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The remarkable story of Sumner Redstone, his family legacy, and the battles for all he controlled.Sumner Murray Redstone (1923–2020), who lived by the credo'content is king,'leveraged his father's chain of drive-in movie theaters into one of the world's greatest media empires through a series of audacious takeovers designed to ensure his permanent control. Over the course of this meteoric rise, he made his share of enemies and feuded with nearly every member of his family.In The King of Content, Keach Hagey deconstructs Redstone's rise from Boston's West End through Harvard Law School to the highest echelons of American business. The ninety-seven-year-old mogul's life became a tabloid soap opera, the center of acrimonious legal battles throughout his vast holdings, which included Paramount Pictures and two of the largest public media companies, Viacom and CBS. At the heart of these lawsuits was Redstone's tumultuous love life and complicated relationship with his children. Redstone's daughter, Shari, has emerged as his de facto successor, but only after she ousted his closest confidant in a fierce power struggle.Yet Redstone's assets face an existential threat that goes beyond his family, disgruntled ex-girlfriends, or even the management of his companies: the changing nature of media consumption. As more and more people cut their cable cords, CBS, with its focus on sports and broadcast TV, has held steady, while Viacom, with its once-great cable channels like MTV and Nickelodeon, has suffered a precipitous fall. As their rivals merge, the question is whether Shari's push to undo her father's last big strategic maneuver and recombine CBS and Viacom will be enough to shore up their future.A biography and corporate whodunit filled with surprising details, The King of Content investigates Redstone's impact on business and popular culture, as well as the family feuds, corporate battles, and questionable alliances that go back decades—all laid bare in this authoritative book.

Award-winning journalist Connie Bruck's biography of media mogul Steve Ross captures the highs and lows of Ross's career in a narrative “as fast-paced as the life it depicts” (Publishers Weekly).Born to Jewish immigrant parents in 1920s Brooklyn, Steven Jay Rechnitz would become an unstoppable force in the world of business, a figure both revered and reviled by those who knew him. His early ventures—a limousine rental service operated under the auspices of his father-in-law's Manhattan funeral home and a parking lot company whose co-owners harbored dubious connections to the criminal underworld—inspired a taste for substantial risk that was outpaced only by Ross's success in turning that risk into profit. In a career that spanned both Wall Street and Hollywood, Ross's mastery of obfuscation, deflection, denial, and his imaginative approach to the law finally culminated in the empire he had long craved: Time Warner, the largest media and entertainment company in the world. Extraordinary in its depth of coverage, startling in its frankness, Master of the Game is a riveting journey through the mind and career of a man who was by turns flamboyant, charismatic, and completely outrageous—an unstoppable force in the pursuit of an outsized dream.

Global business lessons from Bill Roedy, the man who built the world's largest entertainment network What Makes Business Rock is the compelling story of how Bill Roedy, the Chairman and CEO of MTV International, built the largest international entertainment network in existence, much of the time having to make up answers for questions which had never before been asked. It's a free-wheeling, rock and rolling tale filled with a fascinating cast of characters including British entrepreneur Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, Bono, the Pope, and a range of legendary politicians such as Nelson Mandela, Vladimir Putin, and Fidel Castro. An important primer on how to build and manage a business in an environment of continually evolving and developing communications platforms Deals with the cultural demands of countries as diverse as China, Zambia, and Ireland A business book masquerading as the memoir of one of the most important people in the music industry Entertaining and engaging, What Makes Business Rock offers an up close look at Bill Roedy the person and professional, and uncovers the innovative strategies he used to help make MTV the most successful, and best known, media brand in the world.

Frank Batten Sr. (1927–2009) created the Weather Channel in 1982, despite mocking by colleagues in the media that around-the-clock weather broadcasts would be as exciting as watching paint dry. The network, and later its companion website, Weather.com, became the largest private weather company in the world and an American cultural icon.Yet few have heard of Batten, a media pioneer whose Virginia newspaper was the only major daily to back school integration. At a time when American corporate greed was making headlines, without fanfare and limelight Batten built a media empire centered on honesty, integrity, and ethics.Starting out in his uncle's newspaper business in Norfolk, Virginia, as a reporter and advertising salesman, he assumed leadership of the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star at the age of twenty-seven and grew Landmark Communications into a media powerhouse. He championed racial equality, a position not often taken in Virginia during the 1950s. His flagship newspaper, the Pilot, was the only daily paper in Virginia to back court-ordered school desegregation. He created two billion-dollar businesses and gave away more than $400 million to charity, nearly all of it to education. As chairman of the Associated Press from 1982 to 1987, he helped guide the news agency back on a sound financial footing. Batten also faced a tremendous personal challenge that would have sidelined many: he lost his vocal cords to cancer two years before starting the Weather Channel.This is the untold story of a man whose name few recognize, yet who helped change the face of the media in the twentieth century.

Founded in Galveston in 1842 with the launch of the Daily News, the Belo Corporation entered the twenty-first century as a powerhouse conglomerate, owning four daily newspapers (including the Dallas Morning News), twenty-six television and cable stations, and over thirty interactive Web sites. The first comprehensive work to bring to life this remarkable success story, Belo blends biography with a history of corporate strategies. Drawing on company archives and private papers of key figures, including A. H. Belo and G. B. Dealey, former company archivist Judith Garrett Segura brings to life important chapters in the cultural life of Texas, from Galveston's days as the largest and most vibrant town in the Republic of Texas, through the wars that followed statehood, periods of economic hardship, and the effects of sweeping social change. Turning points in the company's history, such as the sale of its Galveston paper when company revenues were dramatically affected by candid reporting of Ku Klux Klan activities in the 1920s, highlight crucial elements of the press's role in the life of a community. Segura also charts technological advances, from the telegraph and the typographers'union to the dawn of the Information Age. Finally, she includes the most complete portrait of the Dallas Times Herald Company to date, documenting the rise and fall of Belo's chief rival. This is a story of frontier survival and futuristic thinking, marketing genius and historic reporting, nurtured by a family of mavericks.