York Times notes.

Facebook’s decision to block news links in Canada in the wake of the company’s conflict with the Canadian government has had almost no impact on the platform’s usage in the country, Reuters reports.

The data from several analytics companies doesn’t indicate that fewer people started using Facebook in Canada in August, after the social network started blocking news links for Canadian users.

“The estimates, while early, appear to support Meta’s contention that news holds little value for the company as it remains locked in a tense standoff in Canada over a new law requiring internet giants to pay publishers for the news articles shared on their platforms”, Reuters notes. Over the past years Meta has been deprioritising news content on its platforms and focusing on more light-weight topics like sports and entertainment.

Denník N, a major Slovak newspaper, has acquired a minority stake in FatChilli, a Slovak IT and consulting firm for news publishers.

The companies have long been cooperating on the development of Denník N’s REMP subscription platform, which also serves many other publishers, and FatChilli is one of the biggest web advertising firms in Slovakia, the announcement notes. Financial details of the deal haven’t been disclosed.

Founded in 2014, Denník N operates one of the biggest independent news outlets in Slovakia, as well as news operations in Czech and Hungarian languages. (Editor’s note – disclosure: FatChilli is The Fix’s product partner)

Bonus — Five more stories you might want to check out:

Insider: Major websites like Amazon and the New York Times are increasingly blocking OpenAI’s web crawler GPTBot
The Guardian: Barclay family aim to regain Telegraph control with UAE backing – report
Semafor: The Washington Post lays off staff from tech arm
Digiday: Referral traffic from X continues to decline sharply for publishers
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: Kyrgyz Prosecutor Requests the Shutdown of Independent Media Outlet Kloop

Source of the cover photo: eirikso, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mark Thompson to lead CNN, Denník N investment – weekly news digest

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