Two decades ago, a young producer named Jeff Zucker helped a down-on-its-luck “Today” show regain its ratings mojo and start what became a 16-year winning streak. More recently, he was a sounding board for Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, as Mr. Sherwood’s “Good Morning America” finally ended the “Today” show’s streak.
Now, Mr. Zucker is assembling a new morning show for CNN, the first of several building blocks for the ailing cable news channel. On Tuesday, he hired Chris Cuomo, a former news anchor on “G.M.A.,” to be a co-anchor of the new unnamed show, and is expected to begin in the spring. Mr. Zucker wants to pair Mr. Cuomo with Erin Burnett, another veteran of the morning shift.
Mr. Zucker, who formally took over CNN Worldwide last week after his appointment as president last November, declined an interview request. But his decision to scrap “Starting Point,” CNN’s morning show, and start over turned heads in the television industry on Tuesday. Agents and anchors said it conveyed the message that “he’s not wasting any time.”
CNN is one of the most valuable brands in the world, but its ratings in the United States have collapsed in the face of competition from other cable channels and the Internet. “Starting Point,” for example, had just 234,000 viewers on a typical morning in 2012, the channel’s lowest total viewer number in that time slot in more than a decade. Of those, just 96,000 were between the ages of 25 and 54, the group that cable news advertisers try to reach.
For Mr. Zucker, who rose from “Today” to run all of NBC Universal in the 2000s, before being replaced when Comcast took control of the company two years ago, the chance to turn around CNN’s morning ratings represents a test: long after leaving “Today,” can he revitalize another morning show for another network?
TMZ first reported Mr. Cuomo’s impending move on Monday night. He wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, “I have a great chance to be the first word on what matters to you every morning.”
His brother, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, said in a radio interview that CNN was a better fit than ABC. “He’ll be on every day, so there will be a certain relevance to what he’s doing,” Governor Cuomo said.
Chris Cuomo has been a co-anchor of the weekly ABC newsmagazine “20/20” for the last three years. David Muir, the anchor of ABC’s weekend “World News,” will add “20/20” to his duties now. Mr. Cuomo, who previously spent three years as the news anchor on “G.M.A.,” was in the running for the co-host job on that show when Diane Sawyer left for the evening newscast “World News” in 2009. But the job went instead to George Stephanopoulos.
At CNN, a unit of Time Warner, Mr. Cuomo will have a new opportunity to lead a morning newscast. As it seeks a bigger audience in the mornings, however, CNN risks irritating the audience it already has by making sweeping changes. That happened 12 months ago when it gave up on a 10-year-old show, “American Morning,” and created “Starting Point.”
Soledad O’Brien, the anchor for the last 12 months, has been widely praised for her political interviews despite the program’s relatively low ratings. The show’s defenders say it never received the internal support and the external marketing it had been promised. They imply that it was not given a chance to succeed. Its detractors, however, say it was a bland copy of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” a show that, coincidentally, Mr. Zucker supported when he ran NBC Universal.
A CNN spokeswoman said in an e-mail Tuesday, “Soledad is very important to the network, and we’re discussing various options with her.”
Pairing Ms. Burnett with Mr. Cuomo would create another hole in CNN’s weekday schedule. Ms. Burnett is best known for her years at CNBC, where she and Mark Haines were at the helm of the midmorning markets newscast “Squawk on the Street” from 2005 to 2011. She is now the anchor of the 7 p.m. hour on CNN. But the hour has suffered like “Starting Point” and the rest of the channel’s schedule. CNN declined to comment on Ms. Burnett’s status on Tuesday.
Mr. Cuomo is the third prominent name from ABC to be hired by CNN in the last year. The first was John Berman, a longtime ABC correspondent, who now co-hosts “Early Start,” the predawn newscast that precedes “Starting Point.” The second was Jake Tapper, the chief White House correspondent for ABC.
Mr. Zucker had a role in signing Mr. Tapper, who will begin anchoring a daily program for CNN this year. Now Mr. Zucker is figuring out where Mr. Tapper and CNN’s other hosts belong on the schedule. Associates say Mr. Zucker wants both the daytime and prime time programs to be more entertaining and less dependent on the daily drip-drip-drip of stories about politics and overseas conflicts.
On Tuesday, Mark Whitaker, the managing editor of CNN Worldwide, stepped down, stating in an e-mail to staff members that Mr. Zucker “deserves his own team and management structure and the freedom to communicate one clear vision to the staff.” Mr. Whitaker was a top lieutenant of Jim Walton, Mr. Zucker’s predecessor.
The announcement last week of the hiring of the sports reporter Rachel Nichols from ESPN was a hint of what is to come under Mr. Zucker. He said in a statement then that Ms. Nichols would host a weekend sports program and called her hiring “an important step in expanding the range of programming and storytelling on CNN.”
Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.
