| | | | | Exec summary: Every hour, there's a new bombshell about Robert Mueller's probe or Jared Kushner's position or Hope Hicks' testimony. Scroll down for details... | | The WSJ's lede-all for Wednesday's paper: "Comcast is pursuing an audacious takeover of European pay TV giant Sky, a power move in a global media-industry chess match. In a single gambit, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has scrambled the game board in multiple ways."
He sure has... Roberts' all-cash offer for Sky complicates both Rupert Murdoch's pending takeover of Sky AND Robert Iger's pursuit of Murdoch's Fox assets... | | Hadas Gold emails: In the days to come, I'm looking for the formal Comcast bid, and what -- if any -- Disney response we'll see. On Tuesday afternoon 21st Century Fox said it remains "committed" to its initial cash offer. Fox signaled that the company might say more when a "firm offer" has been made by Comcast.
Obviously the big question is about counter-bids. Will there be any? And what will politicians in the U.K. say? The regulators keep a straight line, but several politicians, like Labour's Ed Miliband, have been vocal about how much they loathe the idea of Murdochs owning all of Sky. Will they start rallying behind this Comcast bid? Read more... | | Is Brian Roberts getting his revenge? | | That's my question at the end of this long day of media maneuverings. First Murdoch spurned Roberts' offer to buy most of 21st Century Fox. Murdoch struck a deal with Disney's Bob Iger instead. Now Roberts is back with an offer for Sky that can't be ignored.
OF COURSE: Comcast says this isn't personal at all. The company is telling investors that the deal will "extend Comcast's international footprint" and fuel "growth investments." And all of that makes sense on paper...
BUT: Think about the players here. These men, who have known each other for decades, are in a constant state of competition. They're all vying for global growth opportunities. Some billionaire-size egos are involved. Here's my column for CNNMoney... | | The official story: A taxi ride, a store visit... | | Roberts and Comcast comms chief D'Arcy Dudnay were in London on Tuesday for the surprise announcement about the Sky bid. Roberts told reporters that he was impressed by Sky's technology while he was on a trip to London last November. At a Sky retail store, he and a colleague "spent at least an hour going through every feature and comparing it to our own," Roberts told The Guardian. "We were really terribly impressed."
--> Key quote: Speaking with the WSJ, Roberts talked about his growth ambitions for Comcast more generally. "In a world where you're getting into competition with Amazon, Google and Facebook, having scale" is important, he said... | | | Another media CEO, David Zaslav of Discovery Communications, said Tuesday that "Comcast and Brian coming in, and making a move on Sky," is part of an industry-wide effort to grow outside the U.S. "There's going to be a race to try and be more global," Zaslav told investors... | | Discovery/Scripps deal wins DOJ approval | | | When Discovery reported Q4 earnings on Tuesday, it also shared a big announcement: The DOJ has OKed its acquisition of Scripps Networks. Ireland is the only country that still needs to OK the deal. The two companies are anticipating that the merger will take effect in March... | | -- The NYT has "quietly ended its partnership with Tina Brown's live events business," Jeremy Barr scoops, citing the company's 10-K filing. The NYT "sold its 30 percent stake in Brown's live event conference business, Women in the World, LLC, for 'a nominal amount...'" (THR)
-- The WashPost's David Fahrenthold has moved from CNN to MSNBC... He was introduced on Tuesday as an NBC News and MSNBC political analyst... (Twitter)
-- Fox News is calling this a "sweeping victory" against the media monitoring service TVEyes. A TVEyes rep tells me "we are in the process of evaluating the decision and considering our options..." (THR)
-- Margaret Sullivan's latest: "NBC's questioning of Ivanka Trump was more than appropriate. It should be just the start..." (WashPost) | | | THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATIONS | | The NYT broke this news on Tuesday evening... CNN and other outlets quickly confirmed it...
During closed-door testimony, W.H. comms director Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee that she has "had to tell what amount to white lies" for President Trump... "But she argued that she hasn't had to lie about substantive issues..."
What are "white lies" in this context? I hope Hicks will publicly elaborate on this... | | Ivanka Trump: "The White House won't be the same without him." Gary Cohn: "He will be missed." They're talking about Josh Raffel, the P.R. maestro who is leaving the W.H. in the coming months. Jonathan Swan broke the news...
Raffel "has primarily served as a spokesman for Ivanka Trump and Kushner's White House initiatives," CNN's Jeremy Diamond noted. So this is a loss for "Javanka..." | | | Kaitlan Collins tweeted: "Rough day to be Jared Kushner: His top aide is leaving the White House. He was stripped of his access to the nation's top secrets. And WaPo reports that four countries have discussed how to exploit him." AT LEAST four countries... | | GQ Q&A with Bannon coming out Wednesday | | | What is Steve Bannon doing post-Breitbart? Well he's starting to give some interviews... On Wednesday morning GQ will publish a Q&A with Bannon by the mag's DC correspondent Ben Schreckinger... Bannon describes an "ideas group" that he's launching this spring or summer, "focused on the promulgation of ideas, the weaponizing of ideas and building and binding together through affiliate groups..." | | "The game keeps changing. There's always a new buyer. There's always a new kind of way of doing business."
