The new Paramount is laying off about 10% of its workforce, achieving some of the cost savings that CEO David Ellison promised investors when he took charge of the media company over the summer.
Many divisions of Paramount Skydance will be impacted, from the iconic movie studio to CBS News to Comedy Central.
About a thousand jobs are expected to be cut this week, and another thousand in the near future, as a new management team reorganizes the company.
Ellison, who headed the production company Skydance and merged it with the much larger Paramount, said in a memo on Wednesday morning that “these steps are necessary to position Paramount for long-term success.”
“In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” he said. “In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth.”
Steep cuts and sweeping changes are common after mergers, but Paramount has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, so employees have been especially on edge about this fall’s expected terminations.
At CBS News, nearly 100 positions will be eliminated, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on condition of anonymity.
The person said the CBS News cuts were already in the works before Ellison appointed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief earlier this month, following the purchase of her startup outlet, The Free Press.
The reorganization comes as the wider media industry waits to see Ellison’s ambitious plans for Paramount. In recent weeks Ellison has been pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN, HBO Max and the Warner Bros. studio.
The WBD board has rebuffed those initial offers and started a strategic review, which could result in a sale of the entire company, a continuation of the current plan to split WBD into two, or some other outcome.
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