Coffey Leaving CNN to Create Private Medical Foundation

CNN, which is expected to announce its long-awaited restructuring and layoffs today, is also losing a top executive, Shelby Coffey III, president of CNN Business News and CNNfn.

Coffey’s exit comes less than a week after CNN parent Time Warner and AOL completed their merger. The executive, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times who has been at CNN for just over a year, is resigning to pursue long-held plans to establish a private foundation with his wife, Dr. Mary Lee Coffey, an emergency-room physician. The foundation will bring the latest emergency-room techniques to less-developed countries. He will also become a fellow at the Freedom Forum, a journalism foundation.

Coffey said he had planned to leave since an earlier CNN restructuring, in August, which had him reporting to Jim Walton, president of domestic networks, CNN News Group, instead of CNN News Group Chairman Tom Johnson, who, for a time, was also Coffey’s boss at The Times. At top management’s request, however, Coffey agreed to stay on through the AOL Time Warner merger.

“Circumstances have changed,” Coffey said. “This was time for me to move into these other areas.”