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Lord Zucker & The Great Telegraph Chase

Jeff Zucker, Gerry Cardinale, and Sheikh Mansour are spending $1.4 billion to take over The Telegraph, presumably introducing the business to the U.S. and making it the thinking person’s Daily Mail. Is it a brilliant move, or might it go the way of other recent legacy reboots?

Jeff Zucker, the former NBCUniversal C.E.O. and CNN president who is now C.E.O. of the Abu Dhabi-backed joint investment vehicle Redbird IMI.
Jeff Zucker, the former NBCUniversal C.E.O. and CNN president who is now C.E.O. of the Abu Dhabi-backed joint investment vehicle Redbird IMI. Photo: Paco Freire/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
November 24, 2023

Earlier this year, after Sir Frederick Barclay and his family defaulted on a £1.1 billion debt, Lloyds Bank seized control of the family’s double-barreled heirlooms, The Telegraph, the influential center-right broadsheet and Tory vade mecum, and The Spectator, the prestigious conservative newsmagazine, and put them both up for auction. Of course, media assets with such weighty political influence and cultural heritage rarely come on the block. In the U.S., we saw this phenomenon a decade ago, when troubled but storied assets Businessweek and Newsweek came up for sale. And then we saw it a half decade-ish ago, when Time, Fortune, and The Los Angeles Times all hit auction, and Laurene Powell Jobs agreed to a controlling position in The Atlantic.