Media Decoder Blog: Soledad O’Brien to Take on New Role at CNN

4:45 p.m. | Updated Soledad O’Brien will leave CNN’s morning show in the spring, but she won’t be leaving the cable news channel altogether.

Ms. O’Brien, who is well-known for CNN documentaries like “Black in America,” said Thursday that she would form a production company and continue to supply documentaries to CNN on a nonexclusive basis. She’ll also make them for other television channels and for the Web.

“There’s so many great stories to tell,” said Ms. O’Brien, who is preparing two new installments of the “Black in America” franchise for CNN.

The deal is an unusual one for CNN. In effect, Ms. O’Brien will go from being an anchor to an outside producer. She may have had little choice in the matter: the new head of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker, decided even before he started the job in January that he wanted to replace Ms. O’Brien’s morning show, “Starting Point,” with a brand new one.

The hosts of the new, as-yet-untitled show have not been named, but Mr. Zucker hired Chris Cuomo from ABC last month with the intention of pairing him with Erin Burnett, who presently hosts the 7 p.m. hour on CNN.

After Mr. Zucker took over, “we had conversations in general about my role at CNN,” Ms. O’Brien said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “What we ended up with was, they wanted to partner with me, and I wanted to partner with them.”

So she will be a free agent, hosting documentaries for CNN part-time, but able to take hosting and reporting jobs elsewhere at the same time. She could go the syndication route, as Katie Couric has. On Thursday, Ms. O’Brien appeared on “The Wendy Williams Show,” a syndicated daytime talk show.

However, “at this moment, I really want to work on projects,” she said.

Her new production company, called the Starfish Media Group, will distribute those projects, as well as past CNN documentaries like “Gary and Tony Have a Baby,” “Unwelcome: the Muslims Next Door” and “Don’t Fail Me: Education in America.” That means they could show up on other channels in the future.

“We can take some of the discussions around these issues and carry them to new audiences,” Ms. O’Brien said. She has a number of ideas for new documentaries, some of which “wouldn’t necessarily be right for CNN,” she said, like ones about sports.

Citing another example, she said she had been pitching a “Poverty in America” documentary “for a long time.” Under the terms of the new agreement, she could take the idea to another channel if CNN passed on it.

Ms. O’Brien, who is black and a Latina (her mother is Afro-Cuban, her father is Australian and of Irish descent), stood out on cable news both culturally and creatively. She joined CNN in 2003 from NBC, where she was a co-host of “Weekend Today.”

At CNN she co-hosted an earlier iteration of the channel’s morning show for four years, then delved into documentary-making. “Black in America” was her first, and it spawned a whole series of others about race and other issues.

Ms. O’Brien’s identity is so wrapped up in these documentaries that it was a surprise to some people when she was given the morning anchor job again in January 2012. Her morning show was, in retrospect, probably destined to fail; it was scarcely promoted by CNN and was the subject of internal feuding over its editorial sensibility.

“Under the previous regime, we did not have a ton of support,” Ms. O’Brien said Thursday. While she and her colleagues “tried to get a sense of what people wanted” — she meant people up the corporate ladder at CNN — “it was never very clear.”

Referring to Mr. Zucker, she added, “One of the great things about Jeff coming into CNN is that he has a very clear vision of what he wants.”

Ever since Mr. Zucker’s plans for the new morning show emerged last month, fans of Ms. O’Brien’s have complained that she wasn’t part of that vision. But she wasn’t critical of CNN on Thursday. Asked whether she had any concerns about diversity, or the lack of it, at CNN, she said, “Diversity is never one person. Diversity is about what a company believes.”

Despite low ratings — “Starting Point” had just 234,000 viewers on a typical day last year, CNN’s smallest audience in the mornings in a decade — Ms. O’Brien said she was proud of the show, and in particular its reputation for tough interviews. “We became relevant in an important election,” she said.

She said she would not miss the 2 a.m. wake-up calls that “Starting Point” necessitated.

“To do the thing that you’re really passionate about,” she said, “is a very nice luxury, and that’s what I am getting to do now.”

Mr. Zucker said in a statement, “We greatly value Soledad’s experience, and her first-rate storytelling will continue to be an asset to CNN. Documentaries and long-form story telling are important to our brand and we’re anticipating more of what we’ve come to expect from her — riveting content.”

The decision to have her supply documentaries makes sense because CNN has been moving from an in-house production model to an outside acquisition model. The channel is working with several outside production companies on weekend programming, and it is also buying the rights to documentary films.

CNN said that Ms. O’Brien would host at least one documentary this year, and three next year.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/soledad-obrien-to-take-on-new-role-at-cnn/?partner=rss&emc=rss