--CBS CEO Les Moonves... | | Let's talk about SUBSCRIPTIONS... | | With so many newsrooms banking on digital subscription $$$, what works and what doesn't?
Vivian Schiller quoted in this new Digiday story: "A lot of people are going, 'Reader revenue, it's working for The New York Times, it's working for specialty publications; that's our path.' I'm afraid for most news publishers, it's going to end in tears..." | | Facebook says it wants to help | | This is Facebook's next olive branch to the news biz: The "Local News Subscriptions Accelerator." As Poynter's Kristen Hare reports, it "puts $3 million and three months" behind a pay-for-news promotional effort. The dailies in Dallas, Miami, Boston, S.F., Philly, and other markets are on board.
Every bit helps. Every million seriously helps. But there was some understandable skepticism about Tuesday's announcement...
-- A news exec emails: "Facebook's market cap, as of 5 minutes ago, is $537.22 billion. So their $3 million investment is an eloquent statement on how much value they really put on this initiative. It's 0.0005%, as you probably worked out..." | | | BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman tweeted the truth: "In a year or two we'll see articles talking about how the pivot to subscriptions failed to pan out for some news orgs. But there is only so much subscription revenue available for news. It's a battle to capture it..." | | | For digital media execs: The Media Insight Project is out with a new study about WHY people pay for news -- full of specifics about the "paths to subscription" -- check it out here... | | Tom Kludt emails: If you've lost track of the seemingly never-ending drama that has engulfed the NYT op-ed section for the last several weeks, Tuesday provided a pair of developments that ought to get you up to speed. The morning brought this scoop from HuffPost's Ashley Feinberg, who obtained a recording of a Q&A session between NYT editorial page editor James Bennet and Times staffers. The exchanges reveal an ample amount of skepticism among Times reporters toward Bennet's leadership, which has been highlighted by a number of controversial hires and contributors.
Later in the afternoon, we received word from one of those hires, Quinn Norton, whose tenure on the Times opinion page lasted only a few hours last week. After announcing the Norton hire, Twitter sleuths quickly dredged up several of her past tweets in which she used offensive language and admitted she was friends with neo-Nazis. Writing for The Atlantic on Tuesday, Norton said the Times fired her "doppelganger." "The net created a person with my name and face, but with so little relationship to me, she could have been an invader from an alternate universe," Norton wrote...
--> WaPo's Philip Bump speaks for many of us: "OK, I think we're done hearing about the Times editorial board now. Thanks everyone," he tweeted... | | Mashable publishes Kim Wall's final story | | Mashable's Andrew Freedman emails: "We just published my friend Kim Wall's final story, which she was working on with two other freelancers and editors at Mashable, including myself, at the time of her tragic death in Denmark in August. It's a story about the legacy of nuclear testing, the effects of sea level rise, and coming wave of climate refugees from the Marshall Islands." Here's part one of the three-part story.
"This is a bittersweet occasion, as we celebrate her work while wishing she were here to do the same," Freedman says. "Our payment to her is going to her journalism foundation..." | | YouTube re-enables ads on Logan Paul's vids | | | "Ads are back on Logan Paul's YouTube channels," CNN's Kaya Yurieff reports, following "a temporary suspension earlier this month." Paul is in a "90-day probation period." And he's "still not eligible for Google Preferred, a designation that helps advertisers identify top-performing channels." Read more... | | -- "LittleThings, a 4-year-old site that scaled an audience by sharing feel-good stories and videos on Facebook, shut down today, putting 100 out of work, after Facebook decided it wanted more user posts and less publisher content in its news feed..." (Digiday)
-- "Alec Baldwin is set to host a new talk show titled 'Sundays with Alec Baldwin' on ABC." The network "will air a sneak peak of the new series immediately after the Academy Awards on Sunday night," and eight episodes will air later this year... (Variety)
-- Can you relate to this? John Herrman's latest: "How Tiny Red Dots Took Over Your Life" (NYT Mag)
-- Lucia Moses reports: "With conspiracy-peddling sites under the microscope, Taboola yanks its content ads off Infowars..." (Digiday) | | Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. students will return to school on Wednesday... Two weeks since the massacre... The school will operate on a modified schedule for the rest of the week...
--> CNNMoney's headline about the controversies engulfing the NRA, Delta, FedEx, and others: "Companies learn the hard way: There's no easy way to take sides in polarized America" | | Daniella Emanuel emails: This Wired story is a fascinating look at how "outrage-sharing" contributed to the spread of the far-right's Parkland shooting conspiracy theories...
