| | The BBC’s former director is on a small list of potential candidates to lead CNN. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ |
 | Ben Smith |
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Welcome to Semafor Media, where we welcome adversarial coverage. A friend texted me, alarmingly, Thursday morning to say they had read the great Washington Post editor Marty Baron’s new memoir, Collision of Power: “You’re a bigger character than I would have imagined.” One of the truths of the media beat — all beats really — is that most people who have sterling public reputations guard them obsessively. I’d written about Baron, who with Jeff Bezos brought the Post back to the heights of American journalism, a couple of times for the New York Times. He declined to speak to me for those stories, which is unusual in our business. And, he writes, he hated the coverage. Some of our disagreements are substantive. I was the editor of BuzzFeed News when we published the Steele Dossier, which Baron views as a “serious mistake.” In other places, he was just unhappy with Times coverage of him and his institution. In one puzzling instance, he concedes that a scoop about an unpublished Bob Woodward column was accurate, but adds that it was “false and misleading” in part because my sources described a “nearly ready” version, but he considered what he’d seen a “rough early draft.” Baron will rightly be remembered primarily for confronting Trump, the central subject of Collision of Power, and for restoring the Post to its status as what he calls a “news heavyweight.” The book is well-told, insightful, and worth reading — if a little heavy on score-settling. It opens with the account of a previously unreported meeting between Trump and Bezos, attended by Baron despite his qualms. It also includes Baron’s experience of the newsroom’s generational conflict — including his near-resignation over staffers’ treatment of another top editor. Go pre-order it. But a decade of simplistic, glowing coverage of Baron’s tenure did the Post no favors. Instead, it papered over what was obviously, in retrospect, a decade of strategic drift. The heroic story of the Post’s tough White House coverage ignored the festering problems that can come with a billionaire’s vanity investment: tensions between Baron and publisher Fred Ryan, unfocused coverage outside hard Washington news, and losing bets on technology and audio and video. (In “Collision,” Baron says he advocated for more lifestyle coverage, but was blocked by Ryan.) Now the Post is desperately trying to catch up with the hungry, diversified, and profitable Times. The Post might be stronger if it had received — and even grudgingly welcomed — the kind of adversarial coverage that makes institutions strong, and that Baron ably directed outward. In today’s newsletter: Max has more on the future of a company that’s experienced no shortage of adversarial media coverage, and another (British) name in the mix to run it, CNN. (Scoop count: 4.) What we’re chasing this week, and hope you’ll tip us on.  WENN.comIs it possible that the story behind the music manager Scooter Braun’s fall is as mundane as Matt Belloni reports — the inevitable fall of a guy who thought he was bigger than the talent? With layoffs at the Texas Tribune and Futuro Media, how deep will the downturn in non-profit journalism be, and what’s driving it? What will the headlines be out of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk bio, arriving September 11? We notice that he’s been pre-marketing it on Twitter to Musk fans, suggesting they may be less enthusiastic when they see the whole thing. |
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Two Brits on the list for top CNN job |
 NRKTHE SCOOP Warner Bros. Discovery’s search for an outsider to run CNN has taken it to two high-profile veterans of the BBC. Semafor broke the news last week that a leading contender for the job is Mark Thompson, the former New York Times and BBC chief. But the company has also spoken to another prominent British journalist, James Harding, who led BBC News from 2013 to 2017 and then founded the British digital media outlet Tortoise. The news of an imminent appointment has come as a surprise inside CNN, where many staffers expected the current, three-person interim leadership to last until the 2024 U.S. election. But hopefuls have been lobbying Zaslav for months, in at least one case through his lawyer and confidant Allen Grubman, a person familiar with the process said. But Thompson — who presided over high-wire television in London and led a corporate turnaround at the Times — is Zaslav’s leading candidate for the role, a person familiar with the recruiting process confirmed after Puck first reported Friday that Zaslav “has made up his mind.” MAX’S VIEW The challenges that the next leader of CNN will inherit have been in full view over the past several weeks as the streaming television business convulsed and the network lost market share to MSNBC amid the rolling indictments of former President Donald Trump. While CNN previously competed with MSNBC on big Trump-related breaking news days, the liberal network has begun to pull away significantly on these days: MSNBC was number one the night of Trump’s arrest in Georgia, while Rachel Maddow’s Hillary Clinton interview on the night of Trump’s indictment in Georgia