Forbes was one of several media companies that had hoped to tap the SPAC market to help fuel growth. But not all went ahead with deals, and some that did have struggled.

Axios earlier reported that the prospects for Forbes’s SPAC deal looked bleak.

Shares in BuzzFeed, which went public through a SPAC deal in December, have tumbled more than 50 percent. Vice’s efforts to go public through a SPAC stumbled as investors turned on the market, and the media company instead looked to raise more money from private investors. There is also hand-wringing in the media industry over the state of the advertising market, especially after Snap, the owner of Snapchat, said last week that its revenue and profit would be lower than expected this quarter.

Some SPACs are still hunting for media deals. Executives from Group Nine Media, a publishing company that was recently sold to Vox Media, last year started their own blank-check company aimed at consolidating the digital media sector.

Forbes has posted positive financial results since it agreed to be taken public by Magnum Opus, a sign that the canceled deal could be a reflection of the souring market for SPACs. In February, Forbes said it generated $94 million of revenue in the fourth quarter of last year, a 51 percent increase from a year earlier. It made $18 million in profit for the quarter, an increase of 80 percent from the year before.

Founded as a magazine in 1917, Forbes is known for its rankings of wealthy businesspeople. Last year, Forbes said it reached more than 150 million people with its journalism, events and marketing programs. The Forbes family sold a majority stake in the company to Integrated Whale Media Investments in 2014.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/business/media/forbes-public-spac-deal.html

The Netflix Lobby Metric

Over a three-hour dinner, Mr. Sarandos was charming and upbeat, dressed down in Levi’s and sneakers. You would never know he had been through a Job-level run of bad fortune in the last few months. First, his father, with whom he was very close, died. Soon after, his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Avant, with whom he was also very close, was shot to death when she encountered a burglar in the middle of the night at her Beverly Hills home. Ms. Avant, renowned in Hollywood for her elegance, art collecting, philanthropy and community organizing in Watts, Calif., was the wife of Clarence Avant, a music mogul known as the “Black Godfather.”

Then, on top of Mr. Sarandos’s personal woes, Netflix skidded from rapid growth to grind-it-out. (Its stock peaked above $700 a share in November 2021 and has now fallen below $200.)

The rise of Mr. Sarandos, a community college night-school dropout, from a video store clerk in Arizona to the pinnacle of Hollywood, is legendary.

“He’s had more singular influence on movies and television shows than anyone ever had,” Barry Diller told me. “He has denuded the power of the old movie companies that had held for almost 100 years. They are now irrelevant to setting the play and rules of the day. If there is still a Hollywood, he is it.”

Only a few years ago, the Netflix lobby was the coolest place on earth. Now it’s suddenly gloomy. In her “Saturday Night Live” monologue last weekend, Natasha Lyonne, the star of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” sarcastically cracked that the “two things you definitely want to be associated with right now are Russia and Netflix.”

After winning the pandemic, Netflix now finds itself in its own version of its survival drama “Squid Game.” The company hit a ceiling, for now, of some 220 million subscribers, after thinking it could get to a billion with its global empire, and that has thrown a wrench into the future of Netflix and streaming in general. Wall Street suddenly turned a cold shoulder on its former darling, telling Netflix, Guess what, guys, you’ve got to make money, not just grow subscriptions.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/style/ted-sarandos-netflix.html

Is 500,000 the new million?

As a shorthand for success selling albums in the streaming age, that may now be the case. The latest release to hit that adjusted milestone is Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which had the equivalent of 521,500 sales in the United States over the last week, thanks to strong streaming numbers and the biggest vinyl take in three decades.

For years, moving a million copies of an album in one week was a coveted achievement for any blockbuster release. Since the 1990s it has been done at least 20 times, by acts like Adele, Whitney Houston, ’N Sync, Eminem and Taylor Swift.

But streaming has rejiggered the music industry’s math, and the prospect of selling a million copies of an album — or even getting a million “equivalent sales units,” a new yardstick that incorporates old-fashioned purchases and streaming clicks — has largely disappeared from the strategy book. No title has had a million sales in a single week since Swift’s “Reputation” nearly five years ago, and in the last 18 months, only four albums — including “Harry’s House” — have crossed 500,000.

“Harry’s House” had about as boffo an opening as any album can have now, with 247 million streams and 330,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. It had the best opening of any album since Adele’s “30,” which landed six months ago with 839,000. (Even Adele, whose previous album, “25,” started with nearly 3.4 million back in 2015, could no longer hit seven figures.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/arts/music/harry-styles-harrys-house-billboard-chart.html

“But I’ve never … I’m shy, I get embarrassed,” Mr. Moore, who wrote about the experience in Sports Illustrated, recalled telling Mr. Towne. “I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to talk.”

