Start up? No, sit down Bari Weiss

ALSO: Ticket sales for Melania hover in the single digits down under

I’m all for shaking things up in the world of TV news - there’s a lot of great opportunities to maintain relevance that are ignored/never brought to the table. But, that doesn’t mean that every alternative idea is a good one. Case in point is Bari Weiss, the new(-ish) editor in chief at CBS News who continues to throw bad idea after bad idea at the wall.

Ultimately, the problem with Bari is that she knows enough to know that TV news isn’t purpose fit for the current moment, let alone five years from now. But she doesn’t understand that the power of a television broadcaster comes from an entirely different place than digital publishers who find success online.

Bari Weiss seems to be lost in the idea that a TV network no longer has any power, when that frankly isn’t true. She’s that guy you see in social media threads who asks something to the effect of “I didn’t realise people still watched broadcast TV,” despite the thread having hundreds of posts of people talking about something to do with broadcast TV.

This headline at the New York Times made me laugh:

Is thinking like a start-up business really the solution, Bari?

Tom Eisenmann at the Harvard Business Review writes, in an article titled “Why Start-ups Fail”:

Most start-ups don’t succeed: More than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors.

The oft-cited statistic is that 10% of startups fail in their first year, with 70% collapsing between years 2-5.

Instead, surely the solution is to think not like a start-up, but instead to think like a… wait for it… legacy TV broadcaster who needs to learn from and adapt to what works in the digital era.

This paragraph from the NYT piece does a great job at exposing the flaw in her thinking:

“We are not producing a product enough people want,” she said, while dismissing day-to-day Nielsen ratings as an outmoded benchmark. “What winning looks like writ large for this company is building incredible journalism for audiences that are so much bigger than the one that we currently have,” she added.

So, instead, Bari is chasing a smaller audience by refocusing the direction of its news output on content that aligns with centre-right political coding at the expense of the much larger audience who don’t align politically in that way. It’s why ratings have broadly nosedived since Bari’s new-look CBS Evening News has launched. Yeah, it saw a ratings lift last week, but that was driven by a very good Monday night figure lifting up the rest of the week.

The solution needs to be about building new digital products that connect into the broader CBS framework and not embrace the digital start-up mantra ‘move fast and break things.’

Unless, of course, it isn’t so much about building a media business for the future as much as it is playing politics on behalf of the wider company, which brings us to…

David Ellison’s endgame

In a tired article for Variety, Todd Spangler says nothing that hasn’t already been written about ad nauseum for the past few weeks. Broadly he’s saying that the game that is being played by Paramount’s David Ellison as he seeks ownership of Warner Bros Discovery is to hope that US and/or European regulators stop the Netflix acquisition of the Warner Bros assets.

Actually, he appears to truly believe Paramount has a chance to land WBD. His disrupt-and-delay strategy is engineered around the possibility that regulators in the U.S. or Europe — or President Trump — will spike the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal outright or attach onerous conditions, clearing a path for Paramount’s rival offer.

Through its tactics, Paramount is “buying time for negotiations, raising the costs for rejecting the deal and signaling commitment” to buying WBD, says Joseph Kalmenovitz, assistant professor of finance at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.

The problem with this strategy is that it largely seems predicated on the Ellisons having a good relationship with the Trump-led government and that changes made to the political leaning of its news division will be enough to help block the Netflix deal.

What that ignores is that regularly we see that the only thing that gets Trump backing down is when anyone stands up to him. I don’t know if it is just that he respects big-d*ck swinging, or that the short-fingered POTUS is intimidated by it. Either way, sucking up to the guy only gets people so far before he turns on them and shifts his attention elsewhere.

The only really interesting blurb in the Spangler article is this paragraph, which confirms what I’ve speculated:

Sources familiar with the thinking of Paramount Skydance and its financial backers, which include Larry Ellison, David’s multibillionaire father, say the company isn’t prepared to go higher than $30 a share (which is up more than 50% from its first $19-a-share proposal). But at this point, more cash on the table would seem to be the Ellisons’ only option.

If Paramount was going to up its bid, it likely would have done so already.

And speaking of sucking up…

Amazon’s ‘Melania’ set to be an expensive theatrical turkey

It will be hard to call new Amazon feature documentary ‘Melania’ a disaster if the real metric to be judged is whether or not it keeps Donald Trump happy, but if one was to go by ticket sales, ‘Melania’ isn’t a success.

The film is expected to bring in around $5 million in ticket sales in the US and Canada this weekend. Viewership will almost certainly be much higher when it debuts on Prime Video in around a months time. That is against a $40m budget with a further $35m to be spent in promotion. (Read: NYT)

I was amused by Nathan Jolly’s article at Mumbrella yesterday reporting on the single ticket sold for Melania in Australia this coming weekend at the Hoyts movie chain (the largest movie chain to be screening the film this weekend).

