Turner Cuts Staffers at Court
By John M. Higgins -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/20/2006 4:51:00 PM
A month after acquiring Court TV, Turner Broadcasting started swinging the ax at the network, terminating around 50 employees.
The layoffs came in departments that Turner handles centrally at the corporate level, including affiliate sales, accounting, legal and public relations. But Turner lets individual networks handle their own programming, production and marketing, so Court TV employees in those areas were left largely untouched.
Some employees of New York-based Court TV were offered new slots at Turner's Atlanta HQ, but virtually all passed. Turner took over operations of the network after parent company Time Warner bought the 50% of the network it didn't already own from Liberty Media. Before the deal, Court TV had approximately 400 employees.
