HBO Agita, Media Mondays, the Bull Case for Crypto

Happy Juneteenth. Welcome back to the Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to what’s new at Puck.

First up, Dylan Byers delivers a candy bowl of media world insights: the inside conversation about the Baquet-Kahn handoff, how Chris Licht is exorcising the specter of John Malone, and why HBO Max could be next victim of the David Zaslav shoulder tap.

Then, below the fold, William D. Cohan explains what both the speculators and the cynics get wrong about crypto. And Jon Kelly joins Dylan for a very special chat about the latest anxiety inside CNN and how James Bennett lost the Times.

Needless to say, Zaz and Gunnar have a lot more work to do to get to their $3 billion savings target, and this understandably has a lot of people inside the company in a state of panic. Most anxious today, it seems, are members of the HBO Max unscripted team that is responsible for reality shows like FBoy Island and The Hype. In fact, some of these employees are so concerned that they started leaking news my way that layoffs would be announced today. Perhaps they were just testing the waters, because I’m reliably told that there are no plans to announce layoffs today. And yet, I think it’s safe to say that in the near term, their concerns are well-founded. Discovery already has various teams who are poised to expand control of unscripted—which is why Turner unscripted chief Corie Henson is also leaving the company. Some synergies are hard to identify, others are obvious.

By the way, lest there was any concern, the impending layoffs at HBO Max unscripted will almost certainly not extend to HBO Documentaries, a crown jewel that certainly means too much to HBO, and Zaz, to ever be disbanded...