My Drive Mr. Fido
Nigerian breakout star Mr. Fido hits the road with CNN's Lamide Akintobi to share the story behind his viral hit 'Joy is Coming.'
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2 hours ago
- Yahoo
WBD split: What will Warner Bros. Discovery look like as two separate companies?
Warner Bros. Discovery is saying That's all, folks. No Kings Day: June 14 protests set to be biggest yet, will counter Trump military parade in locations nationwide. Here's what to know How to get the most out of Google's free AI Studio China is arming its space station with 'guard dogs.' They have good reason for it On Monday, the media and entertainment conglomerate announced that it would break into two separate companies, one for its cable TV networks and the other for its streaming services and studio business. The split is expected to complete sometime next year, and each company will be publicly traded. In effect, the breakup will separate WBD's flagship streaming service, HBO Max, along with its movie and television production operations, from its cable networks and news offerings, which include CNN, TNT, and many other networks. When it's all said and done, the separation will more or less undo the merger between Warner and Discovery that occurred in 2022, when WarnerMedia was spun off from the mobile and wireless giant AT&T. Here's how it'll all break down once the dust settles in 2026: 'Global Networks,' as company management refers to it, will include many of WBD's entertainment, news, and sports brands. That includes TV networks like CNN, Discovery, and TNT Sports in the United States. But there will be differences depending on international regions and countries, and depending on specific rights agreements. Global Networks will also house Bleacher Report and certain digital products, like the Discovery+ streaming service. Gunnar Wiedenfels, WBD's current CFO, will become the president and CEO of Global Networks. 'Streaming and Studios' will become the home of the company's development and production assets, and more. It will include Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, HBO Max, and their respective film and television libraries. David Zaslav, WBD's current CEO, will remain CEO of WBD Streaming & Studios. During a conference call on Monday morning, Zaslav said 'we're focusing on the next stage of transformation' of WBD, and that the separation will 'allow each of these strong companies to achieve their maximum potential.' 'Each company will have its own dedicated management team and board,' Zaslav said, with 'unique objectives and priorities.' He added that 'we expect all the factors to come together to unlock value—these companies will be better aligned with shareholders.' Wiedenfels, joining Zaslav on the call, said that 'the whole concept of the separation is to create two strong and well positioned companies—we feel very confident about the compelling nature about both portfolios,' adding that he saw the separation as 'a natural progression of WBD.' Both companies will be publicly traded. Moreover, the global networks business will hold up to a 20% retained stake in the streaming business. In the short term, Warner Bros Discovery stock (Nasdaq: WBD) was up about 7.59% in late-morning trading on Monday after the announcement. But the stock is flat year to date. Last week, shareholders voted to reject pay packages for top executives including Zaslav, although the vote was largely symbolic. WBD, since its merger a few years ago, has struggled with debt, rounds of layoffs and rebranding. (Notably, HBO Go became HBO Max, then Max, and is now back to HBO Max again). But Zaslav sounds upbeat about the future, and said the two companies coexisting should help each prosper. 'When we put these businesses together in the last three years, we built them out, and we paid down debt,' Zaslav said. 'We believe [the separation] gives us a lot more flexibility in the future.' This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter: Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
4 hours ago
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The Goofus in Charge of HBO Max Is Out of Ideas—and It's a Crisis for American Culture
