Greetings from Las Vegas, and welcome back to In the Room. In tonight’s email, my invariably brilliant partner Julia Alexander offers her insights on a few of the existential questions facing Brian Roberts’ and David Zaslav’s respective cable spincos: Can Versant thrive on its own when it’s seen as nothing but a drag on Comcast’s own books? And can a shrinking CNN succeed in an oversaturated news space if audiences’ needs—for news, weather, health advice, etcetera—are already being amply met elsewhere? After reading Julia’s piece, I’m placing a two-leg parlay on the under. But first, a few quick observations on the latest industry headlines…

A Disney resignation: According to my partner John Ourand, Justin Connolly resigned today as Disney’s president of platform distribution, a role in which he reported to Dana Walden, Alan Bergman, and Jimmy Pitaro. Connolly, who spent the past 25 years with Disney and ESPN, did not tell staffers where he was headed, but speculation immediately centered on YouTube TV, the virtual M.V.P.D. that lost Lori Conkling to Netflix back in January. (Of note: Disney’s affiliate deal with YouTube TV is up at some point this fall.) However, a Disney insider told Ourand that they were surprised by Connolly’s abrupt decision to exit since he re-upped a multiyear, fixed-term contract earlier this year, and Disney has not agreed to release him—to YouTube TV or anywhere else. Connolly was a finalist to replace John Skipper as the head of ESPN in 2018—a job that eventually went to Jimmy Pitaro. He was also in the mix to run the NBC Sports Group a couple of years ago, before Disney lured him back with an attractive deal. Connolly is a well-respected and well-liked executive who cut his teeth in ESPN’s affiliate sales and distribution department before moving over to Disney, where he was involved across the company. Earlier this week, he was front and center at an ESPN presser announcing the name and pricing plans for the company’s forthcoming D.T.C. service (née Flagship, now known simply as… ESPN). Connolly sent a memo to a few Disney staffers this afternoon announcing his move and reflecting on his time at Disney. “In 2003, I met my wife, Jessica, while we were both working at ESPN,” he wrote. “Many of you were there when we got married. And, we subsequently learned we were going to be parents for the first time in an ESPN satellite office in Cheshire, CT. Accordingly, each of our four kids holds Disney in a special place in their hearts.”
Alan’s $25,000 ticket: Last year, as you may recall, former Fortune chief executive Alan Murray decamped to Dow Jones to help spearhead the expansion of the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute, a B2B membership business that gives C.E.O.s and other top executives access to exclusive summits, dinners, and other peer-to-peer networking events, for a hefty subscription—$25,000 a year, in the case of the flagship C.E.O. Council. The institute offers similar programs for C.F.O.s and C.I.O.s, and now, according to Adweek, will add councils for board directors and chief people officers.Is all this worth the price tag? These things are easily expensed by executives who will justify the cost for the potential deal flow and networking opportunity. On the other hand, isn’t this what the golf club, or San Vicente Bungalows, membership is for? Anyway, Alan managed to pull this off for years at Fortune, arguably at the expense of the editorial product. At least now this is his sole focus, and Almar and Emma can focus on the rest.

Crossfire 2.0: Sam Feist, the lifelong CNN veteran who recently became the C.E.O. of C-SPAN, is planning to bring back a kinder, gentler version of the famed CNN debate show Crossfire—one that aspires toward bipartisan resolution, not Maury-style ideological combat. The show will be called Ceasefire—get it?—a concept, according to the Times, that Feist picked up over a lunch, decades ago, with the original show’s co-host Michael Kinsley.Will this new iteration make a meaningful dent in the market, or even become a phenomenon in its own right? Obviously not! It’s C-SPAN! But, man, you have to hand it to Sam—a lovably earnest, dyed-in-the-wool Washington media insider and party gadfly, the kind of guy who’s spent his entire adult life in the Beltway and is still genuinely thrilled to be at every event on the W.H.C.D. circuit—for at least being passionate enough about this dying industry to still give something like this a try. His old boss Mark Thompson isn’t doing this shit, and couldn’t be bothered to.So, good for Sam. After more than 33 years working his ass off in the service of every CNN president since Tom Johnson, he finally got a chance to play the role himself on a far smaller stage, and is absolutely relishing the opportunity.
And finally…: A little D.C. media scoop while we’re in that space: Brooke Brower, the executive producer of ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos (and another CNN alum), is leaving the network after two years.

