He Placated Regulators to Buy Paramount. But Can He Fix the Business?
After 19 torturous months of wrangling, appeasing, jockeying, promising and placating, David Ellison has finally won government approval to buy Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, MTV and Hollywood’s oldest movie studio.
Now comes the hard part.
Mr. Ellison, 41, has vowed to take the venerable but troubled media assets and overhaul them for the TikTok age. He wants to exorcise the ghosts of glory days gone by — to rid the company of this-is-how-we-have-always-done-it thinking — and create a media-technology hybrid that can compete with Netflix, YouTube and whatever the artificial intelligence revolution has in store.
Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.