Inside Hudson Yards, Animal Capital, and the Rise of Zazwood

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to what’s new at Puck.

First up, Dylan Byers marks the imminent launch of CNN+ with an insider look at the arrival of Chris Licht, fresh rivalries in the C-suite, and what Andrew Morse didn't say at his talent-packed launch party in Hudson Yards. 

Plus, below the fold, William D. Cohan runs the numbers on Animal Capital, a pioneering V.C. firm that is treating social capital like, well, real capital. Teddy Schleifer chats with Peter Hamby about the Silicon Valley's next Benioff.  And Matt Belloni steps into the ring with WWE’s Nick Khan.

Notes on Zaz Rule and CNN+’s Debut

David Zaslav’s date with destiny—the endlessly anticipated consummation of Discovery and the WarnerMedia assets—is finally (finally) less than two weeks away. And yet the first major artifact of his tenure—the emergence of CNN+—is already in the market. Herewith, some notes from Hudson Yards.

On Monday evening, Andrew Morse, the executive in charge of CNN+, offered some remarks at a launch party in Hudson Yards attended by top talent from the network and its about-to-debut streaming product. It was a refreshing moment amid a bewildering season beset by Omicron, Cuomo, Zucker, and a clandestine search for his successor, which ultimately led to the hiring of Chris Licht. Morse, who had been considered a contender for the top job on CNN’s greasy pole, did not betray any signs of frustration, angst, or even anxiety. Instead, he sounded like the model low-key, HBR-imbibing leader of the David Zaslav era. “This is the right time to launch CNN+,” Morse said. “We know the media landscape is changing quickly, and so is the way people are consuming news. In order for us to ensure our journalism remains as essential to the world for the next 42 years as it's been for the last, we must always continue to push ourselves and to innovate.”

CNN+, as Morse plainly noted, is being launched to ensure the long-term relevance of the brand’s journalism. And that testament, perhaps inadvertently, gets to the heart of the matter: news channels are building streaming services these days out of sheer necessity, just like magazines and newspapers built websites 25-30 years ago. The day will come when all of these channels need to make their core offering available via streaming, and the linear product will wither. They can’t do that yet because of the economics of linear, so they’re building placeholders in the meantime. Indeed, similar to the transformations of the music and print industry decades earlier, news brands must convince their employees, and audiences, that the real action is on their streaming service, not their cable channel—and to do so probably before that’s actually legitimately true...

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