Can Chris Licht Flip CNN Round?
Licht’s confidantes and advisers will need to have been beaming when James Stewart’s long-awaited New York Occasions profile landed on December 18, like a heat bundle of vacation cheer. (Licht’s boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, gave the piece a hearty plug on Instagram.) After months of tough and relentless protection that put Licht’s management underneath the lens of a high-power microscope, right here was a sympathetic portrait from a titan of the enterprise pages. However, it’s too early to inform whether or not Licht and his lieutenants can proceed to flip the narrative. CNN introduced the curtain down on 2022 with a painful culling that put tons of out of labor. Annual income, as Stewart famous, have fallen by $500 million. The community’s large streaming plans imploded. Its scores depart a lump within the throat. All of which means that Licht has his work reduce out for him. His to-do record within the New Yr contains locking in a prime-time lineup that has a preventing likelihood of narrowing the hole with MSNBC and—extra dauntingly—Fox Information; gaining viewers momentum for CNN’s not too long ago rebooted flagship morning present; and successful the goodwill of staff, who noticed morale tank through the rocky first eight months of Licht’s tenure.
Can The Washington Submit Stave Off a Mutiny?
Final we noticed Submit writer Fred Ryan, the pitchforks have been out as he retreated from a room filled with livid staff after he’d knowledgeable them—in spectacularly ham-fisted style—of looming layoffs, after which refused to take any questions. (“Democracy dies in darkness, huh?” one staffer scoffed to this publication.) The fallout was swift: Video of the disastrous city corridor circulated on Twitter; a gaggle of union holdouts, together with a number of star reporters, enlisted with their colleagues within the NewsGuild; and reviews swirled hinting at friction between Ryan and the chief editor he’d appointed simply final yr, Sally Buzbee. The drama unfolded towards a backdrop of dimming monetary prospects. Digital subscriptions are reportedly down. One presumes promoting is simply as tough as it’s all through the business. And the brass, in contrast to that of, say, The New York Occasions, haven’t precisely evinced a transparent enterprise technique to revive the mojo. Is that this the identical Washington Submit that loved copious progress and success underneath the legendary newsroom reign of Marty Baron? The bigger that query looms within the collective media consciousness, the extra fragile Ryan’s management might begin to appear.
Will The New York Occasions Avert a Strike?
On the time of this writing, Occasions leaders and their greater than 1,300 staff within the NewsGuild remained at an deadlock in a tense and protracted bargaining course of, with the Guild reportedly rejecting a proposal to herald a federal mediator. This newest growth got here on the heels of a piece stoppage that left the Occasions, for twenty-four hours not less than, with out the firepower of a big phase of its journalistic corps. The one-day motion was a major escalation within the union’s battle for greater salaries befitting not solely the realities of inflation, however the Occasions’ ongoing prosperity. It might not cease there. Over the previous few years, the NewsGuild has expanded aggressively in membership and affect throughout the media, whereas demonstrating its willingness to resort to extra hardball techniques. (“Radical” is a phrase I’ve heard tossed round to explain its skilled management.) Final yr, The New Yorker—which, like Self-importance Truthful, is owned by Condé Nast—got here perilously near a strike throughout its personal tussle with the Guild. Which is to say, even when the prospect of Occasions journalists strolling off the job indefinitely could seem distant, it’s hardly fanciful.
Will Fox and Information Corp Reunite?
