Oscar season is supposed to be Hollywood’s lap. It is also, increasingly, a reminder of how shaky things are in Hollywood right now. And this one comes as one of the town’s most prominent players is about to be swallowed by a new mogul, backed by tech money.

Here to unpack all of it is Puck’s Matt Belloni, who explains why we may never see an Oscars like this again; how the show will — or won’t — change when it migrates to YouTube in a couple years; how the movie business thinks about the upcoming Paramount/WBD deal; and some 100% not guaranteed betting advice for Sunday night’s show.

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The World Cup is coming to the U.S (and Canada, and Mexico) in less than 100 days.

Perhaps you’re an American who doesn’t care about soccer, and has given this news zero thought. That won’t be an option when the games arrive, says Roger Bennett. The CEO of the Men in Blazers podcast network — and author of “We Are the World (Cup)”, a personal history of the tournament — tells me this won’t be like anything we’ve seen here; even for old timers like me, who can remember the 1994 edition, which the U.S. also hosted.

This time around, Roger predicts, we are going to feel the “global eclipse” of attention the games generate, and will be astonished when places like Kansas City and Seattle turn into temporary versions of Argentina and the Netherlands. Even if you don’t watch a single second of a single game, you won’t be able to ignore it.

The other thing you won’t be able to ignore: The fact that America is hosting the world at the same time it is telling much of the world to pound sand. What happens if/when  “America First” politics, visas, and Homeland Security become part of the tournament’s story?

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Netflix shocked the world last year by winning a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. This week it shocked us by walking away.
In this emergency bonus episode, CNBC’s Alex Sherman walks us through the whiplash: Why Netflix chose not to counter Paramount, what the market blowback signaled, and how much of this was about price versus the very real prospect of a long, ugly regulatory and political slog.
Then we spin it forward: what a Paramount/WBD mash-up means in practice (translation: overlap, “synergies,” and a lot of job anxiety)? What happens to crown-jewel assets like HBO and CNN? And why this isn’t just another media merger, but a power shift. We don’t really know what David and Larry Ellison have planned for their newly acquired media empire — but we do know that they are now very big players.

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Brian Stelter puts its clearly: "All M&A runs through the Oval Office right now.” So how much does Trump matter in the Netflix/Paramount battle for Warner Bros. Discovery — and what does he want out of it?

Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst and author of the newsletter Reliable Sources, walks us through the information vacuum around the deal, Trump’s habit of inserting himself as a would-be kingmaker, and the harder-to-prove question haunting every newsroom: not just what Trump says out loud, but what companies do (or don’t do) because they’re afraid to become his next target.

Then we broaden out: Brendan Carr’s FCC and broadcast pressure, the Nexstar/TEGNA fight, and what’s going on in Murdochland when Trump can sue the Wall Street Journal and still break bread with Rupert Murdoch. Plus: the state of CNN — and what it’s like to work at a network that may have a new owner sooner than later. 

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Janice Min and Reed Duchscher are both building new media companies in LA. But their perspectives are quite different: Min runs The Ankler, the trade pub that mostly focuses on the fate of Big Media companies like Paramount and Netflix; Duchscher runs Night, a talent agency focused on digital talent like Kai Cenat and Hassan Piker (he’s best known for his work with Mr. Beast).
So it’s not totally shocking that my conversation with Min is a pretty downbeat chat about the state of the industry — LA, she says, currently has “a Detroit Vibe”. And that my chat with Duchscher is more upbeat — he just raised $70 million to build out his business.
But there’s still a lot of overlap in these two conversations, because both of these CEOs are trying to build businesses that can stand up to industry changes. Min, for instance, is getting ready to live in a world where consolidation means a smaller pool of advertisers for her publication. And Duchscher is trying to navigate platforms like YouTube, which is simultaneously asking his clients to make long-form videos that can work on TV, and clips built for YouTube shorts, its TikTok knock off.

