The WaPo Reckoning & TikTok’s Next Act

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1:30Sara Fischer:Congratulations, you made the varsity of the podcast. My name is John Arandon, and I am Pucks Sports Correspondent and the host of this pod. And today, Sarah Fisher joins us. Sarah is a great media reporter for Axios and thankfully for me, a regular guest on this podcast. We're gonna talk about everything from Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery to Jeff Bezos' decision to cut sports from the Washington Post to a Super Bowl preview. But before we get to Sarah Fisher, today is Wednesday, January 28th, and here's what I'm watching. I'm focused on two things. First of all, did you see the numbers for Paramount's first UFC card last weekend?

2:12Sara Fischer:Saturday night's event from Las Vegas set records for the Paramount Plus streaming service, 5 million streaming viewers. It was just last August that Paramount signed a seven-year,$7.7 billion deal for UFC rights, and the deal kicked in this week. Both Paramount and UFC execs, they have to be thrilled with those numbers. But now comes the tricky part, they have to sustain it. I'm also intrigued by all the negative stories around this summer's World Cup, which, as you all currently know, will be played in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. Some influential people in Europe are calling on fans to skip the game over immigration concerns.

2:56Sara Fischer:Others are pressuring countries to boycott the games because of Trump's threats to take over Greenland. These stories reached a crescendo this week when former FIFA president Sepp Blatter promoted the idea of fans not traveling to the U.S. for any World Cup games. Yes, the same Seth Blatter who 11 years ago resigned in disgrace following a scandal-ridden run as FIFA's president, and the same Seth Blatter who awarded the World Cup to Russia in 2018 and another to Qatar in 2022. But I digress. My main point in bringing all of this up, basically, is to ignore it. Seriously, it's a time-honored tradition before every World Cup and every Olympic Games for sky is falling type stories to emerge.

3:43Sara Fischer:Host cities, these stories always say they always miss deadlines and never seem to be ready to host these kind of big events. But consider this, fans have complained loudly about the cost of tickets. ESPN reported that the list price on a World Cup ticket for the July 19 final in New Jersey is close to$9 ,000. But tickets are still hard to come by, at least so far. And Fox, which will carry the game, should expect huge ratings. And I fully expect this summer's tournament to be huge. Okay, now let's get to Sarah Fisher. Sarah, first of all, thank you for joining the pod. But we're both journalists.

4:28Sara Fischer:we both live in the dc area and uh for both of us you know like what's going on at what's happening at the washington post is you know i don't think saying emotional is too strong a word it's it's not quite personal but it it uh it's something that you know people that live in this area uh and have grown up with the washington post like it's it's it's utterly shocking like give me what you're reporting on this has told you or from your perspective, what is happening at the Washington Post? Yeah, John, it's very sad, in part because there was so much optimism around the future of the Post when Jeff Bezos bought it for$250 million in 2013.

5:14And the Post, what made it different from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal was that it always remained a little bit more focused on its local constituency than those two papers, which became hyper-nationalized You know, the Post hung on to its metro section a little bit longer than the Times did. It continued to invest very heavily in local sports coverage in the DMV and was considered very authoritative on that. Also, local food coverage, things like that. What happened was when Jeff Bezos instilled new management in 2024, they decided that they wanted to shift the direction of the paper and make it a much bigger and broader entity, reaching a wider audience nationally.

5:52And we saw last year there were huge buyouts at the local level, gutting a lot of the local metro desk. And now we're seeing reports that they're going to be essentially cutting 300 jobs and that many of those jobs will impact local reporters and in particular the sports desk. John, The Washington Post has been the home to some legendary columnists in sports. You think about Christine Brennan, who was there. You think about Sally Jenkins, who took a buyout. It is just absolutely devastating to see this coverage be gutted. And in particular, because there's incredible reporting of Washington, D.C., local sports reporting is much harder to come by.

6:31Yeah.

