Cbs news axes 60 jobs and kills its radio service to chase tiktok eyeballs
CBS News told roughly 60 staffers they were finished—by email—late Friday so the legacy network can bankroll “ambitious growth” on platforms its anchors still mispronounce. The 6 % bloodletting, confirmed by an internal memo leaked to Bloomberg, shutters the entire CBS News Radio operation on 22 May and guts desks that once fed nightly bulletins for 87 years.
Radio silence ordered by weiss
Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and network president Tom Cibrowski blamed “changing audience habits” and a brutal ad climate. Translation: affiliates want TikTok-length clips, not top-of-the-hour updates that still open with a Morse-code bumper. Staff who built their careers on 60-second radio hits were told to clear out before Memorial Day; severance terms arrived in the same inbox that once carried Edward R. Murrow’s dispatches.
Weiss, parachuted in after Paramount swallowed her boutique media shop Free Press last fall, has spent five months unpicking the old guard. First she installed a new CBS Evening News anchor. Then she spiked—and, after public backlash, quietly reinstated—a 60 Minutes segment on immigrant deportations. Friday’s cuts finish the pivot: legacy prestige out, algorithmic reach in.
Paramount’s ledger demands fresh meat
The math is brutal. Linear news ratings are down 30 % year-on-year while Paramount Global carries $14.6 billion in long-term debt. Radio, once the network’s profit engine, now bleeds seven figures annually; killing it saves roughly $15 million—enough to bankroll a year of Snapchat originals. Investors cheered: PARA stock ticked up 2 % after hours, wiping the blood off the studio floor with algorithmic applause.
Remnants of the radio staff—some still on air Saturday morning—were offered “transition plans” that amount to a Zoom HR session and a LinkedIn Premium code. CBS News promises to “reinvest” the savings in “visual storytelling teams” fluent in vertical video. Translation: 22-year-olds who can caption a Supreme Court ruling in under nine seconds.
By October the network will launch a refurbished streaming hub, betting that Gen-Z will trade TikTok dance challenges for explainer clips about inflation. If they don’t, another 6 % will be carved out—this time without the courtesy of a Friday memo.