Ryan Kadro left CBS News several weeks ago, but he isn’t leaving the news business.
Kadro, the former executive producer of “CBS This Morning” is set to join Quibi, the company led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman that is devoted to short-form content. Kadro is expected to oversee news programming for the subscription-based service, according to a person familiar with the matter, and to have some involvement with music and sports content as well.
A spokesman for Quibi declined to comment.
Kadro was one of the founding producers of the current edition of “CBS This Morning,” and eventually moved into the show’s executive producer role. The morning program marks the first time in years that CBS has truly mounted an A.M. entry that competed reasonably with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and NBC’s “Today.” In recent months, however, the show has suffered ratings setbacks, and Kadro announced in December he would leave the program to seek a new challenge.
He will join a new-tech company that has drawn outsize attention in recent months. Katzenberg and Whitman have articulated a startegy to design programs appealign to a generation that spends an increasing amount of time with mobile screens. Their plan calls for subscribers to pay $5 per month for content with ads and $8 per month for an ad-free experience on a new service that will offer a premium lineup of original, short-form series comprising episodes of 10 minutes each, sometimes less. Quibi’s name is a condensation of the phrase “quick bites.”
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Kadro will join as a content executive, and step into a company that has amassed an intriguing roster of veterans. Diane Nelson, the former president of DC Entertainment, and Doug Herzog, the one-time head of Viacom’s Comedy Central and other cable networks, are on board, as well as Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter.
Kadro got his start in the TV business as a page at NBC, and parlayed that into a job as an assistant to two executives at the network, which lead to a role as a researcher at during the launch of Carson Daly’s late-night program on the network, “Last Call.” Kadro eventually worked his way up to become a supervising producer at the program, and then left to join CBS News in 2010. He was the second employee hired to launch the current run of “CBS This Morning.”
While Kadro has found a new job, CBS News has yet to replace him. The executive producer role at “CBS This Morning” remains open while Susan Zirinsky, the incoming president at CBS News, mulls various options for several of the network’s best-known news programs.