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If Joe Weisenthal didn’t exist, the internet would have to invent him. Because Joe Weisenthal is built for the internet — more specifically, an internet personality: Knows a lot, curious about even more, often right, happy to be wrong, always has something to say about anything.
That persona/personality did wonders for Joe in the early days of Business Insider — which, not coincidentally, were also the early days of Twitter, where Joe really took off. Then he took his talents to Bloomberg, and since then has turned himself into a successful business/finance podcaster: Along with co-host Tracy Alloway, they’ve turned “Odd Lots” from a project no one at Bloomberg paid attention to into a genuine hit.
Discussed here: Why Joe is still at Bloomberg, instead of doing the indie media route that could make him a gazillion dollars; what makes a perfect podcast guest; and Joe’s semi-secret country music ambitions. Plus, something smart you can say about tariffs, if you’re in a place where people are talking about tariffs.
Bonus content! This pod also includes a conversation with filmmaker Adam Bhala Lough, who wanted to make a movie about OpenAI’s Sam Altman, but couldn’t. So he made a fake Sam Altman instead, which is why his movie is called Deepfaking Sam Altman.

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Jeff Bezos used to be the savior of The Washington Post. He bought it for $250 million in 2013, and then invested money and energy into turning it around — and it worked.
Now the Amazon founder is decimating the Post’s staff, and his managers are telling the ones who are left that things have to change.
So what happened, and what happens next? Erik Wemple is the right person to ask: He spent years covering media at the Post, and now he’s at the New York Times, where he’s covering the collapse of his old home.

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In February 2020, Disney CEO Bob Iger finally announced his successor: Bob Chapek, who ran the company’s parks business. That didn’t work out.
Now Iger is running it back: This time around he’s announced that Josh D’Amaro, who runs the company’s park business, is going to succeed him.
So: Who is Josh D’Amaro, and what has he done to prove himself CEO-worthy? Why does Iger (and the Disney board) think this one will work? And what happens to all the Disney businesses D’Amaro doesn’t have any background in - you know, the movies and TV shows you think about when you think of Disney?
We have an excellent guest to walk us through all of this: Puck’s Julia Alexander, who has been covering Disney for years — and also worked there for a year doing strategy stuff.
Julia’s argument in a nutshell: Disney doesn’t know what’s going to happen to the business of making things like movies and TV shows. But it knows people are going to keep coming to its parks and cruises, so it hired the guy that knows that business. Is that the right call?

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In an ideal world, I wouldn’t be bringing you an interview with the editor of the Minnesota Star Tribune about her paper’s coverage of the killing of Alex Pretti in the same episode where I interview the man behind HBO’s newest Game of Thrones show.

But we’re not in an ideal world right now.

So here’s a conversation with Star Tribune editor Kathleen Hennessey — who left the New York Times to take the gig less than a year ago — about the challenges of covering the chaos in the Twin Cities, and how the paper tries to distinguish itself from the many, many competitors it has on this story. From the NYT itself to citizens posting their own videos.

And then I chat with Ira Parker, whose “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is HBO’s newest GOT extension. But this one differs from the others in ways you can see onscreen — it’s lighter and more fun, and doesn’t require viewers to understand things like the Targaryen family tree — and in offscreen ways you can’t necessarily see — namely, that it’s much cheaper to make.

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Football isn’t just the biggest show on TV — at this point, it’s basically the only reason some TV networks exist. So it’s a very worthy subject for Chuck Klosterman, the provocative and prolific writer, to tackle in his new book, which is called… Football.

The big Channels idea here is to talk about football’s dominance in American media and culture, and What That Means — and how that might end, one day. And we most definitely get into that.

But when you have Chuck Klosterman in studio, you talk about as much as you can. So in this this one, we also get into:

• Why football is a “completely mediated,” made-for-tv-even-if-accidentally experience — and why “the only seat” is basically your couch
• How video games helped rewire the way fans understand (and even play) football
• How gambling created a “fake game” that sits on top of the real one
• Why the concussion panic faded even though the hits didn’t

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News is a tough business. So how did Semafor, the news startup founded by Ben Smith and Justin Smith, figure out how to turn a profit in their third year of business?

Excellent journalism certainly helps. But it’s really because the company made two key decisions: Focusing on events — and focusing on events in Washington, D.C., where companies will pay a lot of money to reach a relatively small crowd of influential people.

There’s more to it than that, as Semafor’s CEOJustin Smith explains to me in our conversation. But it’s not a coincidence that Semafor is doing well in the same market that’s been quite kind to other news startups in recent years, including Axios and Punchbowl.

So one big question I had going into this conversation — and one I still have — is whether you can adapt the Semafor playbook if your media company isn’t oriented around the C Suite/K Street set. But take a listen and let me know what you think.

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