“We are in a state of reset,” says Zirinsky, whose first moves as president of the news division were locking down Gayle King at CBS This Morning and elevating Norah O’Donnell to the anchor chair of the Evening News. But, she says, “We’re nowhere near done.” Many network insiders agree there’s nobody better to help navigate the post-Moonves, post-Fager era than Zirinsky, a television news legend who calls CBS a second home.

With seven- and eight-figure deals with Netflix, Penguin Random House, and Spotify, the Obamas have officially gone multiplatform—and, soon, multiplatinum. “They recognize that, as citizens, they’ve got this enormous platform,” says longtime friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett. “They’re in the process of figuring out, What’s the message we want to deliver? . . . This will be their content, and they will own it. They are very ambitious in terms of the impact they want to have.”

If it weren’t for Brown’s stunning Miami Herald investigation, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes might not have landed back in the national spotlight. For more than a decade, victims like Virginia Giuffre and lawyers like Brad Edwards were working behind the scenes to bring Epstein to justice. Brown put their struggle in the white hot center of the news cycle, exposing a scandal with implications that reached as high as the White House. “Julie did a great job publicizing how we battled through many obstacles and ultimately prevailed,” said Edwards.

Stankey has gone from a relatively unknown telecommunications executive in Dallas to a power player on the New York and Hollywood media circuits, with Warner Bros., HBO, and the Turner networks all under his watch. His ascent coincided with an exodus of top talent from the Time Warner firmament, with one key exception: Zucker. The CNN boss and perennial Trump target not only weathered AT&T’s takeover, but got a bigger brief in the process, taking on an elevated role as chairman of WarnerMedia News and Sports. Stankey is now a target too—activist investor Paul Singer has just taken aim.

With podcasting journalism’s current frontier, Ek has expanded his streaming audio empire with a series of acquisitions: Gimlet ($230 million), Anchor ($110 million), and Parcast ($56 million). Starting next year, the Obamas will be making podcasts for Spotify through their own audio deal, and the company is pushing into news and sports: It recently brought on former CBS News president David Rhodes and Facebook vet Amy Hudson to develop those efforts.

Baron recently left a group of Post editors with the impression that he might begin to wind his editorship down after the 2020 election—a prospect that sent shivers throughout the rank and file as they gossiped about it at social outings. (Baron says he’s made no decision past the 2020 election.) Baron’s longtime friend and foil, Baquet, meanwhile, will definitely be wrapping up his executive-editorship at some point in the wake of 2020—Times tradition dictates that the brass step down from management at the age of 65. For now, though, with a historic election on the horizon, Baron and Baquet are the two most important editors in America.

Bakish has emerged as king of the corporate media re-unification that almost wasn’t. With a market cap of close to $30 billion, the newly minted ViacomCBS is still smaller than its leviathan competitors, but now Bakish finally has some scale to work with. Ianniello didn’t get the top job, but he did manage to retain stewardship of the CBS empire—not a bad consolation prize. Per one of Ianniello’s colleagues, “He checked his ego at the door to make this deal work.”

It ain’t Disney, but Fox Corporation nonetheless gives Rupert Murdoch’s successor control of the Fox broadcast network, 28 local affiliates, Fox Sports, and, perhaps most notably of all, Fox News. “We continue to be obviously no. 1,” Lachlan recently boasted of the network’s ratings, “and expect to continue that run for quite some time.”

Maddow remains queen bee at MSNBC despite a slip in the ratings. Carlson is hemorrhaging advertisers but might have stopped a war with Iran. There’s an irresistibly ironic synergy between the two ideological foils: It was Carlson who first gave Maddow her big break when she was a guest on his own MSNBC show back in 2005. Carlson often watches the beginning of Maddow’s show as soon as he gets off the air. “We’re both doing this thing that’s killing us,” Maddow recently told the Times, “and killing us at the same pace.’”

“There’s definitely a perception in town that the L.A. Times is back.” So said a seasoned Hollywood journalist, referring to the new regime of Soon-Shiong, the billionaire who rescued the West Coast paper last year and has set about pouring money into the newsroom. But, says one editor, “The biggest thing you’ll hear is, is he really in it for the long haul? Does he really realize the damage that was done, and how much it will take to turn the place around?”