CNN cuts 30 jobs in Hong Kong

CNN will lay off 30 journalists at its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reports on Saturday. The original number of jobs will be reduced from 50 to ten after the dismissal. The "redeployment" as it is called by the TV-station, will involve 10 producers and 20 freelancers.
The reduction is part of an unexpected restructering that also involved the Atlanta headquarters of CNN and its London operation. The Hong Kong office was established in 1995 at a time when most other networks had already reduced their international operations or were planning to do so.
Hong Kong has been severely hit, as the number of members of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club dropped from over 400 in 1997 to 170 at the beginning of last year. But Hong Kong and CNN are is not exception as the number of journalists deployed outside their own country has been falling already since the end of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s. While the numbers have gone up slightly in Beijing and Shanghai, the size of the foreign press corps has been reduced everywhere else in Asia.