Are you ready to be entertained by a behemoth? General Electric is on the brink of selling NBC Universal to Comcast—a deal that will create one of the nation's largest entertainment companies and make everyone the same everywhere.
• The New York Times says it will cut 100 newsroom jobs, or roughly 8% of its editorial workforce, via buyouts and/or layoffs. [NYT, NYO]
• The Condé Nast cuts continue today at Wired, Glamour and Lucky. [Gawker]
• The bad news for NBC: It's facing blowback from its affiliates over Jay Leno's 10pm show. The good news:…
• The Condé Nast job cuts have made their way to Anna's domain on the 12th floor of 4 Times Square: Vogue laid off six staffers today. [AllThingsD]
• More bad news for Condé: some advertisers are reportedly "jumping ship" after the recent shake-up at Brides. On the plus side, The New Yorker appears to be hiring, so…
• Rumor has it Condé Nast isn't going to shutter several of its money-losing magazines like Details and Teen Vogue, after all. But the budget review that's taken place in recent weeks seems to have "scared fiscal responsibility into some of the highest-rolling titles at the glitzy empire." This means Graydon Carter…
• Glenn Beck is Time magazine's cover boy this week, sadly. [Time, HuffPo]
• Spike Lee and Robert De Niro are teaming up with Showtime "to develop a drama series about Manhattan's Alphabet City." [THR]
• Twitter is now worth $1 billion, believe it or not. [TechCrunch]
• Nikki Finke hears that Variety is planning to…
Nothing that excites Hollywood more than the thought of a studio changing hands; the implications spilling down over a generation of executives and deals might be completely incomprehensible from this distance, but they are darn exciting.
Vivendi, the French conglomerate whose corporate portfolio is even harder to parse than IAC's, is reentering the business of providing mobile content, six years after it exited the market. Last time around, Vivendi's venture was called Vizzavi; this time, it's called Zaoza, which means something in Chinese. What the…
Vivid has taken the first steps by the porn industry to protect their content using the courts, following in the footsteps of Hollywood and the record labels. The adult-film producer is suing the companies behind PornoTube for copyright infringement. Vivid is making the same argument as Viacom has against Google's…
The merger between Vivendi's games division and Activision is a big deal in the videogame business. The industry's Davids now have not one but two Goliaths to sling stones at. More importantly, console makers have two equal-sized publishers to play against each other. But it wasn't Activision CEO Robert Kotick's…
Vivendi is forking over $1.7 billion to take a controlling stake in videogame publisher Activision. With their powers combined, they'll create a new game-publishing goliath, Activision Blizzard, ostensibly worth $18.9 billion. In size, it will rival longstanding industry leader Electronic Arts. The deal pairs…
Wowza, everyone wants a piece of the YouTube market. During its third-quarter earnings call, Vivendi revealed plans to test a new content platform dubbed Zaoza that will mash together social networking and entertainment products together into an indistinguishable pulp. The running suspicion is Vivendi is setting up…
Well, maybe not everyone. But the tide is certainly turning against Apple's music and video store, which has held a near-monopoly on digital media distribution. Vivendi says the contract between its Universal Music Group and Apple is "indecent." We like the sound of that, but somehow it doesn't sound like Vivendi…
Vivendi announced that its Universal Music Group unit's digital music sales during the first half of 2007 have doubled over the past year. Despite that, it ran a $102 million loss. World of WarCraft, Vivendi's popular online game, boosted the company's videogames divisional profit to $162 million, almost double the…
