SachDan Posted March 19, 2010 Posted March 19, 2010 Christiane Amanpour , one of CNN's best-known international correspondents for two decades, is leaving Time Warner's cable news channel to host This Week , the Sunday morning news programme on ABC News. Her departure in April, just seven months after the launch of her own show on CNN International, will rob the channel of one of its most familiar faces, who has reported from trouble spots ranging from Sarajevo to Somalia and covered combats from the first Gulf War to the current Afghan campaign. Her appointment at ABC News comes weeks after the Walt Disney-owned network announced plans to cut more than 20 per cent of its staff, or 300-400 people. US network news groups have suffered from shrinking viewing figures, ageing audiences and competition from cable news channels including Fox News, MSNBC and CNN. The pressures have been exacerbated by a cyclical advertising slump. David Westin, president of ABC News, said Ms Amanpour's arrival in August, after an interregnum in which Jake Tapper will host the show, would give it "the opportunity to provide our audiences with something different on Sunday mornings". Ms Amanpour's appointment could prove a test of US audiences' appetite for international news. She will take over before the US mid-term elections in a year when heated debates about the economy and healthcare reform have dominated the news agenda, but overseas stories such as the Haiti earthquake have also broken through. This Week , which competes with Face the Nation on CBS, Fox News Sunday and Meet the Press on NBC, would add "an international perspective" to its domestic coverage, Mr Westin said. "All of us know how much the international and the domestic have come to affect one another - whether it's global conflict, terrorism, humanitarian crises, or the economy," he added. Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, told staff that Ms Amanpour's work "burnished our news brand and gave it authority". Ms Amanpour, who started as an assistant on the CNN assignment desk in Atlanta in 1983, takes over This Week from George Stephanopoulos, who left in January after eight years to be co-host of ABC's Good Morning America show. The reshuffle also saw Diane Sawyer take over the flagship ABC World News nightly newscast in December. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1b28db9a-32f6-11df-bf5f-00144feabdc0.html
Clarke Posted March 19, 2010 Posted March 19, 2010 http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/18/christiane-amanpour-to-join-abc-news/?hpt=T2
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