createpositivechange

Tag: CBS

  • America Loses Cronkite

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  • Sumner Redstone to sell $400 million stake in CBS and Viacom

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  • ABC, NBC and CBS join forces for Stand up to Cancer

    The entertainment industry is banding together to combat cancer. The Stand up to Cancer campaign launched last week, with a celebrity-filled event at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills.

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    The organization will air a one-hour special simultaneously on three of the four of the country’s top TV networks on Sept. 5. The special will combine celebrity performances with reporting by news anchors Charles Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric on ABC, NBC and CBS.

    Couric, one of the leaders of Stand up to Cancer, lost her husband to the disease in 1998. Other heads of the organization include former Paramount Pictures chair Sherry Lansing, and Spider-Man producer Laura Ziskin.

    Stand Up to Cancer plans to serve as an umbrella organization to bring together other cancer nonprofits to raise funds for cancer research. The American Association for Cancer Research, the Entertainment Industry Foundation and the Noreen Fraser Foundation are among the leading organizations working with Stand Up to Cancer. Others include the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the American Cancer Society and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

    Major League Baseball, Revlon, AOL, and the AARP are corporate sponsors.

    In addition to the TV special, the organization will also produce TV, radio and print public service announcements, the first of which is featured on its website. Celebrities such as Larry David, Morgan Freeman, Tony Hawk, Tobey Maguire, Jodie Foster and Lance Armstrong have appeared in the organization’s first videos.

  • CBS will pay $1.8 billion for CNET Networks

    CBS announced today that is acquiring CNET Networks Inc., for $1.8 billion, at $11.50 per share.

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    CNET, which holds the coveted news.com domain name, operates a range of web sites, including CNET, ZDNet,
    GameSpot.com, TV.com, CHOW and Search.com.

    Leslie Moonves
    Leslie Moonves

    As Dealbook notes today, CBS chief Leslie Moonves said a year and a half ago that the company wasn’t interested in pricy web acquisitions. “We are not going to spend $1.6 billion on YouTube,” he said then, referring Google’s purchase of the video site.

    Moonves has apparently changed his mind. In today’s press release, he says, “There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks.”

    Jana Partners LLC, CNET’s largest shareholder, had pushed for a higher stock price. Jana has not yet responded publicly to the CBS announcement.

    The deal may affect content distribution for other web publishers. CNET currently provides content to Hulu, a subsidiary of NBC.

    The purchase will bring significant online traffic to CBS. In the fourth quarter of 2007, CNET claimed 148 million unique users per month. The company also boasts a strong presence in Asia and Europe.

    CNET, one of the early publishers on the web, was founded by Shelby Bonnie, who stepped down after an internal audit found back-dating of stock options. Bonnie went on to found Political Base.

  • Scott Boras: The Ari Gold of baseball

    Like any sport, baseball needs its villains.

    And right now, there’s no better villain than Scott Boras, the California-based sports agent who has the audacity to seek and get really, really good contracts for his millionaire clients.

    Boras, 55, is so hateful, it would seem, that he will even upstage the World Series.

    While the last game between the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies was being played last month, the word emerged that Boras client Alex Rodriguez was opting out of the last three years of his contract with the New York Yankees. In doing this, he was passing up $91 million to seek more money elsewhere.

    The writers were appalled that Boras — the presumed leaker of the info — didn’t wait until after the World Series to let the opting-out be known.

    “At the very least, the decision to announce Rodriguez’ decision violated baseball etiquette in the extreme,” wrote Jack Curry in the New York Times.

    Casual observers might wonder how a game in which the players spit frequently and scratch themselves could have etiquette, but baseball does.

    And there are lawyers who might argue that Boras, who is a lawyer and a former minor league player, was just doing his duty to his client.

    Regardless, the fuss over Boras, sometimes called the most hated man in baseball, may obscure the fact that he is a business powerhouse.

    His company, Boras Corp., has so many clients on so many baseball teams that he may be the best-connected person in the sport.