6:32Sara Fischer:In fact, I grew up in D.C. and I grew up reading Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. And I'm convinced that that is why I do what I do today. That was part of my daily life in terms of doing that. Now, if you want to grow, not just a newspaper, newspaper sounds so old-fashioned, but if you want to grow a media brand, why would you give up a sports desk? What's the reasoning behind that? So you have to think about what is the opportunity, the void that you could fill uniquely. And I think the Washington Post has decided, because of its connections to Jeff Bezos, because of its investments in technology, that it has a really good opportunity to reach a much broader audience.

7:18You know, one of the things that they've been experimenting with has been micropayments, for example. So if you want to read one article for like 70 cents, they want to give you the opportunity to do that. In one sense, I applaud that effort because I do think we're heading into a world where great journalism has never been more accessible and inaccessible. So much is moving behind a paywall. So many news companies are launching catered towards professionals, such as my outlet and to an extent yours. And so I understand what they were trying to do. The challenge, John, though, is that there is still so much that is accessible for free.

7:54And then if you're trying to get to that big, big, big wide audience, it's a tough business model. Where I thought the Washington Post had a really strong lane to win would be actually to have doubled down on this market. reinvest in sports, reinvest in local restaurant coverage, local education coverage, and double down on the industry in your town, which is policy and politics. Instead, it's sort of retreated from both. They've let outlets like Puck, like Politico, like Punchbowl really take the reins on the political and policy side. And they've sort of seemed to be retrenching from their local coverage.

8:31I hope it works out for the Post because I'm always rooting for great journalism and great brands. But I do think they're going to have a lot of challenges. This is a company that lost$77 million for the trailing 12 months in 2023 and 2024. I think over$100 million in 2024. I assume that's the case for last year as well. And so unless they can really figure the strategy out, the Washington Post is looking like it's not in a good place.

8:59Sara Fischer:Yeah, this is so difficult because the people that are populating podcasts and talk shows are journalists and they all love the post and they hate to see any anything you know change is scary and and layoffs are terrible uh like across the board but i am going to try to articulate as you just did i like sort of what will lewis the ceo of the post is like what his uh thinking is on this and if you're a sports fan and you want to, and if you're a fan of the local DC teams and you want to find out about the DC teams, the first place that I think of is not the Washington Post anymore. I would go to the athletic or I'd go to various blogs that have popped up that cover these teams really in depth.

9:47Sara Fischer:So they really have lost a big step on terms of that. You reference this also. If I'm thinking of politics, I'm thinking of Axios, of course. I'm thinking of Politico. I'm thinking of Puck. I'm thinking about areas, other publications that have really come in and just are part of the mix in a much deeper way than the Washington Post is, which is not to take anything away from the great journalism that is coming out of the Post every single day. Even locally, Axios has a local DC newsletter that my family devours when it comes out all of the time. Axios DC, I think that they're in, I forget how many markets that there are that are out there.

10:32Sara Fischer:And so there are local areas to go to too. So if you're the Post, you're sitting on this brand that's based off of a fantastic newspaper of the 70s and Woodward and Bernstein and the 80s of a lot of those sports journalists that you and I have already name-checked in the early 90s. And that doesn't work in 2026. And so this is a way of saying, okay, how can we take this great news brand and make it more applicable for 2026, 2030, and beyond that? Yeah, I mean, my argument would be there's a way to modernize it without abandoning the audience that has long stayed loyal to you and has long offered a strong business model.

11:18You know, the Washington Post still had, up until a few years ago, pretty good distribution in print. They have a sizable online readership within this local jurisdiction, a ton of local businesses advertising the Washington Post. So I'm very curious to see what happens. But, of course, I'm rooting for great journalism and great journalists at the Post.

11:35Sara Fischer:You also have been covering pretty in-depth what's been going on at CBS News. And I know this is a sports business podcast, but can you step back and take a look at these two stories? CBS News, of course, is where Barry Weiss has come in to run it. The rank and file at CBS News are not happy. There's a lot. Disgruntled is always a word that seems to come up there. As you step back and you look at what's happening at CBS News, at The Washington Post, is there a common thread that runs through both of those? Oh, absolutely, which is that the ownership in both cases is trying to pander to Trump. I mean, you have Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, a billionaire who has billions of dollars of government contracts through Amazon, Blue Origin, his space company that are at risk if Donald Trump does not like him.

