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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Paula Zahn Will Leave CNN
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: July 24, 2007

Paula Zahn is an American newscaster, most recently the host of Paula Zahn NOW on CNN. On July 24th, 2007, she resigned from CNN.

A day after CNN announced that it was hiring Campbell Brown to replace one of its prime-time hosts, presumably Paula Zahn, Ms. Zahn confirmed today that she was leaving the cable channel, effective Aug.

The unraveling of “Paula Zahn Now,” which made its debut at 8 p.m. in 2003, was ultimately a function of ratings. Though CNN took pains recently to note that the number of viewers for the show had ticked upward earlier this year, Ms. Zahn’s task remained a Herculean one.

The estimated 558,000 viewers her program has been drawing, on average, each weeknight this year, according to Nielsen Media Research, represents less than a quarter of the nearly 2.3 million who watch “The O’Reilly Factor” with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Ms. Zahn’s program also draws about 100,000 fewer viewers a night than “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.

In a telephone interview shortly after breaking the news of her departure to her staff, Ms. Zahn said the decision was a mutual one between her and CNN management. Her contract, she said, is up at year’s end.

“We worked so hard to maintain a high quality of objective reporting on the air,” she said of her show, which recently featured a series of special reports about intolerance, including racial bias. “Yet what has become clear when you look at the landscape, particularly in the 8 o’clock hour, it seems pretty obvious the audience is drawn to opinion-driven shows. That is not what I do.”

Ms. Zahn she had no idea what she would be doing next, beyond taking some time off.

For all the rumors in recent months of Ms. Zahn’s impending departure, the transition to Ms. Brown will not necessarily be an orderly one. Ms. Brown signed an exit agreement with NBC which keeps her off the air until Nov. 1, meaning CNN will have no regular host in its 8 p.m. timeslot for three months. (She is also expecting her first child in late December, and planning to take at least a few weeks maternity leave then.)

Once she makes her debut, Ms. Brown, like Ms. Zahn before her, will be asked to marshal all her experience on network news to try not only to surpass Mr. Olbermann but somehow to become competitive with Mr. O’Reilly.

Ms. Zahn’s awkward departure from CNN was a stark contrast to the swirl of excitement that had surrounded her arrival.

In 2001, Ms. Zahn was hosting a prime-time program on Fox News when her agent, Richard Leibner, succeeded in negotiating a new contract for her at its rival, CNN. Fox News responded by filing suit against Mr. Leibner, contending that he was not permitted to negotiate a new job for Ms. Zahn before she had left her old one. Though the suit was dismissed, the hot rhetoric lingered; Ms. Zahn’s former boss, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, said she was no more valuable to Fox than a “dead raccoon.”

Ms. Zahn, who also spent 10 years at CBS News, was hired by CNN to lead a new morning show. She was pressed into service earlier than planned to help lead CNN’s coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2003, after she (along with her then-co-host, Anderson Cooper) posted some gains in the morning, the network moved her to prime time.

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