“You’re an athlete,” Mr. Towne said. “And the character is easily embarrassed.”

In his review, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Moore was “the biggest surprise” — “relaxed, charming, low-keyed and self-assured.”

After leaving Sports Illustrated in 1995, Mr. Moore collaborated with Mr. Towne on the screenplay for “Without Limits” (1998), about the brash Oregon runner Steve Prefontaine, who held seven American distance records at his death in a car accident in 1975. He and Mr. Moore had been close friends.

In addition to his brother, Mr. Moore is survived by his wife, Connie Johnston Moore. His first marriage, to Roberta Conlan, ended in divorce.

Starting in the mid-1990s, Mr. Moore helped lead a human rights campaign to publicize the plight of Mr. Wolde, a former Army captain who was accused of killing a boy during the reign of terror in Ethiopia that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

Mr. Wolde proclaimed his innocence in a case that was finally decided in 2002 when a judge convicted him of a lesser charge and sentenced him to six years in prison, then freed him because he had already served nine.

Mr. Moore recalled in a Runner’s World article in 2018 that he spoke by telephone with Mr. Wolde soon after his release.

“How’s your health?” Mr. Moore asked.

“Hey,” said Mr. Wolde, who died a few months later, “give me a couple of months to recuperate and I’ll race you anywhere you want, any distance you want!”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/30/sports/kenny-moore-dead.html

Euphoric reviews and strong word of mouth helped boost ticket sales, which easily surpassed prerelease analyst expectations. “Top Gun: Maverick” received a rare A-plus grade from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. Paramount also backed the release with a savvy marketing campaign that included a monumental premiere on an aircraft carrier; a video stunt with James Corden that went viral; promotion by hundreds of TikTok and Instagram influencers; a website allowing fans to generate customized call signs with augmented reality photos; and original songs by Lady Gaga. As ever, Cruise trotted the globe on a tightly controlled publicity tour.

In the United States, concerns about the coronavirus seem to have faded. About 85 percent of prepandemic ticket buyers (those attending at least four movies a year) currently feel safe going to theaters, according to polling by National Research Group, a film industry consultancy. In January, about 65 percent felt safe. N.R.G. data shows that consumers in general view movie theaters as safer than gyms, bars and restaurants.

“This is the real turnaround,” said Mooky Greidinger, the chief executive of Cineworld, which owns Regal Cinemas, the No. 2 multiplex chain in the United States. “We are very, very optimistic for the rest of the year.” He noted that a large percentage of “Top Gun: Maverick” ticket buyers opted for premium-priced screenings in large-format theaters such as IMAX. “Give us every weekend a movie like ‘Top Gun!’” he said.

For the first time since early 2020, Greidinger and other theater owners are going to get their wish. The box office has struggled to bounce back in part because of sporadic output by studios. “We would have a really big one and then nothing to follow that up,” Fithian said. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” for instance, was a juggernaut in late December and January, taking in $1.9 billion worldwide. But it also had theaters largely to itself, with February almost devoid of big-budget offerings.

In the weeks ahead, Hollywood will serve up a murderers’ row of sequels and prequels, including “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “Lightyear,” “Minions: The Rise of Gru” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.” Other high-profile summer offerings include “Where the Crawdads Sing,” “Elvis” and Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Theater owners also have high hopes for “The Black Phone,” a Blumhouse thriller, and “Bullet Train,” starring Brad Pitt.

“There is finally a range of options for moviegoers of all types,” Fithian said. “Moviegoing begets moviegoing,” he added, with trailers shown in theaters one weekend fueling attendance the next.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/movies/top-gun-maverick-box-office.html

Rich Greenfield, a co-founder and analyst at LightShed Partners, a research firm, is skeptical that Paramount can survive on its own. Paramount’s streaming business is growing quickly, but it’s still not profitable, Mr. Greenfield said. And much of the audience for Paramount’s signature content — think MTV and Nickelodeon — has shifted to new-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

“I don’t think there’s anybody who believes that in five years, this company won’t either have bought other things or become part of something larger,” Mr. Greenfield said. “It’s eat or be eaten time.”

In recent weeks, Wall Street has put a sharper focus on the profitability of streaming businesses. Netflix said in April that it lost streaming subscribers in the first quarter of the year, reversing a decade of growth and causing its stock to tumble. Mr. Bakish said that competitors like Netflix — which he cheekily calls “legacy streamers” — are only now coming around to the importance of the revenue strategies Paramount has embraced for years, including advertising.

The box office, another traditional business largely eschewed by Netflix, is another example, Mr. Bakish said. “Top Gun: Maverick,” is on pace to generate $150 million in ticket sales during its opening weekend, but, in an exception to most movies produced by the studio, it won’t appear on Paramount+ within the typical 45-day window.