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Now, here’s Julia…

Julia Alexander

YouTube’s red alert: For years, the audience coming to YouTube for politics or news content has leaned right, with Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly among those reliably dominating the top of the charts. But voices on the left are belatedly starting to find an audience on the world’s largest podcast network, which now attracts more than a billion podcast viewers worldwide each month, according to C.E.O. Neal Mohan. Of the top 100 podcasts on YouTube, only about 10 percent are explicitly liberal or liberal-leaning, according to YouTube’s new podcast charts, with only The Bulwark with Tim Miller (more Never Trump-ish than liberal, but whatevs), IHIP News, and MeidasTouch in the top 50. But hey, it’s a start…
The war on wireless: Congrats if you had Cox and Charter on your media M&A bingo card. The two cable giants will merge to become one of the largest cable companies overnight, with a valuation of $34.5 billion and around 38 million combined customers. It’s an interesting time for the move, given that Charter has managed to actually slow the rate of cord-cutting in recent quarters, losing just 181,000 cable customers in Q1 of this year compared to roughly 405,000 in Q1 of last year. But, as the Journal notes, these companies are facing pressure from all sides: The broadband business, and cable internet in particular, are getting their lunch eaten by wireless operators peddling 5G internet. Even the central profit center for Cox and Charter—propping up declining pay TV revenues—is now also under threat. Anyway, while no one expects cable customers to return en masse, Charter’s recent deals with streaming companies might enhance the value of pay TV bundles for remaining audiences. Most importantly, the combined size of Charter and Cox will help cable carriers regain some of the leverage they’ve lost in recent years. Now we’ll just have to see whether Trump’s F.T.C. allows the deal to go through. Considering that Charter C.E.O. Chris Winfrey has publicly praised Trump over his tariffs, this one may have a decent shot.

Now, is there life after cable?

Laz and Zaz Ponder Life After Cable

To survive as solo companies, Versant and the seemingly inevitable WBD spinco will need to transform their news media brands—MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, etcetera—into something more than mere cable channels. Is the New York Times playbook already obsolete?

Julia Alexander

On Thursday, while fielding softballs at MoffettNathanson’s annual media conference in New York, Comcast C.F.O. Jason Armstrong made a notable, if offhand, remark. He had arrived well prepared with answers for the audience of media analysts and investor types who filled the Gershwin Ballroom at the Westin Times Square, who asked about everything from residential broadband to Peacock’s new NBA deal. (Indeed, Armstrong talked endlessly about Comcast’s broadband business.) But when it came to the topic of Versant, the new spinco comprising NBCU’s cast-off TV assets—USA, MSNBC, E!, the Golf Channel, CNBC, etcetera, plus digital properties like Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, and GolfNow—Armstrong had a lot less to say. Versant “has the ability to go do some things maybe in digital that we weren’t necessarily thinking of, and maybe the opportunity to look at things over time,” Armstrong said cryptically. “And [I’m] not being too prescriptive about that”—that’s an understatement—“but if you look at the way they’re going to be set up, with a talented leadership team and a strong balance sheet, they’re going to have a lot of options.” Gunnar Wiedenfels, Armstrong’s counterpart at Warner Bros. Discovery, was similarly enigmatic later that day when he was asked about his own company’s willingness to explore new strategies, like spinning off TV assets. “There’s a lot more openness to discuss options, opportunities,” he said. “And we’re just going to make sure that we are in a position to take advantage of whatever opportunity arises.” It’s funny, but not all that surprising, that while legacy media executives will tell anyone in earshot that digital is the future, nobody can seem to articulate exactly what that means. Armstrong, for one, was pretty forthright about Versant’s challenges: He blamed Comcast’s stalled revenue on the 40 percent of assets that aren’t growing and were easily separable, contributing less than 2 percent of total content to Peacock. But then, what’s the bull case for Versant as a solo entity, when Comcast’s chief financial officer viewed the portfolio as nothing but a drag on his books? The answer, it seems, is that now it’ll be someone else’s problem.

There’s an App for That?

It’s telling that whenever Mark Lazarus, the C.E.O. of the company formerly known as SpinCo, is asked about Versant’s ambitions, he turns the conversation to golf—specifically GolfNow, the app that schedules tee times in 52 different countries. And when he’s asked about MSNBC, Lazarus mentions there are a few left-leaning podcasts he’d like to acquire. Both would seem to align with Armstrong’s suggestion that Versant will have “the ability to go do some things maybe in digital that we weren’t necessarily thinking of.” Indeed, media executives should be thinking about experiential and nonlinear channels to bring TV brands to life. Interest and participation in golf is increasing, and a significant portion of the top 100 YouTube podcasts are political shows. Poaching the MeidasTouch guys or investing in GolfNow won’t ever replace the peak revenue that cable once provided, of course, but at least Lazarus isn’t living in the past.