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This weekend seemed like a good one for Warner Bros. Discovery. Having secured national broadcasting rights for Good Night, and Good Luck—the megahit Broadway play adapted from George Clooney's 2005 film—the entertainment giant scheduled a much-anticipated, widely accessible livestream of the show's penultimate performance on Saturday night. Interested audiences could catch it on CNN's cable broadcast, stream it via HBO Max (fka Max, fka HBO Max), or, if they subscribed to neither service, view it for free on CNN's website. Making history as the first Broadway play to ever get a live telecast on American TV, Good Night, and Good Luck reintroduced the righteous saga of Edward R. Murrow's battle against McCarthyism at a timely moment—and transmitted the story through both traditional and digital means, crystallizing the corporate synergy between the Cable News Network and its name-shifting digital counterpart, (HBO) Max, with the express approval of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. Or so it seemed. On Monday, Zaslav and WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels announced to investors that CNN and HBO would no longer operate under the same parent. The whole dealmaking process that fused WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc. just three years ago and brought their intellectual property under Zaslav's watch has been effectively nullified, as WBD will be split back into two separate companies by summer 2026. The first company, to be known as Streaming & Studios and headed by Zaslav, will consist of Warner Bros.' film and television properties, HBO's TV and streaming services, and the DC Studios library. The second, to be known as Global Networks and headed by Wiedenfels, will take over the company's cable assets, including Discovery, CNN, Turner Classic Movies, Animal Planet, TLC, Food Network, TBS, TNT Sports, Bleacher Report, U.S. broadcast rights for sports like NCAA basketball, and various European channels. It'll also assume a heaping stack of corporate debt worth tens of billions of dollars. Coupled with the HBO Max reversion that occurred just last month, the redivision of WBD might be yet another obvious indication that Zaslav should probably not have custody of so much American cultural history. Zaslav had been CEO of Discovery Communications for 16 years before the merger with WarnerMedia closed in 2022. Now, however, he's given up everything from Discovery, just two years after his HBO Max–to–Max rebranding set the stage for HBO and Discovery properties to exist together online. After admitting last month that maybe that wasn't the best idea, David Zaslav is just dumping Discovery wholesale and nabbing the prestigious divisions for himself. That's not the only fishy part. After the 2024 presidential election, Zaslav expressed some unsubtle optimism that a second Donald Trump presidency would allow a more favorable business environment for media-industry deals—like the potential WBD merger with Paramount he'd explored in 2023. But then the economic uncertainty engendered by the Trump 2.0 tariff chaos got to him, not least because so much WBD revenue stems from movie releases in China, and Zaslav began trimming employee perks as a result. Now he's even un-consolidating his media empire, instead of consolidating further—likely so he can hoard the company's current and future moneymakers as a bulwark against economic headwinds, and also no longer worry about the debt accrued during the $43 billion acquisition, whose payback installments are still subject to those high interest rates. It's only been a few months into this Trump term. As I noted late last year, Zaslav had already spent much of his 2024 chipping away at the Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio. Beyond purging classic titles like Looney Tunes from the HBO Max corpus (and then taking advantage of the tax write-offs), the WBD executive suite started selling off many of its international cable channels and canceling ongoing arrangements with institutions like Sesame Street. On top of that, Zaslav demonstrated his explicit contempt for one of WBD's most pricey, yet valuable, advantages: domestic rights for NBA broadcasts via TNT. First he claimed WBD didn't need the NBA, then got pissed and sued the league when it understandably turned to Amazon for future broadcast rights. The fallout: a November settlement that allowed TNT Sports and Bleacher Report to broadcast games in certain international markets, but no more rights to televise live games in the United States. (The NBA's new deal gives those rights to Disney, Comcast, and Amazon for the next 10 years.) A lot of notable people got pissed off along the way, including NBA commissioner Adam Silver and TNT panelist Charles Barkley, both of whom likely noticed that Zaslav is a frequent courtside attendee at Knicks games. But now, looking at the proposed split-up, it's clear Zaslav has nothing but contempt for the sporting world that, for now, remains one of traditional TV's last solid revenue sources. (Zaslav's excuse is that sports apparently don't drive HBO Max subscriptions; I'm less convinced that that's why some customers may be avoiding Max.) All the athletics are now Gunnar Wiedenfels' problem at Global Networks, along with the cable channels and (most) of the monetary debt accrued during the 2022 merger and Zaslav's subsequent