--> Key quote: "In looking at the case of the Parkland, Florida, shooting and the crisis actors narrative it spawned, there was another important factor that allowed it to leap into mainstream consciousness: People outraged by the conspiracy helped to promote it -- in some cases far more than the supporters of the story. And algorithms -- apparently absent the necessary 'sentiment sensitivity' that is needed to tell the context of a piece of content and assess whether it is being shared positively or negatively -- see all that noise the same..." | | How the hoaxes and lies spread... | | | Check out this new WashPost titled "We studied thousands of anonymous posts about the Parkland attack -- and found a conspiracy in the making..." | | | For the record, part three | | | -- In Wednesday's NYT: "Sinclair Deal With Tribune Hits Complications in Washington" (NYT)
-- Via Daniella Emanuel Poynter's Al Tompkins tells the story behind Time mag's special report on the opioid epidemic... (Poynter)
-- Epix is planning a standalone streaming service... (Variety) | | 700 original titles on Netflix this year | | | Netflix is spending $8 billion "on original shows and movies this year, and expects to have about 700 programs available for customers," CNNMoney's Jill Disis reports. The 700 # -- which includes shows and movies -- came from CFO David Wells' appearance at Morgan Stanley's tech conference on Tuesday. Read more... | | Netflix targets Arabic market with new original series | | CNN's Zahraa Alkhalisi reports: Netflix is "launching its first original series in Arabic next year. 'Jinn' is a six-episode supernatural thriller that revolves around teenagers who discover a genie in the ancient Jordanian city of Petra. The series is created by Arab talent and filming will begin at the end of 2018..."
--> Related: Netflix's first Arabic project -- a stand-up comedy show featuring Lebanese star Adel Karam -- will start streaming this Thursday... | | | Brian Lowry emails: Netflix's announcement about its dizzying expansion in original content production notably runs counter to what Bob Iger said at the Morgan Stanley conference on Monday, where he suggested that the popularity of Disney's flagship properties -- Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar -- is so strong that unlike Netflix, the studio will be able to market a streaming service that doesn't rely on high volume. It's the difference, significantly, between having to invest in hundreds and thousands of titles and focusing on a few that people will feel compelled/inspired to ante up in order to access them... | | T-minus five days til the Oscars | | Brian Lowry emails: Jimmy Kimmel was a relatively safe choice to host the Oscars last year, given his genial persona and ABC's enhanced creative input in the ceremony, secured in its most recent TV rights deal with the Academy. But now that he has waded into the political fray on multiple fronts, he's bringing a different profile with him to the job this year...
For his part, Kimmel said on "GMA" on Tuesday, "I'm still doing a comedy show and I need to be funny and entertain my audience, but I also think that we've matured enough ... to the point where we can accept late-night talk show hosts speaking about a serious subject. And I think that it's almost necessary now." | | How to be "respectful" but "funny" | | Megan Thomas emails: Jimmy Kimmel has shed a few tears on television over the past year and did so again during an interview on "Ellen." DeGeneres surprised him by revealing that one of the rooms on the Heart Institute floor of Children's Hospital in Los Angeles had been named in honor of his infant son, Billy. Several of the nurses who helped care for Billy when he underwent heart surgery last summer were in the audience. You can watch the clip here for a lift...
--> As for Sunday's Oscar-hosting duties, Kimmel said he's working on finding the right balance for the monologue during this "weird year." "You do want to be appropriate, and respectful, but I also want to be funny," Kimmel said, because "nobody remembers 'appropriate' or 'respectful...'" | | Yes, Ryan Seacrest is still hosting E! Oscar coverage... | | On Monday night, actress Bellamy Young triggered a Hollywood news cycle by saying Ryan Seacrest should step away from his Oscar red carpet hosting duties in the wake of a sexual harassment allegation against him. This allegation surfaced last November... E! started an investigation... And earlier this month the channel said it found "insufficient evidence to support the claims." But on Monday, Seacrest's accuser went public via a Variety story.
Seacrest has repeatedly denied the allegation against him... But Young's comment lit up social media on Tuesday... So it's notable that Young walked it back on Tuesday night. She told THR that she had spoken "about something I had no first hand knowledge of" and she apologized to Seacrest. Here's the full story by Sandra Gonzalez... | | Barbra Streisand on the cover of Variety | | | Megan Thomas emails: Variety's Ramin Setoodeh snagged a rare, worth-a-read interview with Barbra Streisand. She describes the "boys club" mentality she encountered as a rare female director at the time she made "Yentil" and "Prince of Tides," talks politics, and, interestingly, reveals her dogs are cloned... | | | For the record, part four | | | By Lisa Respers France:
-- Here are the results of the annual UCLA study about diversity in Hollywood...
-- Big Boi from Outkast talked with me about expanding his acting resume with new film and TV roles...
-- According to Amy Schumer, her recent wedding vows "sucked..." | | | Brian Lowry emails: TV's wave of dramatic true-crime series continues with "Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G.," a USA network series that seems to want to be "True Detective" and winds up feeling more like "Law & Order..." | | | Email brian.stelter@turner.com... the feedback helps us improve this newsletter every day... Thanks! | | | | | | |
