Exclusive: Alisyn Camerota and Jeff Zucker Give Inside Scoop on Big CNN Lineup Moves

CNN opened the year with a reshuffling of its lineup. Amid a half-dozen or so moves, none is more significant than New Day anchor Alisyn Camerota moving to the afternoons to co-host a show with Victor Blackwell. She will be replaced by afternoon anchor Brianna Keilar, who will join John Berman on New Day.

Given the outsized role that morning show ratings play on the rest of the day’s viewership, this is no small change, particularly since Camerota helped launch the New Day franchise roughly six years ago. In an exclusive interview, I discussed what led to this move and what it means for CNN with both Camerota and CEO Jeff Zucker.

To say that Camerota was happy with this move would be something of an understatement. She sounded legitimately delighted and relieved with her move to an afternoon slot. While she is very proud of her work co-anchoring CNN’s New Day for six-plus years, she will not miss waking up at 3 a.m. every morning.

Morning shows are a coveted gig but they require great sacrifice. Talent needs to be TV-ready at 6 a.m., which requires pre-production prep, script editing, and hair and make-up. Thus the 3 a.m. wake-up slog. And the subject prep, particularly over the past four years, has been more intense than any other time in recent memory.

“So it’s been an intense news cycle,” Camerota deadpanned. “It’s been it’s been a privilege and powerful and relevant and exciting to be on New Day.”

“And it’s been exhausting and sometimes, you know, draining and everything. And so there were some days that it was really hard to get up at 3 and to go in and to, you know, steel my stuff for the fight of whatever incoming, what would be happening over, say, the last four years.”

A former Fox & Friends host (6-9 a.m.) for six years before joining CNN, Camerota approached Zucker roughly a year ago and made clear that she wanted to eventually get off the Jetsons-style treadmill familiar to anyone who works in the news and infotainment business.

“I would sometimes say to Jeff, you know, it’s kind of hard to do this and get up at 3,” she said. “And he would basically say, get back in there, and that there was no time to take your foot off the gas. And he was right. So basically, I really wanted to see this through.”

Zucker tells a similar story. “She came to me, I asked her to stay, you know, for more than a year, more than, maybe she had originally intended, and I was grateful to her for that, but also recognized that she had a desire to change it up as well.”

With a new year and a new administration, the time was deemed right.

Camerota has hosted New Day for nearly six years, which Zucker noted is the longest run by any CNN morning anchor that he can find (admitting that records from the last millennium are a bit sketchy). Camerota and Chris Cuomo first anchored the show, but a few years ago Cuomo was moved to the 9 p.m. prime time slot, and Berman replaced him.

Despite the prominence of its hosts, New Day has struggled in the ratings. Critics are quick to note that it has consistently trailed the viewership of well-established franchises like MSNBC’s Morning Joe and Fox & Friends, but a like-to-like comparison doesn’t tell the entire story. It’s not apples to oranges that come to mind, it is more like apples to cotton candy.

New Day is the only proper news program that starts a cable network’s day. Its competition presents a decidedly opinion-based product that serves a consumer looking for the quick sugar rush of confirmation bias and even political division. Do they rate better? Of course, they do, but McDonald’s sells more burgers than Sweetgreen sells salads.

New Day has also been buoyed by the recent ratings success of CNN overall. The networks saw its highest-rated month in history in January, beating MSNBC (and typical ratings juggernaut) Fox News across the board. New Day, though placing third in total viewers, beat Fox & Friends in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demo for the first time since it launched in 2013.

CNN can boast a ridiculous 100+ winning streak for viewers in the target demo, which of course isn’t entirely due to its morning show, but does set the tone for the rest of the day which it has done largely by booking guests that represent a much larger political spectrum than its rivals. It is, in fact, a news show, not opinion.

This brings us to Keilar’s move to the morning anchor chair, and speculation New Day will become more opinionated. Keilar has made a name for herself recently in searing rebuttals of cable news rivals, namely Tucker Carlson, in segments perfectly suited to feature on websites that cover cable news wars and the intersection of politics and media.

Given Keilar’s move to mornings, I asked Zucker these moves signal that he leaning into a formula of opinion in the morning and primetime, and news programming during the day.

“No, it doesn’t,” he made clear. “It is not fair to look at what is historically defined as cable news as all the same. I mean, I truly believe Fox — whatever that is — is as different from MS as as as is different from CNN. I believe we’re all doing something slightly different. And so I don’t believe there’s one formula that fits all of those channels.”

“There’s a difference between doing opinion and calling out facts,” he continued. “And I believe that the others are doing, you know, what they think is in their best interest. And I think that we’re doing what we think works best. And, you know, we’re committed to telling the truth all day long.”

Zucker was quick to return to memorializing his appreciation for Camerota. “In the last 20 years, nobody anchored a morning show for as long as Alisyn did.” He noted that, along with Berman, she “brought New Day to CNN’s best position in the morning ever. So I just want to, you know, before I address, what is all of this signifying, you know, what’s it about? Let’s just remember that. Alisyn gave us six years of waking up at 3 a.m. and turned CNN’s morning daypart around. And so I am beyond grateful to Alisyn.”

Given CNN’s rise from worst to first in the ratings over the past four years, it’s clear that both Zucker and Camerota feel great pride in the work that they have done. And Camerota’s skills and experience will likely suit dayside programming well seeing as she has shown flexibility from serious interviews, to occasional humor and levity, to her signature “Pulse of the People” segments in which she interviews American voters of all stripes. She plans on taking that with her to afternoons and is excited to forge a new relationship with Blackwell, who will be moving to New York to co-anchor.

“What makes Alisyn so special is that, she’s just she’s got such way about her that she really is the perfect partner and I think that that’s why she is so special,” Zucker gushed. “She and Victor will be a very, very dynamic and strong team.”

Zucker noted that Blackwell has anchored the weekend morning program for nine years. “That’s also an incredibly long run. He’s one of our true, really, I don’t want to say secrets, because he’s clearly been doing this for a long time,” adding “people are going to really get to see and know, Victor, in an even bigger way now.”

“People are going to be really taken with Victor. And the opportunity to sit next to Alisyn, I think ensures that whoever sits in that seat always gets better. And so I really am excited about this combination.”

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