In the Room: CNN+’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Welcome back, I'm Dylan Byers. You're reading In The Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry.
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Happy Friday, I'm Dylan Byers.

You're reading In The Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry.

In today’s column, the backstory on CNN+'s demise, Jason Kilar's defiance, and what David Zaslav's latest move tells us about the future of Warner Bros. Discovery.

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CNN+’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Months before the deal closed, Discovery executives made it clear to both AT&T chief John Stankey and WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar that they had questions and doubts about CNN+'s strategy, its cost, and the product itself.

DYLAN BYERS

David Zaslav has spent the last year aggressively rebranding himself. A Patagonia-vested, GE-trained “cable cowboy,” brought up under the tutelage of “Neutron” Jack Welch and Bob Wright and John Malone, Zaslav has long focused on keeping costs low and content cheap—a strategy that coincidentally made him the highest-paid media executive in the business despite a portfolio of assets that many of his competitors privately describe as mediocre. But after engineering the deal of the decade and putting himself at the helm of a combined WarnerMedia-Discovery, with control over the illustrious HBO and Warner Bros., Zaslav has recast himself in a new light: The Hollywood Mogul, on a level with the likes of Bob Iger.

Ensconced in the Elizabeth Taylor Suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel while awaiting the remodel of his newly acquired Robert Evans estate, Zaslav took meetings with everyone who was anyone in the business and signaled a profound respect and admiration for creatives and talent. He posed for glowing profiles in Vanity Fair and Variety—the latter poolside at the suite, with multiple blazer ensembles and no vest—and spoke about the importance of restoring the luster of the storied Warner Bros. studio while creating a streaming service that could compete with Netflix and Disney. And Hollywood was receptive: On the whole, the industry's executives, creatives, and agents respect and admire Zaslav; the people I talk to describe him as a gutsy, no-nonsense leader; and they have been bullish on his new company from the start...

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