CBS News to Cut 6% Workforce, CBS Radio to Shut Down in May

In an effort to "remain competitive", CBS News, a major American media company, will lay off 6% of its employees on March 20. Those affected employees will be contacted by the end of the day, according to the news network owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation. President Tom Cibrowski and Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of CBS News sent the internal memo to the staff.

According to the memo, the company is moving ahead with ambitious plans to expand and invest in order to meet the demands of its expanding audience in new locations. In order to accommodate the items the corporation needs to construct to stay competitive, it will be necessary to reduce the size of various areas of its newsroom.

Ongoing Developments at CBS News

Up to sixty workers may receive termination notices. Which divisions or sections were affected remained a mystery. In his tenure at CBS, Weiss hopes to implement a "streaming mentality" and raise the network's ratings to compete with ABC and NBC. It is worth mentioning that Weiss assumed leadership of CBS News in October of last year following the acquisition of her media company, The Free Press, by Paramount, which was controlled by David Ellison.

She has replaced the nightly news anchor and made several other changes to the media organization since taking CEO. A plan to reorganise operations to incorporate digital news coverage was launched by her in January, along with the addition of 19 new contributors to the network. Anderson Cooper, a renowned CBS News anchor, left the network after Weiss took over. Promos for Cooper's latest '60 Minutes' program about sending undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons had already aired, thus his decision to postpone the segment sparked outrage. The program was edited before being shown by the channel.

CBS News Radio Ending 100 Years of Entertainment

The legendary CBS News radio show is also going out of business. Nearly a century has passed since the service began. The cut is reportedly part of a larger round of layoffs that will occur in response to changing programming strategy at radio stations and the difficult economic climate.

The first CBS News Radio programme aired in September 1927, long before the network as a whole came into being. William S. Paley, who had previously worked on the station's expansion from a tiny radio station, made his debut on the show. During WWII, Edward R. Murrow—a pioneer in the field of broadcast journalism—was one of the journalists sent to deliver reports from London as part of the radio programme.

In 2026, CBS News Radio is well-known for its top-of-the-hour news summaries and supplies content to around 700 stations in the US. The network announced that the service will terminate on May 22. The decision was not easy, but it was necessary, according to the memo from Weiss and Cibrowski.