CNN Expected to Revamp Its Morning Lineup

The channel, a unit of Time Warner, is expected to announce as early as this week that Soledad O’Brien, one of its former morning anchors, will start anchoring from 7 to 9 a.m. weekdays. Ashleigh Banfield, until recently a correspondent for ABC News, will start co-anchoring from 5 to 7 a.m.

The plan, described by three people with direct knowledge of it, will effectively dismantle “American Morning,” which has had about 10 co-anchors in its 10 years on CNN. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the changes had not been announced. A CNN spokeswoman declined to comment on Sunday.

Ms. Banfield, at 5 a.m., will have a co-anchor, the people with direct knowledge of the plans said. One possibility is Zoraida Sambolin, who was an early morning anchor in Chicago until this month. Time Out Chicago reported last week that CNN had hired her for a morning anchor slot. Ms. O’Brien, at 7 a.m., may be joined by an ensemble of contributors.

“American Morning” has been largely an afterthought in a time period defined by the “Today” show and “Good Morning America” on network television and by “Fox Friends” and “Morning Joe” on cable. The program also has routinely been beaten in the ratings by “Morning Express With Robin Meade” on CNN’s sister channel HLN.

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.

Ms. O’Brien is well aware of the challenges CNN faces in the morning, having co-anchored “American Morning” between 2003 and 2006. In her memoir, “The Next Big Story,” she recalled how the ratings would rise and fall depending on the news cycle. “ ‘American Morning’ is a hard news show, and when the news is soft, a lot of people tune out,” she wrote.

She was dismissed from the program in 2007 and assigned to produce and host documentaries, something she perceived at first to be a “consolation prize” but came to view as a “backhanded” reward. Her documentaries, like the “Black in America” series, were warmly received by viewers and critics; the “In America” unit that produces them is expected to remain intact, according to two people with knowledge of the unit.

Ms. Banfield has been seen recently on “Good Morning America” as a correspondent. She joined ABC News two years ago after working as a host on TruTV and her contract is believed to be up in November.

She became well-known while anchoring for MSNBC after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and was briefly mentioned as a possible co-anchor for “Today,” but she departed the network in 2004 after giving a speech that was critical of television coverage of the Iraq war. She argued in the speech that too much of the coverage blindly embraced patriotic symbols and ignored civilian and military causalities and the other “horrors” of war.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5f5e0c74c0e52267c62ae3f7130b808d