drew nearly 4 million viewers. By contrast, CNN has barely broken one million viewers in certain primetime hours, a far cry from the network’s primetime ratings during the first years of the Trump administration. At one point during Wednesday night’s broadcast covering former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s surrender to a jail in Fulton County, Georgia, CNN broke away to cover the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin — a reasonable news choice, but an obvious ratings killer. Surrendering those viewers was, at least for a time, part of the plan. Zaslav and former CEO Chris Licht decided to cede the anti-Trump viewers former CNN chief Jeff Zucker won from MSNBC, in hopes of restoring CNN’s centrist brand and winning back some conservative viewers. But the strategy has failed to find a new audience of people who watch cable television, and I’ve sensed palpable apprehension within the network about the failure to benefit from the Trump indictment bump. Meanwhile, after scrapping CNN+ last year, earlier this week, the company announced that CNN would launch a 24-hour livestream channel on the streaming platform Max. CNN’s next president will face several daunting questions: Will the network tack back to a more confrontational stance on Donald Trump to goose ratings? Can the 24-hour stream inside Max possibly justify its cost versus cheaper and more popular programming? And will the Warner chief be able to convince a high-profile and respected candidate to take a job that will likely involve years of cost-cutting and layoffs as the cable business inevitably shrinks? Still, the pull of the iconic American news brand is strong — perhaps especially to British media figures. And the breadth of the search reflects a moment when media giants have been looking for executives outside the traditional ladder of their own top producers. Last year, NBC News hired Rebecca Blumenstein, a New York Times veteran with no senior level television experience, to head up the network. Read the story on the web here. |
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Caitlin Thompson is the co-founder of the tennis quarterly Racquet  |
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Hollywood: Zaz Muddles Through: Clare Malone renders a lukewarm verdict on Warner Bros. Discovery, and the big media business as a whole: “In a few years, though, the ungainly hybrid that Malone and Zaslav built may be just a part of a new merger—another attempt to fix a problem that no one can solve.” The Only Good Media Business: OnlyFans is thriving, with revenue flowing through the platform up to $5.6 billion in 2022 from $4.8 billion the year before.  Jakub Porzycki/NurPhotoEnd of an Era: Bankrupt Vice is going remote and abandoning a Williamsburg office legendary for its power to seduce ad buyers. Rising Fast: Molly Jong-Fast, the liberal writer and contributor to Vanity Fair, has signed with talent agency WME… News: Sign of the Times: The New York Times ended its mandatory Covid-19 vaccination policy for employees and guests today, human resources VP Tori Turner announced on Slack. Some employees responded with sad and sick face emojis. Gershkovich Waits: The Wall Street Journal reporter taken hostage by the Russian government, Evan Gershkovich, will remain in jail for another three months of pre-trial detention. Tucker Hugs Trump: The influential Iowa conservative radio host — and DeSantis fan — Steve Deace is praying for Tucker Carlson after the former Fox host’s “slurping” interview with Vivek Ramaswamy and “greatest hits” Trump session: “I’m sorry, but these are not good signs of where independent Tucker is heading.” Telegraphic: The London title is up for sale, and bidders may include Rupert Murdoch, a fan of the sparkling conservative magazine The Spectator, which is included. Other possible bidders are the Daily Mail, and — we hear — a consortium led by former Dow Jones CEO Will Lewis, who now runs The News Movement. “The Telegraph is a profitable media company that has made the transformation to digital-first. Not many media companies can say that,” the hard-to-impress Jacob Donnelly wrote recently. Fake News in Niger: U.S. and French media were among those falling for a fake announcement that those country’s ambassador’s left the country, Yinka Adegoke noted in Semafor Africa. Marketing: TikTok USA: Did you catch TikTok’s TK spot during the presidential debate? It’s focused on very, very American small business, in this case a profile of a woman with a southern accent who is using TikTok to sell goat soap. It’s part of the Chinese-owned company’s campaign to appear ultra-American. Another in the series stars “Patriotic Kenny.” Publishing: Lighting Rod: The literary critic Merve Emre wonders, “Why is anyone interested in anyone as a person?” — but a great Insider profile of her answers the question. |
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 - A YouTuber’s attempt to bring together one person “from every country on Earth” for a competition is the latest viral moment to highlight the fraught political nature of maps in pop culture.
- Here’s what really mattered in the first 2024 Republican debate.
- A leading candidate has emerged in the search to fill the top job at CNN after Chris Licht was fired in June.
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