Still, some experts think Paramount’s strategy is sound. Brett Feldman, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, said that the global market for streaming subscribers is far bigger than the audience for pay-TV subscribers. Paramount+ added 6.8 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Mr. Feldman is in the minority of analysts who have a “buy” on Paramount.

“Not everybody pays for cable, especially outside the U.S.,” Mr. Feldman said. “Most people have an internet connection or cellphone to stream video.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/business/media/paramount-streaming.html

Some of the projects that Mr. Armstrong promoted were small-time, experimental crypto ventures that eventually encountered problems. In those cases, he said, he considered himself a victim, too.

“They’re preying on the novice crypto influencer who just got popular and is trying to figure out what they should and shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “It’s hard to go from 12,000 followers to a million in one year and make all the right decisions.”

Mr. Paul rose to fame as a video blogger and an occasional actor; YouTube once reprimanded him for publishing footage of a dead body he found in a Japanese forest. Over the years, he has parlayed his internet fame into an eclectic array of entrepreneurial pursuits, including a line of energy drinks.

Mr. Paul became interested in crypto last year as the market for NFTs started booming. In a recent interview, he acknowledged that he was still learning how to navigate the crypto market, even as he tried to profit from the technology. “I’m an extreme ideas person, not much of an executor,” he said.

Mr. Paul was involved in some of the initial brainstorming for the Dink Doink project. But the venture was ultimately spearheaded by one of his roommates, Jake Broido, who gave Mr. Paul 2.5 percent of the tokens that were initially issued.

In a tweet last June, Mr. Paul called it one of the “dumbest, most ridiculous” cryptocurrencies he had encountered, and circulated a video of a cartoon character singing sexually explicit lyrics. “That’s why I’m all in,” he added. He also appeared in a shaky-cam video on Telegram in which he hailed Dink Doink as possibly his favorite crypto investment.

The campaign was a flop, and Mr. Paul was pilloried by YouTube critics. The price of Dink Doink hovered well below a cent, before falling even further in value over the summer. Mr. Paul said he had never sold his tokens or profited from the project. But he said he regretted promoting the coin without disclosing his financial stake. “I definitely didn’t act as responsibly as I should have,” he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/technology/crypto-influencers.html

Anyone else who appears in court risks being lifted into an internet folk hero or smeared as a liar. Heard’s attorney Elaine Charlson Bredehoft is branded a “Karen” (once a term for a racist white woman, it has since been flattened into an all-purpose misogynistic slur) and conspiratorially constructed as an undercover Depp fan, while Vasquez is cast as a Depp love interest, hailed as an internet sensation for her “intimate” interactions with her client. Seemingly every woman tangentially involved in the case has been imbued with imagined Depp-lust. Dr. Shannon Curry, an expert witness called by Depp’s team, has been celebrated for “exchanging glances” with Depp on the stand; even Curry’s husband, who she mentioned once delivered muffins to her office, has been inflated into a treasured fan fiction character referred to as “the muffin man.” Meanwhile, Depp supporters have harassed two of Heard’s expert witnesses off the medical professional site WebMD, flooding their profiles with one-star reviews.

The internet livestreaming of the trial has created its own virtual sport. Each day hundreds of thousands of viewers congregate on YouTube livestreams, like the one hosted by the Law Crime Network, and type comments into a racing sidebar chat. Some pay as much as $400 to have their comments highlighted and pinned to the top of the chat — the more you pay, the longer your commentary lords over the proceedings. During Wednesday’s stream, one participant paid to say that Heard “has a nesting snake on her head”; another promoted his YouTube novelty song about Heard’s legal team.

The immediacy of the livestream and its commentary gives viewers the illusion that they can somehow influence the outcome of the case; someone is always pleading for an internet artifact to be “forwarded to Camille,” as if obsessive fan attention alone might crack the case. This week, Depp’s team called a witness who surfaced after he posted a tweet in response to a pro-Depp Twitter account’s coverage of the trial.

Even if they cannot influence the trial itself, viewers can shape public opinion in real time. Once a fan fiction scenario gains enough momentum to achieve escape velocity, it is elevated into mainstream tabloids, which are rife with reports of Depp’s courtroom flirtations and epic witness-stand one-liners. Once gossip journalists had to craft celebrity story lines themselves, but now the narratives are lifted straight from social media and enshrined as Hollywood canon. Gossip sites are regurgitating banal celebrity internet activity as heartwarming Depp content: Jennifer Aniston followed Johnny Depp on Instagram as a “subtle sign of support,” the magazine claimed, and Depp followed Aniston back as a “sweet gesture.”

