Jeff Zucker, whose move to the helm of CNN a year ago put him squarely in the middle of the rough-and-tumble cable television news wars, will be the keynote speaker at the Deadline Club’s 2014 Awards Dinner on May 19.
Zucker, 48, whose television career began in the late 1980s, will be interviewed by a journalist yet to be named at the dinner, which will be held at the Waldorf Astoria. Tickets for the event, at which winners of The Club’s 31 journalism contest categories will be announced, are expected to go on sale late next month.
Since becoming president of CNN Worldwide early last year, Zucker has been managing the network’s two-front ratings war against Fox News Channel on its right and MSNBC on its left. Among the news brands that Zucker oversees are CNN’s U.S. television network, CNN International, HLN and CNN Digital.
Zucker had been president and CEO of NBC Universal since 2007, after a meteoric rise that began when, at age 26, he became the youngest executive producer of the Today program in 1992, a position he held for eight years. Zucker also was briefly executive producer of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.