    According to an Oct. 29 profile by Ben McGrath in the New Yorker, Boras Corp. represents 65 major-league players.

    For its services, the company gets 5 percent of the major leaguer’s salaries.

    Daisuke Matsuzaka, a star player in Japan who signed with the Boston Red Sox last December, is a Boras client.

    To get Matsuzaka, Boston first won bidding rights by paying $51.1 million. Then the Red Sox agreed to pay Matsuzaka $52 million over six years, a figure that could reach $60 million if Matsuzaka reaches certain goals.

    Boras also got pitcher Barry Zito $126 million for seven years from the San Francisco Giants in 2007.

    And his bargaining brought outfielder Carlos Beltran $119 for seven years in 2005 from the New York Mets.

    Many other Boras clients have done very well.

    However, none has received the contract numbers Boras negotiated in 2000 for Rodriguez. The player signed a 10-year, $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers. (Rodriquez went to the Yankees in 2004 and the contract remained in force.)

    According to reports, Boras now hopes to get Rodriguez, an extraordinary player who has had less than extraordinary results in the post-season, a new contract in the range of $350 million.

    With the exception of Rodriguez, it’s usually Boras and not the players who are accused of greed after big contracts are signed.

    And sometimes, too, it’s Boras, and not the team owners, who is blamed by fans for high ticket and hot dog prices.

    Boras, though, would seem to be able to take the heat, believing he has a role to play. “There’s a clear need for someone to represent the athlete and to explain the athlete’s value,” he told the New Yorker. “If that person is characterized as a villain, well, so be it.”

  • Torre Should Have Looked Over the Fence

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  • ‘Free’ tutoring is big business for Sylvan

    The No Child Left Behind act is a bonanza for private tutoring firms, including Sylvan Learning.

    Under the act’s provisions, students enrolled in schools judged to be failing are entitled to free tutoring, paid for by taxpayers. The costs total $2.5 billion annually, according to U.S. News and World Report.

    Tutoring companies contract with individual states and school districts. Sylvan provides such tutoring at about half of its 1,200 U.S. locations, according to Tabatha Sweeney-Gehrt, Sylvan’s director of new business development. At some centers, she says, business has doubled because of the service.

    Earlier this year at a Sylvan location in West Hartford, Conn., the number of tutored students more than tripled, according to Kathleen Keenan, the center’s director at the time. She estimates 250 kids came to the center specifically for the free tutoring. Keenan is now director of education at a Sylvan center in East Hartford.

    In 1993, two Baltimore businessmen, Christopher Hoehn-Saric and Douglas Becker, gained ownership of Sylvan and first took the company public.

    A decade later, Sylvan sold its tutoring business to New York-based, private equity firm Apollo Advisors, founded by Leon Black. At that point, Sylvan became part of Educate, Inc., an Apollo-owned company that went public in 2004. Educate’s holdings include the Hooked on Phonics grammar/language training system.

    In a $535 million deal completed in June, Hoehn-Saric and Becker, working with Citigroup Capital Partners, took Educate private under a new entity, Edge Acquisition, LLC.

    Hoehn-Saric is still CEO of Educate (and senior managing director at Sterling Capital), while Becker is CEO of Laureate Education Inc.

  • Bear’s Cayne holds cards close to vest

    In a classic fiddling-while-Rome-burns story, the Wall Street Journal traced the activities of James Cayne, the CEO of Bear Stearns Cos. this summer.

    While units of Bear Stearns, an investment and banking powerhouse, were collapsing because of the crisis in the subprime mortgage market, Cayne was out of the office on several occasions, according to a story in the Journal on Thursday.

    Not surprisingly — he’s a CEO after all — Cayne was incommunicado at times on the golf course, the Journal said.

    But at other times he was, hold on to your hats, playing bridge.

    (He might also have been puffing on a joint, the Journal implies, but that’s a whole other issue.)

    Cayne shot back at the Journal, saying in a memo to employees that the article “alleges I engaged in inappropriate behavior and includes a number of other inaccuracies and personal slurs.”

