CBS News Drama, WBD Bids, And Olivia Nuzzi Returns

Olivia Nuzzi arrives for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2023.

AFP via Getty Images

The media business delivered no shortage of drama this week, from CBS News still navigating Bari Weiss’s attempted overhaul to Warner Bros. Discovery fielding multiple takeover bids. Google’s AI-driven search changes continue sending shockwaves through the digital publishing ecosystem — while the re-emergence of political journalist Olivia Nuzzi has made waves of a different sort, following the release of the first excerpts from her forthcoming memoir.

Here’s a look at some of the people and players that drove media headlines over the past week.

Bari Weiss is still shaping her vision for CBS News. The latest press coverage of Bari Weiss—hired by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison to revamp CBS News—casts the 41-year-old founder of The Free Press as a disruptor on a mission, with new profiles zeroing in on her vow to “blow this up” (referring to the status quo at CBS News).

Profiles in Fortune and The Wall Street Journal detailed Weiss’s hunt for new anchor talent to pull CBS Evening News, the former home of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, out of its third-place rut. The expectation is that Weiss will reveal a more detailed blueprint for CBS News in the coming weeks, which leaves the network for now still grappling with its as-yet unsolved identity crisis. “These are really perilous times,” former CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric said during public remarks this week about the state of affairs at her former employer.

Sinclair acquires a stake in Scripps. In other media news, Sinclair Broadcast Group revealed this week that it’s taken an 8.2% stake in E.W. Scripps, a move that could well serve as prelude to a possible takeover bid. The company’s disclosure shows how local TV groups are scrambling to consolidate while cord-cutting continues to pick up steam. It also hints at a broader industry push to get bigger ahead of regulatory and market shifts.

Google’s AI Search is crushing independent media. Google’s AI-driven search changes are having a devastating impact on the digital publishing economy, thanks to the way Search now synthesizes information from web publishers to deliver that content directly on Google search results pages—eliminating the need for users to click on links and leave Google at all.

In an editor’s note published on Nov. 18, Paste announced a major restructuring and a return to music coverage going forward. The note reads, in part: “Google’s adoption of an A.I.-powered search feature, and the subsequent traffic and ad revenue gouging it spawned, has severely wounded the journalism industry—especially music journalism. But Paste is ready to push back and keep its lights on.”

Stereogum made the same sort of announcement one week earlier, when the site said it’s likewise racing to offset declining search engine traffic. Stereogum has blamed Google’s AI search changes—and Google AI Overviews, specifically—for cutting the site’s ad revenue by 70%. As a result, it’s pivoting to a reader-supported subscription model.

Olivia Nuzzi returns to the spotlight. Political reporter Olivia Nuzzi—who spent the past year in a self-imposed exile in Los Angeles after a relationship with RFK Jr. that cost her job at New York Magazine—is back in the spotlight, thanks to coverage of her forthcoming memoir American Canto that’s out Dec. 2. The first excerpts were published this week from the book, which serves as both a recounting of her relationship with Kennedy as well as an insidery look at Trumpworld.

Coinciding with her re-emergence (and her new gig as West Coast editor at Vanity Fair), her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza dropped an explosive Substack essay alleging that Nuzzi also had an affair with a separate former presidential candidate.

The Wall Street Journal adds new top editors. The Wall Street Journal this week announced three new leadership appointments—two of which are new hires, while the other is a promotion. In a memo from WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, she said the paper is getting two new deputy EICs: Former Axios top editor Aja Whitaker-Moore (who led Axios’ National, Local and Pro newsrooms) and David Crow, the WSJ’s current executive editor.

Tucker also revealed that Dan Colarusso is coming to the WSJ from CNBC as the paper’s new coverage chief for Business, Finance, and Economics.

Netflix drops a trailer for Seymour Hersh documentary. Netflix this week shared a trailer for its upcoming documentary Cover-Up, about Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh—the journalist known for breaking the story about the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, as well as for his Watergate reporting (among other exposés about U.S. government and military scandals).

Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, Cover-Up (which hits Netflix on Dec. 26) draws on archival and historical footage, as well as Hersh’s reporting. “This is a film I’ve been wanting to make for over two decades, and I’m so grateful that Sy finally relented,” Poitras said in a Netflix interview. “It is an honor to introduce younger generations—particularly young journalists—to Sy’s outsider muckraking reporting.”

Warner Bros. Discovery gets takeover bids from Paramount, Comcast, and Netflix. Finally, Warner Bros. Discovery edged closer to a new chapter for the media giant this week, having drawn a trio of bids for the company ahead of a Nov. 20 deadline.

Paramount Skydance, which itself remains a big driver of media news at the moment, wants to buy all of WBD outright, while Comcast and Netflix are only interested in the company’s crown jewels—the Warner Bros. studio and streaming businesses. The WBD board now has three competing bids on the table (none of which are binding) to weigh against the company’s own plan to split itself in half, one part of which encompasses streaming and studios and the other including linear TV networks like CNN.