Can Chris Licht Turn CNN Around?

Licht’s confidantes and advisers must have been beaming when James Stewart’s long-awaited New York Times profile landed on December 18, like a warm bundle of holiday cheer. (Licht’s boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, gave the piece a hearty plug on Instagram.) After months of rough and relentless coverage that put Licht’s leadership under the lens of a high-power microscope, here was a sympathetic portrait from a titan of the business pages. Nevertheless, it’s too early to tell whether Licht and his lieutenants can continue to flip the narrative. CNN brought the curtain down on 2022 with a painful culling that put hundreds out of work. Annual profits, as Stewart noted, have fallen by $500 million. The network’s big streaming plans imploded. Its ratings leave a lump in the throat. All of which suggests that Licht has his work cut out for him. His to-do list in the New Year includes locking in a prime-time lineup that has a fighting chance of narrowing the gap with MSNBC and—more dauntingly—Fox News; gaining audience momentum for CNN’s recently rebooted flagship morning show; and winning the goodwill of employees, who saw morale tank during the rocky first eight months of Licht’s tenure.

Can The Washington Post Stave Off a Mutiny?

Last we saw Post publisher Fred Ryan, the pitchforks were out as he retreated from a room full of furious employees after he’d informed them—in spectacularly ham-fisted fashion—of looming layoffs, and then refused to take any questions. (“Democracy dies in darkness, huh?” one staffer scoffed to this publication.) The fallout was swift: Video of the disastrous town hall circulated on Twitter; a gaggle of union holdouts, including several star reporters, enlisted with their colleagues in the NewsGuild; and reports swirled hinting at friction between Ryan and the executive editor he’d appointed just last year, Sally Buzbee. The drama unfolded against a backdrop of dimming financial prospects. Digital subscriptions are reportedly down. One presumes advertising is just as rough as it is throughout the industry. And the brass, unlike that of, say, The New York Times, haven’t exactly evinced a clear business strategy to restore the mojo. Is this the same Washington Post that enjoyed copious growth and success under the legendary newsroom reign of Marty Baron? The larger that question looms in the collective media consciousness, the more fragile Ryan’s leadership may start to seem.

Will The New York Times Avert a Strike?

At the time of this writing, Times leaders and their more than 1,300 employees in the NewsGuild remained at an impasse in a tense and protracted bargaining process, with the Guild reportedly rejecting a proposal to bring in a federal mediator. This latest development came on the heels of a work stoppage that left the Times, for 24 hours at least, without the firepower of a large segment of its journalistic corps. The one-day action was a significant escalation in the union’s fight for higher salaries befitting not only the realities of inflation, but the Times’ ongoing prosperity. It may not stop there. Over the past few years, the NewsGuild has expanded aggressively in membership and influence across the media, while demonstrating its willingness to resort to more hardball tactics. (“Radical” is a word I’ve heard tossed around to describe its professional leadership.) Last year, The New Yorker—which, like Vanity Fair, is owned by Condé Nast—came perilously close to a strike during its own tussle with the Guild. Which is to say, even if the prospect of Times journalists walking off the job indefinitely may seem remote, it’s hardly fanciful.

Will Fox and News Corp Reunite?

June 2023 will mark 10 years since Rupert Murdoch split his business in two after it emerged from the British phone-hacking scandal, the impetus being to separate the financially challenged newspaper assets of the Murdoch empire from its more lucrative cousins on the film and broadcasting side. If Murdoch has his way, he will celebrate that anniversary by getting the band back together. (Minus 21st Century Fox, of course, which Disney gobbled up in 2019.) In October, News Corp and Fox Corporation announced the formation of a special committee “to begin exploring a potential combination”—or recombination, as it were. The merger would create a more formidable player, streamlining company resources and making the combined entity better positioned to pursue growth in areas like sports betting and book publishing. Not so fast: The proposal is running into opposition from investors, including a major shareholder of both companies. Murdoch has, over the decades, demonstrated an uncanny ability to get what he wants; in the coming months, that skill will be put to the test.

Will the Murdochs Prevail in Court?

That’s to say nothing of the billion-dollar-plus defamation lawsuits that a pair of electronic voting companies are pursuing against the Murdochs’ most powerful American media outlet, Fox News, for airing unfounded claims that the companies, Dominion and Smartmatic, committed fraud in the 2020 election. Top Fox execs, like Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, and hosts such as Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, have reportedly been deposed in the Dominion case, which is set to go to trial in April; Smartmatic’s day in court is not yet on the calendar. A parallel legal drama is unfolding in Australia, where Lachlan Murdoch has personally sued the website Crikey over an article suggesting that he and his father, as the stewards of Fox News, bore some responsibility for the events of January 6. Crikey’s courtroom showdown is slated for March, the month before Dominion v. Fox kicks off. There’s not enough popcorn in Midtown Manhattan or Surry Hills for all the Murdoch-watchers whose eyes will be glued to these proceedings.

Who Will Buy Simon & Schuster?

The Big Five publishing house will ring in the New Year—and its 99th birthday—with a string of recent bestsellers and another quarter of strong financial results under its belt. What it won’t have at the start of 2023 is a new owner. That plan was foiled in October when a federal judge sided with the Department of Justice in its quest to block Simon & Schuster’s $2 billion acquisition by Penguin Random House, whose CEO, Markus Dohle, went on to resign just weeks after the parent company of S&S, Paramount Global, said it would not participate in an appeal. That means S&S is once again on the block. (Paramount Global, now wholly focused on film and TV, wants nothing to do with a publishing concern, even a booming one.) Who will buy this storied piece of literary real estate? HarperCollins? Hachette? A private equity firm like KKR? Amazon? (You laugh, but at this point some would argue it’s not the craziest idea.) With the M&A process expected to kick into gear again after the holidays, it shouldn’t be too long before we find out.

Will the Twitter Insanity Finally Come to an End?

Elon Musk’s announcement on December 20 that he would resign as CEO seemed like a promising first step. But if the past couple of months on Twitter have shown us anything, it’s that Musk appears to have an unlimited appetite for sowing chaos and confusion, so take whatever he says with a grain of salt. In the meantime, power users continue to dabble in the calmer waters of Post and Mastodon, which may or may not prove to be scalable alternatives. The decidedly un-free-speechy-y suspension of several prominent journalists felt like something of an inflection point. And yet, there are no signs of a mass exodus or imminent implosion. Most of us remain reluctantly shackled to the service, where we’ve spent years cultivating large audiences that won’t be easy to replicate elsewhere, at least not immediately. It seems like things could go one of two ways: Musk makes good on his promise to step back from policy and decision-making, allowing a sense of order to seep back in and the worst possible outcomes averted. Or, he doesn’t do that, and, one by one, we each hit a threshold for how long we can stomach the madness.