Business Features
The Condé Nast Family’s Multibillion-Dollar Fortune: Where the Newhouses Stash Their Money
The Disney family may have given up the reins of its business decades ago, but there is still no shortage of powerful families in media holding sway. Shari Redstone controls Paramount Global, though for how long remains unclear as she considers a sale. The Ochs Sulzbergers still dominate the board of The New York Times. […]
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The AI Perils Buried in the Fine Print
If there is one craze that’s taken hold on Wall Street, it is the growth potential of generative artificial intelligence. “If we succeed, everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Feb. 1, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy predicting that the tech will […]
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Bob Iger’s Invincible Era Is Over
If Bob Iger were a Marvel superhero, his power would be persuasion. The Disney CEO has long leaned on his ability to convince others of his plans. From film and TV writers, directors and stars, to Disney shareholders, to the company’s own board members, Iger’s track record has been impeccable. Consider possibly the most important […]
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“It’s a Silent Fire”: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis
While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic […]
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Europe Stakes Claim as the World’s Digital Cop
Europe is staking its claim to be the world’s digital cop, with a series of new laws aimed at regulating the world’s biggest tech companies. Following last year’s Digital Services Act, which targeted abuse on social media, comes the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into effect on March 7 and has the much broader […]
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Megamerger Dreams Are Dying — and Hollywood May Be Better Off
In July 2023, near the peak of animosity between scribes and studios during the writers strike, a picket outside ABC’s The View in New York welcomed an ally: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Behind closed doors, the writers union had been sharing concerns of a wave of mergers that it said left just a […]
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“The Industry Is Not Back”: Bad News From Hollywood Crews
On March 4, major Hollywood crew unions began negotiating their health and pension benefits with studios and streamers, with Hollywood Teamsters head Lindsay Dougherty saying, “We will strike if we have to” during the talks. But some Los Angeles-area crewmembers say that, in the aftermath of the writers’ and actors’ walkouts in 2023, there doesn’t seem […]
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Bob Iger’s Next Big Battle
Corporate board room proxy battles can be frustratingly unpredictable. Even a company confident in its leadership and strategy cannot afford complacency when someone is seeking to depose board directors. It’s something Disney CEO Bob Iger knows a thing or two about. The last time Disney faced a full-fledged proxy fight was 20 years ago. More […]
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Shane Smith and the Final Collapse of Vice News
Just weeks after the company he founded entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy last May, Shane Smith jetted to the French Riviera. But this wasn’t a vacation for the 54-year-old flamboyant former Vice CEO to drown his sorrows. Smith landed in Cannes on a mission to save the media company that he had started as a scrappy […]
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A Streaming TV Prizefight: Walmart Tries Muscling in on Amazon
The first-ever television commercial ran on July 1, 1941, during a Brooklyn Dodgers-Philadelphia Phillies baseball game airing on the local New York TV station WNBT. The 10-second spot, for Bulova Watches, featured a graphic of a Bulova watch face over a map of the U.S. A voiceover declared that “America runs on Bulova time.” As […]
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AI’s New Job? All-Purpose Hollywood Crewmember
Picture this: In a future not too far away, HBO is mulling whether to greenlight a new Game of Thrones spinoff but is on the fence about the project. So instead of dumping tens of millions of dollars to shoot a pilot it might wind up passing on, it uses a generative artificial intelligence system […]
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Inside Disney’s Shadow Succession Game
In the bowels of the Washington Hilton in April, just hours before the White House Correspondents’ dinner, several ABC News staffers were seen hastily carrying furniture, including couches and high-top tables, out of a room on the terrace level of the hotel that was about to host executives and talent at the network’s pre-dinner reception. […]
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