At the Warner Bros. Discovery upfront on Wednesday, shortly before he triumphantly announced that his network had landed the first presidential debate of the cycle, CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson offered the most specific articulation yet of his plan to reboot his news business. Of course, CNN employees had been waiting on pins and needles for six months to hear their newish boss detail a strategy, any strategy, beyond his vague paeans to digital transformation in town halls and interviews and conference panels. Thompson arrived at CNN with a reputation for having stewarded The New York Times through its own heralded reinvention a decade earlier—a case study for so many news companies to this day—and his street cred had built outsize expectations for his latest revitalization gig. For anxious CNN staff, each cryptic Thompson pronouncement has been scrutinized as if he were Nostradamus.