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Instead, he seems to be gesturing at the sort of future that C.E.O. Mark Thompson and digital chief Alex MacCallum are trying to build at CNN—another declining cable TV brand that needs to become smaller, and more diversified, before it can start growing again. Thompson’s solution has been to create a CNN subscription service, not totally unlike the CNN+ experiment that was launched in March 2022 and shut down less than one month later. The new CNN subscription offering, priced at $3.99 a month, is aimed at beefing up the digital offering with exclusive features (many still to be announced), full access to new newsletter products, and, perhaps, whatever they’ve hired Choire Sicha to do. The exact details are still being closely held by Thompson, although we do know there will be… a weather app. There’s some logic and precedent here. The New York Times essentially cornered the market for general interest digital news subscriptions by transforming into a lifestyle brand—inserting itself into every facet of readers’ lives with games in the morning, cooking at night, plus news and shopping recommendations and endless podcasts throughout the day. That’s the critical strategy that Lazarus, and soon David Zaslav, will be trying to emulate. Brands like the Golf Channel (paired with GolfNow and GolfPass) or CNN (with its forthcoming newsletters and weather app) can succeed if they become part of subscribers’ daily habits—a challenge, of course, this late in the biography of the mobile age. It’s not hard to imagine other outside-the-box biz dev opportunities for Versant. To wit: It could bundle CNBC+ with Robinhood, bringing financial coverage to younger retail investors. (The median age of a Robinhood user is 35, per the Journal.) Or perhaps Lazarus could acquire a platform like Letterboxd, pairing it with existing Versant assets like Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango for movies as Amazon has integrated Prime, Kindle, and Goodreads for books. Of course, not all brands are created equal, nor will all survive this next adventure. Other Versant networks, like E!, Syfy, and USA, are unlikely to be reborn as digital brands—people simply don’t need more general entertainment content. While they will remain part of the package negotiations that Versant enters into with cable providers, inevitably, they’re going down with the pay TV ship. The formula for value extraction will be depressingly familiar: license series to streamers, juice affiliate revenue for as long as possible, then wait out cable’s inevitable collapse—or sell some of these networks to P.E. firms that will do the dirty work instead.

CNN’s Hard Reality

Similar problems plague the WBD television portfolio, which seems destined to go the way of Versant. Sure, there is some standout programming and brand equity in HGTV, Food Network, etcetera, but nothing that can’t be eaten away by YouTube. TNT and TBS are husks of their former selves, especially without the NBA. The other Discovery assets never proved quite as valuable to the Max bundle as Zaslav thought. CNN is arguably the most differentiated of the WBD brands, outside of HBO, but leadership will need to think carefully about how to burnish and expand the product offering to survive beyond the cable TV ecosystem. CNN.com is still the second-most-visited news site in the United States, boasting 351 million visits in March, per SimilarWeb. But CNN.com also recorded a 9 percent drop in traffic year over year, as of March 2025, thanks in part to A.I. eating Google search traffic. If Thompson and MacCallum want to reinvent CNN in the public consciousness as something bigger and broader than a mere television asset, a weather app and some paywalled content won’t cut it. There are limits to how much CNN can differentiate itself with fitness and health content, too. What can Thompson offer that’s better, more accessible, more affordable, and, quite frankly, cooler than what’s available on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok? A few years ago, the obvious answer to what truly distinguished CNN would have been its authority as the “most trusted name in news.” Alas, while authority and expertise are needed more than ever, Americans’ trust in the mainstream news media has collapsed. There’s no denying that CNN’s best asset—its name—is less valuable than ever. Could a subscription product, similar to the Times, that subsidizes news by leaning into more lifestyle products stem the bleeding? Unfortunately, it’s the wrong playbook—a glance backward at a time when the industry desperately needs new ideas. Whatever digital direction Versant and CNN go in, one reality is inescapable: These companies will be much, much smaller than their predecessors. None of these proposed solutions make up for the total dissolution of a near-perfect profit machine that anxious leadership teams are trying to replicate. These moves may, however, help increase the value of these assets just enough to make them more appealing to a buyer down the line. It’ll be someone else’s headache soon enough.

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