#media-business

#media-business

a frisky account of his nearly two decades at the helm of MTV that doubles as a sort of handbook for dealing with hustlers, rock stars, and megalomaniacs. Among those in the last category Freston dealt with personally was Sumner Redstone, the intransigent late media magnate, whose $3.4 billion takeover of Viacom in 1987 allowed Freston to grow MTV from a scrappy DIY upstart to a world-beating, generation-defining institution.

Then, Rick Edmonds answered it, cutting through spin, jargon and numbers with vivid detail. "The company is so new that the signatures were drying yesterday morning on legal papers defining its financial structure, even as the deal to buy the Bulletin, which will be its first newspaper holding, was announced." It's an approach journalists and media watchers are used to from the Poynter Institute's longtime media business analyst. That story, though, ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer in April 1980.