12:32And you see him going to Donald Trump's inauguration. You see his wife, Lauren Sanchez, you know, mixing and mingling with Ivanka and Jared, the president's daughter and son-in-law. And then at the same time with CBS, it was purchased by David Ellison, a Hollywood executive who is the son of Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, who is an ally to Trump. And they want to get more deals done. So they've been trying to do more to sort of bring CBS News to the center, hiring Barry Weiss, bringing in more conservative contributors. I had a scoop this morning about who some of those contributors that they're going to add to CBS News will be.

13:08And so in both cases, you have ownership of these news entities that has an agenda that is separate from the news entities themselves. You know, Bezos has his companies. David Ellison and Larry Ellison have their companies and they want to do more deals that need regulatory approval. And so that dictates in some ways the direction of the news coverage. And this is becoming a much bigger trend that we're seeing in the Trump era, sort of this succumbing of newsrooms because of their corporate parents. And it's interesting, John, I cover a lot of different types of news organizations in sports and in other verticals.

13:42And now we're starting to have a little bit of a conversation around how do we fund news so that it remains independent? You know, we thought for a while that billionaires coming in and owning these outlets would actually save them. Because you'll recall when Bezos came in and bought The Post, it was seen as this great thing. When Laureen Powell Jobs, the wife to Lily, Steve Jobs, bought The Atlantic, we thought that would be a great thing. Mark Benioff bought Time Magazine and the list goes on. We're now seeing that billionaires can be just as susceptible to political manipulation as publicly traded companies or as private family owned entities.

14:17And so there's a lot of conversation about, do we make more news outlets, nonprofits, so they can accept philanthropic funds? Do we look at reader donations or subscriptions? That's sort of the through line here with all of this. Yeah.

14:30Sara Fischer:And I can't emphasize that enough. It's easy to have a lot of ire toward what Bezos is doing to a great newspaper in the Post. But when he bought it, there was a sense of like, finally, somebody's coming in saving the Washington Post. And it did have a nice run under Marty Baron and Bezos as well. I want to end this on a more positive note because it does feel like journalism is going down a sinkhole right now. But there are examples. I think that the New York Times provides an example of an outlet that actually is doing well and has figured out how to double down on sports. on sports, you know, they bought the athletic, how to double down on local reporting and on national reporting while maintaining a sense of independence.

15:28Yes. And they're able to do that in part because they are owned in a family structure within a publicly traded company. So there is incentive for the family, which has class A shares to bring its values and morals to the decision-making of the company. But it's also owned by so many class B shareholders who were financially driven. You know, it's kind of a similar situation in some ways to Fox Corp, which owns Fox News and Fox Sports. On the sports side of things, John, just I would be remiss not to know what the Times has done is they've doubled down on a bundle, a lifestyle bundle, which is what a newspaper typically was.

16:03It wasn't just news. It was classifieds and sports and weather and, you know, whether my school lunch calendar was going to be in there. The Post is doing the opposite. You know, they're pulling away from sort of the bundle of lifestyle products, which would include local coverage and sports. And they're trying to just lean into sort of the big national, you know, investigative stories. We shall see where it goes.

16:25Sara Fischer:Yeah, yeah. And even with the post, they did away with the comic section, for goodness sakes. So all of a sudden, my kids were not reading it nearly as much.

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17:42Sara Fischer:let's stay in in dc for a second we have um uh netflix and warner brothers discovery it looks like that's gonna chug ahead and we're not saying that that it's actually gonna come to completion but uh the warner brothers discovery board has uh uh gone and said that they're gonna accept the netflix bid uh paramount is still in the offing trying to be an agitator of source, but it looks like it's going to move forward with Netflix. What's your read on that situation? I think that's the case. I think in order for Paramount to prevail, it would really need to convince a majority, 51 % of Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders to tender their shares to Paramount.

18:26And I think even though that the offer from Paramount is probably more financially lucrative, and we know that because Netflix just changed its offer to an all cash bid. I think that there is enough of a hesitation from the Warner Brothers Discovery board that is being translated to shareholders around the Ellison bid, the Paramount bid, whether that's sort of the debt financing or just the structure of the partnership. The thing that's worth noting is, you know, if Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix do end up officially moving forward with this, which I don't think Paramount's going to give up without a fight.

