Sam Zell, the real estate magnate, completed his $8.2 billion buyout of Tribune Co. and named Randy Michaels chief executive of Tribune’s interactive and broadcasting businesses. Mr. Michaels has worked for Mr. Zell before as president and co-chief operating officer…
Producers, Writers Get Last Jabs in Before Christmas The Writers Guild of America took to the Los Angeles city council Wednesday to discuss public support for their strike. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers fired back, touting a…
NBC is folding MSNBC’s creative services department into the NBC Agency East Coast. “By combining the East Coast NBC Agency and MSNBC creative service departments, we’ve created a dynamic creative unit to oversee the news brands,” said John Miller, chief…
Comedy Central said “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” will resume production Jan. 7. Both shows will return to the air that night without their union writing staffs. Late-night shows on the broadcast networks also will…
Celebrity gossip queen Perez Hilton said he’s unlikely to post videos on YouTube any longer and instead will probably host them on his own site, Perezhilton.com. The blogger and the biggest video-sharing service are feuding after YouTube pulled some of…
Writers Strike Damages Reaching Millions (or Billions) No matter who you ask, the writers strike is racking up heavy financial costs to writers and to the city of Los Angeles, with low-end estimates around $380 million and upwards of $2.5…
Says Acquisition Won’t ‘Lessen Competition’
The NFL on Thursday proposed binding arbitration as a way to make the NFL Network available to Time Warner Cable subscribers, but the cable operator didn’t seem to be buying. In a letter to Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt,…
Retailers’ price-cutting on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc players may be aided by manufacturing costs that are likely to drop below the $200-per-unit threshold next year. Amazon.com, the world’s biggest Internet retailer, cut the price of the Sony Blu-ray BDP-S300…
The player: Andrew Simon, chief executive officer of HDNet Fights The play: Simon was hired by HDNet Chairman and Co-founder Mark Cuban in October to boost the company’s visibility and subscriber base from its current level of about 9 million…