Business

Wall Street steadied Monday as banks stabilized. The S&P 500 edged up by less than 0.1%, coming off its worst week in nearly two months. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.2%, while the Nasdaq composite added 0.2%.

Puck News co-founder and CEO Joe Purzycki is leaving the company, according to an internal note sent from co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly to staff Monday obtained by Axios. Purzycki exits as Puck looks to finalize a new financing round. In his note to staff, Kelly acknowledged that Purzycki was “incredibly gifted at operationalizing start-ups during the incredibly fraught zero-to-one stage,” and that now the company is looking for a chief executive who can lead Puck through its “next phase of execution.”

“We’re not going back to the old way of doing things,” says ad sales head John Halley.

Byron Allen’s company claims McDonald’s has failed to honor its promise to spend 5% of its advertising budget on Black-owned media.

The media business is in talks to sell itself to top lenders Fortress Investment and Soros Fund Management through a reorganization that would wipe out other investors.

It’s paying $35 million to McKinnon Broadcasting to add the independent to its station portfolio that already includes the market’s Fox affiliate, KWSB.

The writers strike is now impacting overall deals. Just days into the work stoppage, major TV studios have started sending out letters to writer/producers under overall agreements, telling them that their deals are being suspended.

PubMatic said it launched Activate, a new technology that enables buyers to access premium video and CTV inventory on Pubmatic’s programmatic platform via direct deals. Launch partners include Dentsu, GroupM, Havas, LG, Mars and Omnicom Media Group Germany.

Tucker Carlson is preparing to unleash allies to attack Fox News in an effort to bully the network into letting him work for — or start — a right-wing rival, sources close to him tell Axios. Tucker vs. Fox could reshape the conservative news world. Fox, which has seen its ratings plunge in Carlson’s slot since he was let go 13 days ago, wants to sideline him by paying him $20 million a year not to work.

The closing of five news departments at Sinclair stations across the country may just be an effect of one company’s regional sports network gone sideways. It may also signal that a major local TV news shakeup is finally upon us.

New jobs posted to TVNewscheck’s Media Job Center include an opening for a senior sales executive of TV systems at AccuWeather.

An Apple-juiced rally on Friday closed out a bruising week on Wall Street. The S&P 500 jumped 1.8%, though it still turned in a modest loss for the week that was its worst in nearly two months. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 1.7%, while the Nasdaq composite rallied 2.2%.

A group including basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, TV producer Kenya Barris and rapper 50 Cent is among the potential bidders for a majority stake in Paramount Global’s BET Media Group, according to people familiar with the situation. The three celebrities have teamed up with Group Black — a company that aims to invest in and grow Black-owned media firms — private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners and Authentic Brands Group, which develops and licenses its brands to retail operators, the people said.

CEO Hilton Howell: “For the first time ever in the year before a presidential election we are receiving significant presidential ad buys from all major candidates and parties. This is a great sign for this year and for next year.”

Fubo said it reduced its first-quarter loss despite losing about 160,000 domestic subscribers since the end of the year. The company’s results exceeded Wall Street expectations and Fubo shares jumped 32% in midday trading Friday. The company finished the quarter with 1.285 million North American subscribers, which is up  22% from a year ago.

After media companies have lost billions of dollars making the pivot from linear TV to streaming, CEO David Zaslav declared that Warner Bros. Discovery’s business is no longer hemorrhaging red ink. “Here in the U.S., our streaming business is no longer a bleeder,” Zaslav said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call Friday. “It’s hard to run a business when you have a big bleeder.”

CFO Jason Combs: “Looking ahead to the second quarter of 2023, we expect Local Media revenue to be flat to up in the low single digits percent range.”

The CW is about to lose eight important affiliates: the CBS owned and operated stations that are currently affiliated with the Nexstar-owned network will become independent in September. The  stations are WPSG Philadelphia, WUPA Atlanta, KBCW San Francisco, KSTW Seattle, WTOG Tampa-St. Petersburg, WKBD Detroit, KMAX Sacramento and WPCW Pittsburgh. This will give the CBS stations group 14 CBS Television Network stations and 13 independents.

Audience measurement firm Comscore has struck a deal with Magna, part of IPG Mediabrands, to use Comscore’s local television ratings to “inform” local TV buys across the organization. The companies said Comscore is the only alternative ratings service that will be used by Magna for local television. The firm also uses the Nielsen local ratings.

The decrease to $312 million was driven by lower core and political advertising as well as distribution revenue. For the company as a whole, total 1Q revenue was $528 million, a decrease of 6.7%, or $37.9 million.

Warner Bros Discovery matched Wall Street estimates for revenue in the first quarter today, with $10.7 billion, but posted a wider-than-expected loss due to tough comparisons with the year-ago period. Net losses reached 44 cents a share, worse than the 5-cent loss analysts had forecast. Streaming, though, provided a rare bright spot, posting $50 million in EBITDA after several quarters in the red. The company pronounced it a “meaningful turn” and said it now expects the streaming operation to become profitable a year earlier than it expected.

The decrease to $801 million was fueled by lower core and political revenue and only a 1% rise in retransmission consent money.

The increase to $239 million is powered by a 28% boost from its digital properties and higher local advertising revenue that offset lower national and political television ad dollars.

Wall Street sank Thursday as bank fears flared. The S&P 500 fell 0.7% to add to its loss for the week so far. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.9%, and is now down for the year, while the Nasdaq composite fell 0.5%.

Scripps will air NHL Golden Knights games on its KMCC Las Vegas station, which is currently airing programming from Ion, Scripps’ national entertainment network. A rebranded KMCC will broadcast local and national news, local sports and additional entertainment programming.

The U.S. subscription video on demand (SVOD) business grew total revenue by 22.22% to over $8.7 billion in the first quarter, the biggest rate of quarterly expansion since the go-go streaming days of the 2020 pandemic. The data comes courtesy of Informa-owned research company Omdia, which delivers SVOD data as a third party in the Digital Entertainment Group’s quarterly “Home Entertainment Spending” reports.

The reduction from 24 cents per share to 5 cents was explained as a “prudent” move designed “to optimize the balance sheet for flexibility” CFO Naveen Chopra said, and will “translate to significant cash savings of nearly $500 million annually.”

Gray is rolling out Waymark’s tech across all its stations, letting them create video ads in five minutes or less.