19:03I think there will be a long legal road ahead. They then face a big regulatory hurdle here and in Europe. The folks in Washington, D.C., at the Justice Department, they're pretty independent. So when people say Trump is meddling in this deal, he's trying to. But ultimately, I think the DOJ will make the call that they think is best for consumers and competitors. I do think they will sue to block this deal, but that does not mean that it doesn't necessarily prevail. An independent judge in a courtroom will ultimately decide whether or not to bless the deal. And then in Europe, I do think Netflix will face a very, very challenging approval process.

19:38But we've seen in Europe that even when these processes take a long time, I think about Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard, even Amazon acquiring MGM, they do eventually get approved sometimes with concessions. So what I think is going to happen is it's going to be a very dramatic and chaotic legal and regulatory battle filled year in 2026. I think in 2027, it's likely that these two companies, Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery, do come together.

20:07Sara Fischer:I'm going to ask you an unanswerable question right now, because what you described is a long regulatory process. There are going to be peaks. There are going to be valleys. There are going to be concessions given. There are going to be other things granted to the company. Let's say we get to the end of this process. Netflix owns Warner Brothers Discovery. What does that mean for the entities within Warner Brothers Discovery, specifically the cable channels? so discovery one of those discovery has already committed to spinning out the cable channels separately into a publicly traded entity called discovery global and that's going to happen in the summer of 2026 barring any dramatic changes to this deal structure those cable companies spun out publicly will then be forced to and they'll take on by the way a lot of the debt from the existing overall company.

21:06You know, they're going to be forced to survive on their own. The thing about cable though, John, and you know this and your audience knows this better than anyone, it's death is greatly exaggerated in the sense that a lot of the cable fees between networks and telecom providers, those deals have been struck in multi-year terms. And so it's not like these cable companies are dying tomorrow. They still mint tons of cash. You know, Warner Brothers Discovery just put out new numbers on CNN's profitability and it's still making six hundred million dollars a year. So some of those networks, I think, will survive.

21:39It'll just be sort of a slower death than people realize. And for your sports fans on this pod, you know, we have TNT and TBS, which still have some rights. Bleacher Report, which is the digital sports entity that's owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, you know, still has deals for distribution of certain content, like with the NFL and the NBA. And so it's not like the sports energy from Warner Brothers Discovery completely dies. It just will live in this new publicly traded company that's mostly cable networks.

22:11Sara Fischer:You know, I do want to give an ode to the cable networks because their death has been written about for, you know, about five years now. And there certainly is a trend. Look, it's going down. Cord cutting is, it's real. It's happening. But, you know, Paramount just did a bunch of deals where, you know, MTV Latino is still getting carriage on distributors. You know, channels that you haven't watched or thought about in years, you know, that are part of that Paramount family are, you know, they still exist and they're still out VH1 Classic is still a channel that you can go to really any provider in the country and be able to watch.

22:54Sara Fischer:So the idea that the distributors are turning their back on these cable channels is a total misnomer, like you said. And you know why? It's because of sports fans. There is a ceiling, John. There is a ceiling. It's 55 million households in the U.S. of people who refuse to give up cable because there's still sports distributed on it. So thank you to the sports fans. And that matters because the sports fans need to have access to CBS and they need to have access to, you know, a little less so, but CBS Sports Network. And, well, if you want those two channels, you definitely have to take the H1 Classic or, you know, whatever permutation of MTV is out there.

23:39Sara Fischer:In fact, whenever we have Michael Nathanson from Moffitt Nathanson on here, we always talk about the floor, how far is it going to go? Originally, both of us were like, there will be 60 million cable homes. And I think Michael is down around 40 now. It keeps dropping a little bit. But at some point, we are going to see this great rebundling happen. And people are going to realize, like, boy, it was actually cost effective to do one subscription and be able to see all the sports that I wanted to see out there. Yeah, totally. I also want to move on. God, we're sticking. Just because we live in D.C.