5 Challenges David Ellison Faces as Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Merge
New York Times · LC · trust 37/100
Credit... Illustration by Lincoln Agnew; Photographs by Sam Comen for The New York Times, Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York Times Skip to content Skip to site index
The tech scion has given his combination of Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount a new name: Skydance. Now he must make tough decisions about news, movies, streaming, sports and debt.
Credit... Illustration by Lincoln Agnew; Photographs by Sam Comen for The New York Times, Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York Times
Listen · 15:17 min Share full article 144 David Ellison’s To-Do List What Will CNN Be? Quotas vs. Quality Taming an Expanded Streaming Universe Keeping the N.F.L. Happy A Mountain of Debt What Will CNN Be? Image Credit... Lincoln Agnew By Michael M. Grynbaum
At media companies, the old saw about news divisions is that they are a small portion of revenue but a big portion of headaches. CNN is no exception.
The news network is profitable (on track to net $650 million this year), but it is also a favorite target of President Trump, who for years has accused CNN of bias and last month barred its journalists from the White House pool. Mr. Ellison moved to avoid a public debate about CNN’s editorial direction by negotiating to keep its current leader , Mark Thompson, in place.
Still, hurdles remain. CNN’s viewership has fallen behind MS NOW, and its digital offerings are still in the infancy phase. (Fox News is ahead of both.) A subscription news service, which Mr. Thompson started, is expanding to Britain and Canada, but the network has shared few details about the number of paying users. Skydance could nurture this subscription model or take a cue from David Zaslav, the former chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, who eliminated CNN+ just three weeks after it started.
Skeptics will also be watching to see if Mr. Ellison — who has hosted a dinner for Mr. Trump and has hobnobbed with the president at Ultimate Fighting Championship matches — puts a thumb on the editorial scale. For now, Mr. Ellison has walled off CNN from Bari Weiss, his pick to oversee CBS News, although that is subject to change. Ms. Weiss, a critic of the mainstream media, has been accused by several “60 Minutes” correspondents of meddling with their reports. CBS has denied those claims.
Skydance has yet to reveal the makeup of an independent editorial oversight board that it agreed to create as part of a settlement with the state attorneys general who had sought to block the merger on antitrust grounds. An independent board was installed by Rupert Murdoch when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007 to protect the publication’s journalistic integrity; the paper’s editor at the time, Marcus Brauchli, left four months after Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp took over.
“This kind of structure has limited value,” Mr. Brauchli said in an email, because “so much of a modern media company falls into both the editorial and business domains.”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Read the original at New York Times →
Open in TruthVane →