    Regardless, he is an avid bridge player, though his devotion to the demanding card game may sound a bit old-fashioned.

    But other moguls are drawn to bridge, as well.

    Bill Gates, the richest man in America, according to Forbes magazine, loves bridge, as does Warren Buffett, the second richest man.

    But Cayne, who didn’t make the list of America’s 400 richest people this year but was 384th in 2005, is at a much higher level in the card-playing world than Gates or Buffett.

    He’s ranked 611th the world and has been a top bridge player in the U.S. for years.

    For sure, bridge opened doors for Cayne at Bear Stearns.

    Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the head of Bear Stearns when Cayne was rising through the ranks at the company, also played bridge, as the Journal noted.

    The club at 15 East 67th St. in New York City was described this year by New York Times bridge columnist Phillip Alder as having “the highest standard of play in any club in the world, certainly more than a century ago.”

    While skill at bridge would appear to be advancement plus at Bear Stearns it may not trump concern about work habits.

    Warren Spector, who until this summer was co-president of Bear Stearns, is also a competitive bridge player, ranking 10th in the U.S.

    Both he and Cayne were at the same bridge tournament in Nashville this summer when all hell was breaking loose at Bear Stearns.

    Cayne went back to New York before Spector and he later asked for, and received, Spector’s resignation.

    “Mr. Cayne was annoyed that Mr. Spector was away from the office during the fund crisis,” the Journal reported.

    Since the crisis, Bear Stearns has laid off 800 people, though 15,000 remain, the paper reported.

    Cayne, who is 73, remains on the job, presumably analyzing his hand and deciding which card to play next.

  • Linda Stein, celebrity real estate agent, found murdered

    Linda Stein, punk rock band manager and real estate agent to the stars, was found dead Tuesday night in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

    Police said she had been bludgeoned to death.

    Stein, 62, co-managed the Ramones, a band that recorded on Sire Records, a label founded by her ex-husband, Seymour Stein. She later represented Billy Joel, Sylvester Stallone, Debra Winger, Perry Ellis and other celebrities.

    A powerful personality, Stein was the inspiration for Sylvia Miles, the aggressive real estate agent in the movie Wall Street.

    Close friend Elton John issued a statement saying: “I’m absolutely shocked and upset. She’s been a friend for over 37 years and she was a huge supporter of the Elton John AIDS foundation.”

    Police, who had not announced an arrest by Thursday morning, said there were no signs of forced entry.

  • Elvis, John Lennon and other top-earning dead people

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    When Forbes published its list of the year’s top-earning dead celebrities, we set ourselves a challenge.

    If everyone is separated by six degrees (or less), shouldn’t it be possible to link every name on the list?

    The ranking, headed by Elvis Presley, includes 13 people – musicians, actors, a cartoonist, a children’s author, an artist and a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. All 13 appear in the map above.

    Here’s the Forbes list of beyond-the-grave moneymakers for the past 12 months:

    The easiest link was between George Harrison and John Lennon. The Beatles connect to Elvis Presley and James Brown by way of Michael Jackson, former husband of Lisa Marie Presley and part-owner of the rights to Apple Records. Jackson also named Brown as his “greatest inspiration” when he spoke at his funeral.

    Andy Warhol’s celebrity-centric art links him to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Albert Einstein, whom he painted. Another famous subject of Warhol’s was Elizabeth Taylor, who co-starred with James Dean in the 1956 film Giant.

    Einstein, Charles Shulz, and Theodor Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss), share the same publisher: Random House.

    Bob Marley and Eric Clapton both recorded the song I Shot the Sheriff. Clapton’s ex-girlfriend Sheryl Crow found inspiration in actor Steve McQueen, and penned a song named for him.

    Finally, Tupac Shakur makes his way into the map by way of Elton John, whose sample the rapper used on his track Ghetto Gospel. Elton John’s famous song, Candle In The Wind, was written about Marilyn Monroe. It was later re-released as a tribute to Princess Diana, who is also on the map because her ex and Paul McCartney had the same divorce attorney.