rule. Surging viewership for March Madness might be able to help Wiedenfels out there, but he'll no longer have domestic NBA live games as his major trump card for other negotiations. And he's ended up with one of Zaslav's more politically inconvenient offerings: CNN, aka President Donald Trump's least favorite news channel. Zaslav might have agreed to spread the pro-freedom-of-the-press message of Good Night, and Good Luck on George Clooney's behalf—but he probably didn't want to deal with the Trump administration's relentless persecution of news outlets that the president deems 'very unfair' to him. Especially when, as in Paramount's case, that may interfere with the broader company's ability to make deals. The thing is, WBD's move doesn't run counter to broader entertainment trends. Last year saw Paramount shut down and lay off staffers from its in-house TV studio, while devaluing the worth of its cable offerings by billions of dollars. (Just this week, the embattled studio axed another 3.5 percent of its American workforce following an executive shakeup.) Comcast spun off the bulk of its traditional TV assets—minus Bravo and Telemundo and the core NBC brand—into a 'SpinCo' firm (now known as Versant), while pointedly keeping its streaming and cinema ventures, Peacock and Universal, inside the house. So Zaslav has a more focused media group via Streaming & Studios, but leaving HBO Max in his hands will inevitably winnow down its once rich library even further. (Zaslav himself has admitted that the TV networks he's spinning off collectively make for a quarter of HBO Max viewership.) The future of Warner Bros.' film-and-TV biz is even less certain. To his credit, Zaslav did what other studios wouldn't and bid for Ryan Coogler's Sinners in spite of the director's controversial film-ownership demands, ultimately giving Warner Bros. the highest-grossing non-IP movie of the decade thus far. (Perhaps a suitable complement to the actual second-highest-grossing flick of the year, the WBD video game adaptation known as A Minecraft Movie.) But much of his time has been defined by completed movies that get axed prior to release, the halfhearted releases of new projects from veterans like Clint Eastwood, the typical overreliance on IP that Zaslav has made clear will continue, and the arbitrary favors called in for personal friends—like Nicholas Pileggi, the Goodfellas-inspiring author whose latest Zaslav-approved film, The Alto Knights, bombed pretty drastically. So maybe Zaslav thinks he'll get the haters and the feds off his back by offloading his news and sports holdings, along with his cable-channel stack, and granting them all to 'Global Networks' along with a hefty helping of debt. But the entire saga of his WBD takeover, his decisions and backtracks, and now, finally, the unwinding of the media megamerger he was supposed to build up even further—there's no reason to believe he'll do any better in the future. The guy is all out of ideas, and it's American culture that has suffered for it. Good night, and good luck, to all of us.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
George Clooney's Wife Is Now 'Happiest Person' After Hair Change
All eyes were on George Clooney earlier this when he dyed his hair black for the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck." Clooney joked about his dark hair during an appearance on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" earlier this month. The Academy Award winner said, "It looks like [I'm] going through some horrible midlife crisis." It turns out Clooney's wife, Amal, wasn't a huge fan of his dark hair either. Although she found it to be "funny," she was more than ready for her husband to go back to his natural look. During the 78th Annual Tony Awards this past Sunday, the "Ocean's Eleven" actor showed off his grey hair. Unsurprisingly, his wife was more than happy to say goodbye to the black hair dye. "Oh man, my wife [Amal] was the happiest person when I came home after the play today and I'd cut all the hair off," Clooney told People. "Because, you know, I looked like a drug dealer with that bad black dye job." Clooney wasn't fond of his look for broadway, but he did receive a ton of recognition for playing the role of broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow. "Good Night, and Good Luck" aired on CNN this past Saturday. People noted it was the first time a live Broadway performance was simultaneously televised. Clooney thought it was a great idea to expand the show's audience. "I thought it wouldn't be bad for other people to be able to see this and see it at home for free," Clooney said. We'll see what's next for the 64-year-old actor. George Clooney's Wife Is Now 'Happiest Person' After Hair Change first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 10, 2025
