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 Good evening, I'm Dylan Byers.
Welcome back to In the Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry. If you're enjoying this newsletter, I'm willing to bet you'd enjoy my colleague Matt Belloni's What I'm Hearing, which has fast become the most important newsletter in Hollywood. Meanwhile, for those of you who realize that your team may be a little smarter or wiser by reading all that Puck has to offer, email Fritz@puck.news about enterprise accounts and group subscriptions.
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Today, we turn our attention to the CBS Evening News...
 The former House that Cronkite Built is reeling from the ill-fated recruitment of Brian Williams, insults to Norah O’Donnell’s ratings, and botched crisis communications. Meanwhile, they’ve hired a consulting firm to analyze the news division as Shari Redstone presumably sets up ViacomCBS for an eventual sale. Norah O’Donnell’s future at the helm of the CBS Evening News has been the subject of much in-crowd media gossip and intrigue for some time now. This industry is always fascinated by talent moves, speculation about who’s in and who’s out and who’s next, no matter how relatively small the stakes. And in this case, part of the fascination, surely, is the sexism inherent in television news—an industry where anchor chairs have so often been held by men. Another part of it, though, has to do with the office politics inside CBS News.
O’Donnell’s old boss, Susan Zirinksy, stepped down from her role as the head of CBS News back in April. Zirinsky was the executive who selected O’Donnell to take over the diminished throne once inhabited by the legendary Walter Cronkite. She’d also greenlit the decision to move the show to D.C., a gesture that made sense in the Trump era when Washington was the world’s stage, but has since seemed out of step. During O’Donnell’s tenure, the Evening News has remained in third place, though for the first time in nearly three decades it has at least come within spitting distance of the competition.
But even that didn’t seem like enough...
FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT  With apologies to Wall Street, the streamer's stock price apocalypse is a market problem more than a business problem. MATTHEW BELLONI  Despite the narrative, Trump and DeSantis don’t hate one another’s guts. Instead, they are involved in a more complex game theory. TINA NGUYEN  How a peace offering from Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s gaming chief, led Activision’s Bobby Kotick to a $69 billion deal. DYLAN BYERS  Why did Michael Saylor convert MicroStrategy’s reserves into Bitcoin? Perhaps it’s because, as Ray Dalio says, “cash is trash.” WILLIAM D. COHAN
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