In May, Paramount convened the top executives at CBS News and CNN for an inaugural videoconference ahead of their impending integration. During the meeting, which I reported on last week, CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson, executive editor Virginia Moseley, and chief operating officer and digital product lead Alex MacCallum presented Bari Weiss, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, and others at Paramount with the broad outlines of their business. Inevitably, the niceties exchanged on the call masked the underlying anxieties: Not all these leaders will survive the merger, which will centralize backend functions for both newsrooms and create ample targets for David Ellison’s promised synergies.

That said, seemingly everyone left the meeting with unanimous feelings about at least one thing: Alex MacCallum. “Alex is a rock star,” one source present at the meeting said. “She was incredibly impressive,” said another.

The CBS News–CNN merger is fraught with myriad questions, as you well know: Bari’s mandate across both networks is uncertain; David is still searching for a yet-to-be-determined Cardinal Richelieu–style executive to help her manage the business; many talent contracts will be rewritten (the Anderson Cooper negotiations should be interesting!); and hundreds of jobs will be cut across the combined company. But what is arguably the most significant position on the org chart may already be filled, which seems to be providing Paramount brass some solace heading into the merger.

Before you text me: No, I haven’t lost the plot. The CNN Digital experience remains clunky and inelegant, there’s scant evidence that the streaming service has gained real traction, and the company has yet to articulate a compelling value proposition for its nascent subscription business. (As Howard Stern memorably articulated about the short-lived CNN+: Why are people going to pay for what they’re not watching for free?) More importantly, CNN’s brand is a shell of its former self, and the business is on a post-disruption trajectory that will necessitate a drastic rightsizing of the economics and limit the erstwhile ambitions of its CNN+ era.

The most daunting challenge, perhaps, is that too few people inside the building fully understand the enormity of the stakes or are incentivized to aid in the transformation. The talent may post vertical videos, but many are likely to instruct their agents to extend punitive deals; TV news veterans are managing their own careers as 401(k)s; and, within this culture, there remains a broad inability to think creatively about what CNN can mean or accomplish in a multimodal media ecosystem. Nevertheless, all available testimony suggests that Alex has been diligent and disciplined about building a scalable platform that will finally allow CNN to capitalize on first-party data. Current and former sources described her as a best-in-class product lead and a “unicorn” in the business, comparable only to her successor at the Times, Alex Hardiman. The problem, to this point, has simply been that she’s been outnumbered by many of her legacy colleagues, even if she has the title and the support of Mark.

Meanwhile, CNN sources see her as the last great hope for the success of their digital business. “Alex has a full understanding of product, customer lifecycle management, growth marketing, analytics,” one executive who has worked with her said. “What gets lost in all the media discussion about Bari and Mark and so on is that the product is the most important thing.”

Alex first came to CNN in 2021, when WarnerMedia C.E.O. Jason Kilar gave Jeff Zucker the greenlight to accelerate the global D.T.C. business. Though CNN had a digital chief in Andrew Morse, Kilar believed that the job required a product thinker with actual experience running such a business. Alex, who had been serving as The New York Times’s digital product officer under Mark, and had the distinction of being the youngest person ever appointed to the paper’s masthead, joined CNN as general manager of CNN+—which, as you know, would be killed in the crib when David Zaslav took control of the Warner assets in 2022.

Alex decamped to The Washington Post for a year, where she took on the ill-fitting title of chief revenue officer. Miraculously, she managed to escape CNN before the darkest days of the Chris Licht era, then escape the Post just as Will Lewis was coming in.

In early 2024, Mark lured Alex back to CNN and effectively staked the company’s digital future on her. “Mark has given her the mandate to be able to transform this place,” one high-level CNN source told me. To her credit, she is notoriously shy and press-averse, which has enabled her to keep her name out of the headlines despite being essential to the network’s future. But in the past two years, she has launched a paywall, a streaming service, and various mobile-native initiatives, as well as a weather app that—while hardly the product that’s going to save CNN’s business—will play a role in its ability to leverage first-party data. Along the way, she’s built a product team with alumni from Amazon, Twitch, the Times, and the old CNN+ (all of whom might conceivably walk with Alex if Paramount can’t keep her).

Last month, Mark promoted her to chief operating officer. Amid the broader uncertainty surrounding the CBS News–CNN merger, the promotion fueled speculation that Alex herself might be the heir to Mark’s throne and, perhaps, the white knight to shepherd Bari and the two news divisions into the pro forma future. That seems unlikely, since it won’t solve for Bari’s lack of TV experience. Still, the consensus around Alex may point to a different sort of organizational structure for the combined news networks: one in which Bari leads editorial, Alex leads product, Tom and Virginia run their respective TV fiefdoms (for a while, anyway), and everyone reports up to CBS TV chief George Cheeks. Of course, that would require them all to get along. So long as David and Bari still want this project to succeed, it’s in their best interest to see that they do.