But when Julia Fox supported Heard on Instagram, she soon became the focus of articles about how she was hypocritical and “downright stupid.” When a celebrity does not provide such dubious material, it may simply be invented: recently a YouTuber edited and dubbed trial footage to make it seem as if Heard’s “Aquaman” co-star, Jason Momoa, has appeared on the stand to fawn over Depp’s lawyer.

It’s tempting to ignore all of this — to refuse to feed the machine with even more attention. But like Gamergate, which took an obscure gaming-community controversy and inflated it into an internet-wide anti-feminist harassment campaign and a broader right-wing movement, this nihilistic circus is a potentially radicalizing event. When the trial ends this week, the elaborate grassroots campaign to smear a woman will remain, now with a plugged-in support base and a field-tested harassment playbook. All it needs is a new target.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/arts/amber-heard-tiktok-johnny-depp.html

Viewers see a culinary backpacker cosplaying as the ugly American, a man always seeking, even if all roads lead to ambient comfort. The episodes blur, their locations at once distinctive and indistinguishable. California and Wyoming and Maine do not seem so far apart.

“He goes to all these diners, drive-ins and dives,” said one fan, Jim McGinnis, 77, explaining the show’s appeal as Mr. Fieri administered handshakes and how-ya-doing-brothers at a charity event for New Jersey veterans. “It’s just a pleasure.”

It helps that no one wrings more theater from the preordained: Mr. Fieri arrives at a chosen spot. He seems excited. He riffs, a little uncomfortably, to make the jittery proprietors more comfortable. (The stop at the Indian restaurant, Haldi Chowk in Middletown Township, N.J., included nods to “Wheel of Fortune,” “Forrest Gump” and “My Cousin Vinny,” with a brief meditation on the differences between I.T., iced tea and Ice-T for reasons that eluded the room.)

Eventually, a chef has walked Mr. Fieri through the preparation of a favored dish. The host takes a bite — in this scene, it is the tandoori chicken — and shifts his weight a bit. He stands back, silent. His eyes dart mischievously, as if he has just gotten away with something. He wanders off, pretending to collect himself. The chef smiles. The big reveal only ever goes one way.

“Not good, chef. Not good at all,” Mr. Fieri says, the oldest left turn in the TV judge’s manual. “Fantastic.”

Rachael Ray, a friend whom Mr. Fieri cites as an influence, compared his people skills to a game of tag: You will like him. Denying as much midpursuit only wastes everyone’s time. “He just keeps chasing you,” she said.

Mr. Zimmern described him as a politician, “always talking to his base,” forever the person he told them he was.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/dining/guy-fieri-flavortown.html

“You get people who write books about dog burials,” he told The New York Times in 1980. “People write letters to me about how this book should sell five million copies in hardcover, 10 million in paperback, and why Robert Redford will want to make a movie out of it. And you pick it up and it’s a book about a postman. Then we get these books all the time about how the C.I.A. has planted a transmitter in my teeth.”

Having made millions, Mr. Janklow shifted direction in 1989. He formed a partnership with Lynn Nesbit, a veteran agent for International Creative Management whose clients included such literary figures as Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe, John le Carré, Donald Barthelme, John Gregory Dunne and Robert A. Caro.

Representing moneymakers as well as literary talents, Janklow Nesbit eventually established a client list of 1,100 novelists and nonfiction writers, including the winners of Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, Academy Awards and other accolades. Many were well-known politicians, entertainers, historians, journalists, and leaders of the arts and sciences.

Mr. Janklow took commissions of 15 percent when most agents got 10 percent. But his clients received abundant rewards. The Janklovian clout often won signing bonuses and subsidiary rights for television and movie spinoffs, as well as book club and world publishing deals. He also won rights rarely given to authors: a say in advertising and promotional campaigns, even in the details of a book’s cover and jacket copy.

For some established writers, he secured contracts for books not yet plotted, let alone written. Many of his clients became regulars on the best-seller list. In November 1989, he had three clients who held No. 1 positions on Times lists: Danielle Steel on hardcover fiction with “Daddy,” Nancy Reagan on nonfiction with “My Turn” and Sidney Sheldon on paperback fiction with “The Sands of Time.”

Unlike most agents, who remain in their clients’ shadows, Mr. Janklow was a flamboyant self-promoter who moved in political, cultural, communications and entertainment circles and gave lavish parties for the A-list. His friends included Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York; the television news stars Morley Safer and Barbara Walters; The Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham; William Paley, the chairman of CBS; California’s governor, Jerry Brown; and the writers Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

He was tall and intense, and he talked a blue streak. “One doesn’t so much converse with Janklow as plunge into a rushing river of words and try to grab onto a piece of conversational driftwood,” Trip Gabriel wrote in a magazine article for The Times in 1989. He noted that Mr. Janklow’s quest for big advances was more than a macho game or the result of gossip’s influence on the marketplace.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/books/morton-l-janklow-dead.html