Over the weekend, a massive merger agreement was hammered out between telecom giant AT&T and entertainment company Discovery Inc. If it receives the blessing of federal regulators, AT&T will spin off its WarnerMedia unit—which includes CNN, HBO, and other assets—into a separate company that it will co-own with Discovery. The usual descriptions followed: it was a merger made in heaven (Discovery chief executive David Zaslav said the two “fit together like a glove”), with numerous synergies, and would create what the New York Times called “a juggernaut.” As Paul Farhi, Washington Post media reporter, pointed out following the news, a number of deals over the past two decades were described in similar terms, including the merger of Time Warner and AOL in 2000, in a deal that was worth about $165 billion at the time. It was later unwound, with Time Warner taking a massive write-down and spinning off AOL as a separate company. Despite the hyperbole, a number of analysts and media industry experts believe the deal represents an admission of failure by AT&T. The company said it planned to buy WarnerMedia in 2016, and spent the next two years fighting with competition regulators for approval to do the deal. The acquisition was finally approved in 2018, and AT&T bought the company for $85 billion, which it heralded as the start of a new media and entertainment empire. The unwinding of the deal is “a major course correction,” Axios wrote about the new arrangement.... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-05-18 12:05:33 UTC ]
A year has passed since the novel coronavirus first emerged. Even with mass inoculation efforts underway, it continues to rage on, with little sign of abating. Throughout this year, we’ve relied on journalism to make sense of it all—especially as the virus’s spread frequently outpaced our... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-12-15 13:02:41 UTC ]
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The cuts are the biggest since the surge in employees at the time of the Time Warner acquisition in 2018. Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal
[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2020-10-26 17:04:42 UTC ]
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[caption id="attachment_181565" align="alignright" width="150"] Samira Nasr[/caption] For the first time in nearly two decades, Harper's Bazaar has a new editor-in-chief. Samira Nasr, currently the executive fashion director at Vanity Fair, has been named the next top editor of the... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-06-10 15:53:10 UTC ]
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Over the past two days, publishers across the media industry have responded to protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by issuing statements of solidarity with demonstrators calling for equality before the law and an end to racial injustice. Here's another response they ought to... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-06-01 20:07:31 UTC ]
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The Constitution holds that the president shall, from time to time, conduct a spurt of interviews with mainstream news outlets before going back to Fox. Or something like that. We’re currently seeing one of those spurts. Last week, Trump gave an interview to Reuters in the Oval Office; on... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-05-06 12:04:22 UTC ]
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Gannett, the owner of USA TODAY and more than 260 other daily publications, appointed a new chief financial officer as Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2020-04-08 17:34:12 UTC ]
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As the COVID-19 pandemic forces marketers to tighten their advertising budgets and organizers to cancel or postpone events, media companies of all sizes are scrambling to account for lost revenue. In cities across the U.S., a virtual suspension of public life is taking a disastrous toll on... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-03-23 14:46:51 UTC ]
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As an ever-increasing portion of the global population finds themselves confined to their homes this week, coronavirus-related coverage is driving major surges in web traffic to publishers, and not just those that specialize in hard news, multiple vendors are reporting this week. The analytics... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-03-17 18:19:10 UTC ]
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AT&T’s Brian Lesser, who heads up the company’s key advertising unit, Xandr, is leaving the company, according to a new report from Reuters. Lesser felt comfortable stepping down because Xandr is in a good position and its first quarter results are expected to show significant growth, the... Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal
[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2020-03-11 18:26:08 UTC ]
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AT&T Inc. managed something it hasn’t since 2014: An increase in spending on research and development. The Dallas telecommunications and now media company increased in investment in R&D last year by about $80 million to $1.28 billion, an increase of about 7 percent, it said in its... Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal
[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2020-02-25 16:16:46 UTC ]
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AT&T Inc. managed something it hasn’t since 2014: An increase in spending on research and development. The Dallas telecommunications and now media company increased in investment in R&D last year by about $80 million to $1.28 billion, an increase of about 7 percent, it said in its... Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal
[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2020-02-24 22:58:29 UTC ]
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In January 2019, Xandr and WarnerMedia headed to the Consumer Electronics Show as new collaborators, since parent company AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner had closed only a few months prior. One busy year later, company executives are planning for an even more integrated 2020. They're deep... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2020-01-09 15:00:29 UTC ]
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Audience Network, which has been on shaky ground since parent company AT&T bought Time Warner (now called WarnerMedia) in 2018, will soon be no more. AT&T said on Wednesday that it is pulling the plug on Audience Network, and will "transition" it this spring to a preview channel for HBO... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2020-01-09 00:45:55 UTC ]
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The Cartoon Network’s top executive has stepped down, joining the growing roster of former Time Warner executives departing the company following its takeover by AT&T Inc. Christina Miller, a... To view the full story, click the title link. Continue reading at Crains New York
[ Crains New York | 2019-11-27 17:35:13 UTC ]
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On May 17, 1973, the first witness to testify in the Senate’s Watergate hearings took the stand. It wasn’t former White House Counsel John Dean, or former Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, or the burglar James McCord, but Robert C. Odle, Jr., a “baby-faced” 29-year-old who had been the office... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2019-11-13 13:14:35 UTC ]
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Day two of the Folio: Show opened with another panel of industry veterans sharing insights on leveraging content for revenue, moderated by Christa Carone, president of Group Nine Media. Eric Schurenberg, CEO of Mansueto Ventures, the parent company of Inc. and Fast Company, shared intel on how... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2019-10-31 21:34:33 UTC ]
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Mere weeks after activist investor Elliott Management publicly pressed AT&T to slash costs and dial down its acquisitions strategy, it appears as if Chairman-CEO Randall Stephenson has knuckled under to those demands. Speaking today on AT&T’s third-quarter earnings call, Stephenson laid... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-10-28 20:32:03 UTC ]
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AT&T will review its portfolio for assets it can sell off, pay down debt related to its Time Warner acquisition and add 2 board members as part of a plan to boost results Continue reading at ABC News
[ ABC News | 2019-10-28 15:17:23 UTC ]
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When speaking to the investor community for the first time about Peacock, Steve Burke didn’t exactly fling open the metaphorical kimono. In response to analysts’ queries about the nascent streaming service, the NBCUniversal CEO said his team is keeping details about the pricing and promotion of... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-10-24 19:47:42 UTC ]
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Telecommunications giant Spectrum Inc. is investing nearly $2 million in a Northern Kentucky facility ahead of a push to hire on 300 more workers. Spectrum, born from the acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Charter Communications (Nasdaq: CHTR), is investing $1.7 million in upgrades to its... Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal
[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2019-10-11 16:16:40 UTC ]
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