Jonathan Klein is president of CNN/U.S., responsible for management oversight of all programming, editorial tone and strategic direction of the network. He reports to Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide.
Named to this position in November 2004, Klein previously served as president and chief executive officer of The FeedRoom, a broadband video company he founded in 1999. Under his direction, The FeedRoom became one of the leading online broadcasters in the world, delivering more than 1 million video clips each day to customers including CBS, NBC, ESPN, Reuters, Tribune television stations and newspapers, USA Today, Business Week, General Motors, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, General Mills and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Before founding The FeedRoom, Klein was an executive vice president at CBS News, where he oversaw prime-time programming including 60 Minutes, 48 Hours and Public Eye With Bryant Gumbel. Klein also oversaw off-network production, guest booking, investigative reporting and strategic planning.
Klein began his television career in 1980 as a news producer at WLNE in Providence, R.I., and the following year moved to a similar position at WPIX-TV/Independent Network News in New York. In 1982, he joined CBS News as a writer and news editor on the overnight broadcast Nightwatch. He subsequently served as broadcast producer on CBS Morning News and then CBS Evening News Weekend Edition, where he won an Emmy Award for live coverage of the 1986 Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.
In 1988, Klein joined the fledgling prime-time magazine series 48 Hours as a field producer, eventually winning an Emmy Award for coverage of Hurricane Hugo and a Peabody Award for an hour he produced on the anti-abortion movement. Klein served as senior producer for CBS’s 1990 late-night series America Tonight with Charles Kuralt and Lesley Stahl, as senior producer for the network’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War and later for the documentary Back to Baghdad, in which foreign correspondent Bob Simon returned to the Middle East following his imprisonment by the Iraqis during the war.
In 1993, Klein launched a unique prime-time documentary series, Before Your Eyes, two-hour movies-of-the-week that explored social issues such as child abuse, AIDS and juvenile delinquency through the eyes of real people living through dramatic moments in their lives with the cameras rolling. The series, for which Klein served as executive producer and director, was acclaimed for pioneering new forms of storytelling and received numerous national awards.
In 1997, Klein conceived and executive produced the CBS documentary Inside the Jury Room, in which network television cameras were permitted for the first time to observe deliberations in a criminal trial. The documentary won a Columbia-DuPont Silver Baton.
Klein also wrote the story for the TNT Original film Buffalo Soldiers, a 1997 historical drama starring Danny Glover.
Klein graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1980 with a degree in history.
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