It should be noted that more tickets have been sold since, but when I last manually went through the Hoyts sessions for it yesterday afternoon, it was still in the single digits. The film will probably do some walk-up business across Fri-Sun, but with the movie mostly playing in the smallest theatres at Hoyts, I’m still not expecting much in the way of sold-out screenings.

Also, curious is that the single ticket sold session Jolly reported has since vanished from the Hoyts site. The Friday session at Cronulla has vanished, replaced by a single session at 10:30am on Saturday where four tickets have been sold. Good news, 19 tickets and two wheelchair accessibility spaces remain.

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Questions and answers are only valuable when timely

Australia’s ABC is set to launch a replacement Q+A show titled ABC National Forum. It will pop up throughout the year to have a panel discuss topical issues of national importance.

The first one will debut in March and will focus on issues arising from the Bondi massacre on December 14 and the lives and experiences of Jewish Australians. David Speers will host.

Now, I’m all for this. And am more than happy for a show to take the place of the creaky Q+A.

But… I’d suggest that in the current fast-paced media environment we’re in, the only way to do this effectively is to always have a show on the air, say maybe weekly in a fixed timeslot. Lets say on, I don’t know, Monday nights when the viewing audience is at its highest and it can set a news agenda for the week.

(Quietly, I actually think Sunday nights at 8:30pm would actually be best, but let me have my above snarky comment).

As per the SMH:

The broadcaster must continue to innovate the concept of the “town square”, ABC News boss Justin Stevens said, with National Forum a result of that, seeking to bring together voices of Australians from across the country in a constructive way.

“Listening to one another is essential to strengthening social harmony and fostering a more cohesive nation,” Stevens said.

A pop-up show like this will never be mounted quickly enough to provide valuable debate and conversation right when the national town square needs it. It’ll always happen weeks/months too late when the narrative has already been set by the smaller and angrier town squares online - which is certainly the case when it comes to discussion on the Bondi massacre.

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News Desk

• Netflix is reportedly on board for the live-action film adaptation of anime Gundam. Sydney Sweeney and Noah Centineo are set to star. Read: Deadline

• Bluey has once-again been crowned as the most watched streamed show on any platform in 2025 (in the US) by Nielsen. It generated 45.2 billion minutes of viewing time on Disney+. Read: THR

• Hulu in the US and Disney+ in EMEA have acquired Australian streamer Stan’s thriller Watching You. Read: C21

• The Lincoln Lawyer has been renewed for season 5. Read: Deadline

• The BBC has announced that when current director-general Tim Davie leaves on April 2, he will be replaced by interim DG Rhodri Talfan Davies. Read: C21

• NZ actor Antony Starr, best known for playing Homelander in The Boys except in my house where he’ll forever be the star of Banshee, will star in new surfing drama Breakers. The Netflix show is currently in production in Western Australia. Read: IF

• As per THR, Mattel says it is planning a full relaunch of Thomas & Friends, delivering a “bold new look” for the titular tank engine. I can only guess, but I assume it’s heading in this direction:

• Joining the cast of Cupertino in a lead role opposite Mike Colter is Rachel Keller. This show can’t come soon enough - it’s the longest I have gone in over a decade without new episodes of a Robert & Michelle King series (no, Elsbeth doesn’t count) and I am hungry. Read: Variety

• Project Eagle is the internal project name to launch short-form videos onto Paramount+. It is believed that Paramount is interested in hosting user-generated content (USG) alongside clips of Paramount shows. But really, who wants that? Viewers are well and truly covered when it comes to places to find UGC. Read: Business Insider

• EA mobile game Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes will soon include characters from Andor. Read: Variety

• ITV is launching a contemporary reimagining of 90s drama Dalziel and Pascoe. The series is being made for BritBox. Read: Radio Times

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Trailer Park

DTF St Louis debuts on HBO March 1.

A darkly comedic tale of three middle-aged individuals entangled in a love triangle, leading to one's untimely demise

Paradise returns for season 2 on Hulu Feb 23.

The latest Lord of The Flies adaptation debuts on the BBC Feb 8. It will stream in Australia on Stan. My understanding is that in the new version, the conch has been gender-flipped.

Money Heist spin-off Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine debuts on Netflix May 15.

Berlin and Damián bring the gang together, this time in Seville, to pull off a master heist: pretending to steal the Lady with an Ermine. Pretending? Why? Because their real target is the Duke of Málaga and his wife, a couple who think they can blackmail Berlin. What they don't expect is that their challenge will awaken Berlin's darkest side - and his thirst for revenge.

The hilariously-named Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole debuts March 26 on Netflix.

Kissing is The Easy Part debuts on Tubi Feb 13.

The film tells the story of a straight-A overachiever (Asher Angel) who makes a deal to tutor a popular wild child (Paris Berelc) in exchange for a college recommendation letter to his dream school, but when sparks fly, school is the least of their problems.

Even If This Love Disappears Tonight debuts on Netflix Feb 3.

A high school girl wakes up each day with no memory of yesterday. When she agrees to date a shy classmate, can their love grow with every new beginning?

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That’s the newsletter for the today.

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