CNN names Piers Morgan to replace Larry King

LOS ANGELES — CNN said Wednesday it had hired Piers Morgan, the British newspaper editor best known to U.S. audiences as a judge on NBC's "America's Got Talent," to take over the 9 p.m. talk-show slot now hosted by Larry King.

Hoping to bolster its flagging prime-time lineup, the Time Warner-owned network settled on Morgan after delicate negotiations that cleared numerous obstacles, including the host's visa status and his role on "America's Got Talent," which he is expected to continue. He also will continue his British talk show, "Piers Morgan's Life Stories," on Britain's ITV.

The CNN show will be based in New York but will sometimes air from Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Morgan is the latest addition to what's shaping up as an overhaul of CNN's weeknight programming. On Oct. 4, the network will roll out a new 8 p.m. show with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and conservative columnist Kathleen Parker.

King, for years the anchor of CNN's nightly lineup, said this year he would end "Larry King Live." His final show will be Dec. 16. Morgan is expected to start in January.

"I'm hoping it's going to be provocative, informative, revelatory, news-making," Morgan said Wednesday of his show. "I think I interview people in a very distinctive way, which is probably quite different to American interviewers. And I think that's why CNN brought me in."

With Morgan, CNN is getting a brash former tabloid editor with a remarkable capacity for reinvention and a keen sense of the power of fame.

He has proved adroit at pushing interview subjects to share intimate details about their lives. In his column for the British edition of GQ, he got British politician Nick Clegg to confess he had slept with nearly 30 women and actress Helen Mirren to admit to taking cocaine.

Morgan's ascent to American fame has astonished many in Britain, where he is remembered — not always fondly — as an editor whose career was tainted by scandal.

He worked on local newspapers in the 1980s, then became showbiz editor of The Sun, Britain's biggest-selling daily tabloid. He was named editor of its Sunday stablemate, the News of the World, in 1994 at age 28, and took over the Daily Mirror the next year.

His tenure there was long but rocky. His coverage of the royal family, in particular, was criticized as intrusive.

In one famous coup, one of the paper's reporters got a job as a footman at Buckingham Palace and smuggled out pictures of Queen Elizabeth II's breakfast table, royal bedrooms and a rubber duck in the royal bath. Some protested the invasion of royal privacy, but Morgan said the newspaper had performed a public service by revealing lapses in security.

In 2000, a Mirror business column touted a company in which Morgan had just bought shares. The two journalists behind the column were fired, but Morgan stayed.

In 2004, he was forced to quit after the Mirror ran pictures of British soldiers allegedly abusing Iraqis. The photos turned out to have been faked.

Since then, he has written a best-selling memoir about his career in tabloids and built a successful TV career in Britain as well as the United States. In addition to his interview show in Britain, he's a judge on "Britain's Got Talent."

He continues to write weekly columns on sports and on his own life for the Mail newspaper and will write regular columns for CNN.com, CNN said.

Real-estate impresario Donald Trump, who cast Morgan in the 2008 celebrity edition of "The Apprentice," which he won, said the Brit has more of an instinct to go for the jugular than King. That's a characteristic he's going to have to temper a bit on CNN, Trump added.

"When you do a show five or six nights a week, you can't kill everybody, because you're not going to get anybody to come on the show," he said.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.