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Sara Fischer / Axios: Internal memo: TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US unit; Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX will collectively own 45% of the US entity, and ByteDance will retain ~20% -
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter: Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection -
Todd Spangler / Variety: Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) agree to buy WildBrain's 41% stake in Peanuts Holdings for ~$457M, raising Sony's slice to 80% -
Financial Times: Trump Media agrees to merge with Google-backed fusion energy company TAE in a $6B deal and build the “world's first utility-scale fusion power plant” in 2026 -
Ethan Millman / The Hollywood Reporter: Universal Music Group partners with music creation platform Splice to build “advanced commercial AI tools” for musical artists -
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg: YouTube's head of products for podcasts Steve McLendon says viewers streamed 700M+ hours of podcasts on TV in October, up from 400M hours in October 2024 -
Jessica M. Goldstein / New York Times: A look at Track Star, a YouTube music quiz show that has become a stop on the celebrity promo trail and has started creating documentary-style music features -
Shane O'Neill / Washington Post: Q&A with Christopher Anderson, who photographed Trump's inner circle for VF: “My job is to ... draw on my experience as a journalist and photograph what I see” -
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter: CBS News and The Free Press announce Things That Matter, a series of town halls and debates, starting in early 2026, with Sam Altman, J.D. Vance, and others -
Natalie Korach / Status: Sources: Bari Weiss moved a planned internal CBS town hall, set to lay out her broader vision, from this month to 2026, after the Erika Kirk town hall flopped -
Emilio Casalicchio / Politico: Downing Street makes changes to press access, cutting an afternoon briefing and promising more press conferences, which will be open to social media influencers -
Jake Kanter / Deadline: YouTube terminates Screen Culture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers; the platform earlier suspended the channels' ads -
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass: YouTube streaming the Oscars in 2029 makes Netflix's WBD bid less likely to face antitrust issues, as it shows Netflix might need WBD to compete against YouTube -
Anna Betts / The Guardian: David Brooks, who wrote a NYT column last month decrying popular fixation on the Epstein story, appears in newly released photos of a 2011 event with Epstein