By FishbowlLA Staff
A two-week haul this time around — we held last Friday for lack of pinned-down material, so this issue sweeps June 6 through 19. It was a fortnight defined by power: a utility taking aim at the city’s paper of record, a studio megamerger clearing Washington with only Sacramento left in its path, and an LA-built trade-press empire becoming the largest digital publisher on the planet.
Southern California Edison goes to war with the L.A. Times
The relationship between the region’s biggest utility and its paper of record curdled into open hostility this fortnight. After the Times published a June 9 investigation citing plaintiffs’ attorneys who say evidence points to an idle Edison line igniting the deadly Eaton fire, Southern California Edison fired back with a lengthy “For the Record” newsroom post accusing the paper of “one-sided, sensationalist” coverage that ignored context the company had provided.
It’s not the first salvo — Edison ran a similar rebuttal in April — but the pattern is the story: a corporation facing a wall of wildfire litigation now routinely litigating press coverage in public, by name, against a newsroom it accuses of an “18-month track record of bias.” For a paper already bleeding staff, having SoCal’s largest utility build a standing apparatus to discredit its reporting is the kind of pressure local journalism rarely had to weather a decade ago.
Read more at Edison International Newsroom →
Paramount–Warner Bros. clears the DOJ — and now only California stands in the way
Late on Friday, June 12, the Justice Department’s antitrust division approved David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — roughly $111 billion, no divestitures, no conditions — after an eight-month review. For two of the largest studio employers in Los Angeles, the green light moves a once-theoretical combination toward a close the companies now peg around September.
The local twist: the last regulator with real leverage may be our own. A spokesperson for California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the deal “remains under investigation” by the state DOJ, and Bonta is widely expected to join a multistate suit — the same playbook state AGs ran against Nexstar–Tegna. Across the lots, the number everyone keeps repeating is the $6 billion in “synergies” Paramount has promised, a figure that tends to translate into pink slips.
Penske Media swallows Vox — and the company that covers Hollywood becomes the biggest publisher on Earth
On June 18, Penske Media Corporation — Jay Penske’s Los Angeles–headquartered home of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Rolling Stone and Billboard — announced it had acquired Vox Media, scooping up The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, Thrillist, POPSUGAR and the rest. PMC, already Vox’s largest shareholder, folded everything into a new subsidiary called PMX spanning 25-plus titles, with former Vox president Ryan Pauley running it.
It’s a remarkable moment of consolidation for a town whose trade press is now effectively one company’s. The outlets that cover every merger and layoff in entertainment just became the largest digital publisher in the world — worth remembering the next time a Variety or THR byline weighs in on media consolidation.
That’s the week
That’s the fortnight in LA media. Hear something move — a hire, a layoff, a newsroom shake-up, a tip from inside the building? Send it our way; FishbowlLA runs on whispers.