By FishbowlLA Staff
It closed. After a summer of attorneys general, a judge who declined to rubber-stamp anything and a settlement that finally held, Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery completed on Tuesday — and the company that now owns Paramount, Warner Bros., CBS, CNN and HBO is called neither of the names you would guess. The same Tuesday, the NTSB filed its first official account of the news-helicopter crash that killed a KNBC reporter and her pilot last month. And the September ratings book arrived carrying the first Los Angeles radio story this column has been able to print in a month.
The merger closed Tuesday, and the layoff language arrived with the paperwork
David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz sent staff a memo the day the deal closed, and the sentence everyone on both lots will have read twice is this one: “Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce.” The company says it is “committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.” The memo signs off: “Now the real work begins.”
The rest is the pitch. At least $6 billion in “synergies” against a company with nearly $70 billion in revenue, and a commitment to at least 30 movies a year from a library that now keeps Harry Potter, Mission: Impossible and The Lord of the Rings in the same vault. The corporate name went to Skydance, chosen over “WarnerParamount” and “ParamountWarner”; Paramount and Warner Bros. keep their own names and logos, which Ellison had framed days earlier as the whole point — “We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one.” The Class B shares move from NASDAQ to the NYSE under SKYD, retiring PSKY and WBD. Kreiz takes day-to-day management and integration; Ellison keeps creative direction, strategy, technology and capital allocation. The combined balance sheet carries roughly $80 billion in debt.
The number that matters in this county, though, isn’t the ticker. Los Angeles County already did this arithmetic in August, when its Department of Economic Opportunity and the County Film Office published a 120-day report prepared by CVL Economics: roughly 4,500 direct film and television jobs in LA County at risk across the three years it would take to combine the two companies, 10,360 job-years once vendors and the wider economy are counted, and $1.26 billion in wages. County officials were careful to say those are not layoff forecasts. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who moved for the study, was blunter: “We cannot afford to lose another generation of Hollywood workers.” Entertainment attorney Jonathan Handel told NBC Los Angeles at the time what Tuesday’s memo now says in HR language — that $6 billion in synergies is a term for layoffs.
The NTSB’s first word on the KNBC crash: a malfunction at 800 feet, no cause named
The preliminary report, released Tuesday, turns on four minutes of video that reporter Eliana Moreno shot from the helicopter while KNBC covered a collision between a city bus and a passenger vehicle in Chatsworth. Investigators found the audio captured changes in the rotor sound consistent with a malfunction shortly before the aircraft came down. It had been flying at about 800 feet. It fell into an industrial area, struck the side of a metal shipping container and burst into flames. Most of the airframe stayed intact; the fuselage where Moreno and pilot George Maciniw sat was, the report says, “mostly reduced to ash and thermally damaged metal.” The wreckage sits in a secure facility awaiting further examination. The NTSB named no cause and assigned no blame, and a final report can take more than a year.
The detail with consequences for every assignment desk in this market is the altitude. Aviation experts say autorotation — the maneuver that lets a pilot glide a powerless helicopter down on rotor momentum — generally wants something closer to 1,000 feet to work, and that news helicopters fly low precisely because low is where the shot is. Which is to say the trade-off that produces the pictures is the same trade-off that left no room to recover. Last week this column carried a former KABC helicopter cameraman’s argument that Los Angeles should retire the news choppers. The NTSB has now, without meaning to, supplied his premise.
KROQ posts its best book since 2004, and classical LA sets a record
September’s PPM numbers — the August 20 to September 16 survey — are out, and for once the Los Angeles page is the interesting one. KROQ 106.7 jumped from a 3.4 to a 4.3, its largest share since the summer of 2004 by RadioInsight’s count, which puts the alternative veteran a clear point ahead of Alt 98.7 (3.2) and fifth in the market. KUSC’s 3.9 is the highest share the classical station has ever recorded, and it finished in front of both KFI (3.8) and KIIS (3.7).
The top of the board moved the other way. KBIG 104.3 MYfm still leads at 6.1 but gave back six tenths; K-Earth 101 slipped to 5.4; KOST 103.5 is down for a fourth consecutive month at 5.1. Jack FM held steady at 4.6. Further down, LAist 89.3 landed a 3.7, level with KIIS, and KNX sits at 3.1 alongside KLOS. Spin it however your format demands — but a market where both the twenty-year high and the all-time high belong to a rock station and a classical station is telling you something about where LA listening has gone.
That’s the week
Three stories, honestly counted. Two that read as current did not survive date-checking: an L.A. TACO first-person account of one of its own reporters being detained by LAPD turns out to be May, and a “judges reaffirm” press-freedom headline out of Los Angeles could not be pinned to this week at all, so neither ran. Meanwhile the Los Angeles Times newsroom has gone well over a month without a verifiable item in the trades, which is either good news or the quiet kind. Hearing otherwise? Tips, corrections and newsroom gossip are always welcome — that is what this column is for.