A weekly newsletter on power and the press Good morning. For those of us who lived through New York’s tabloid wars, when the Post and Daily News were at each other’s throats, tomorrow’s launch of the Murdoch-backed California Post feels like a throwback. The news business has changed dramatically since 2006. Bravo briefly mined New York’s ink-stained slugfest in “Tabloid Wars.” “Real Housewives,” which also launched that year, proved far more durable in the reality-show pantheon. One thing that hasn’t changed is the Murdoch special sauce of populist politics, scandal and sports, along with a swashbuckling swagger when it comes to taking on an entrenched media power — in this case, the Los Angeles Times. The California Post has been raiding the Times newsroom even as it shrugs off the paper as a threat. As Editor-in-chief Nick Papps quipped to TheWrap’s Corbin Bolies: “Do I lay awake at night worrying about the L.A. Times or other media outlets? No.” (Check out Bolies’ full report, complete with a visit to the newsroom on the old Fox lot in Century City.) Lately, another family dynasty, the Ellisons, have been grabbing headlines as they amass media power — Paramount, TikTok and, potentially, Warner Bros. Discovery — all while developing a cozy relationship with the Trump White House. But the Murdoch family is again coming under the microscope, as Gabriel Sherman, author of the definitive biography of Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes, is out on Feb. 3 with “Bonfire of the Murdochs,” which chronicles the family split that established Lachlan Murdoch as successor to 94-year-old patriarch Rupert Murdoch. And this Tuesday comes Jason Zengerle’s “Hated by All the Right People,” tracing Tucker Carlson’s rise from the more high-minded, Murdoch-backed Weekly Standard to Fox News stardom — and his post-Fox reinvention alongside Trump. I caught up with Zengerle, who mentioned two ways Carlson has stayed relevant “without the built-in audience of Fox.” “He's gotten more and more outrageous, I think, because that's a way to get attention,” he said. “And then he's attached himself at the hip to Trump because that makes him relevant and it makes people pay attention to him.” Attention — from tabloids to TV to TikTok — remains the name of the game. Michael Calderone 
Corbin Bolies reports from Century City: On an 80-degree day in January, I found myself strolling down a brownstone-dotted New York street — at least it appeared that way. The street, modeled after late 19th-century Lower Manhattan, was built in 1967 for the film adaptation of “Hello, Dolly!” and refurbished during Hollywod’s 2023 strikes, a fitting set for productions seeking Big Apple flavor. Or, in this case, an upstart newspaper aiming to take the “DNA of the New York Post” and filter it through “a California lens,” as California Post Editor-in-chief Nick Papps put it to me. “We’ll have the wit of the New York Post headlines, which is really important to it,” Papps said in his office suite... 
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