Disney has named Dave Filoni, a protégé of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and the co-creator of “Star Wars” streaming TV series “The Mandalorian,” president and chief creative officer of Lucasfilm. He will work alongside co-president Lynwen Brennan, who runs the studio’s business operations.

Filoni, 51, will now steer one of the highest-grossing movie franchises in history as well as live-action and animated TV shows.

Kathleen Kennedy has run Lucasfilm since Disney bought it in 2012. She will become a full-time producer. REUTERS

The 72-year-old Kennedy, who has run Lucasfilm since Disney bought it in 2012, oversaw three blockbuster sequels to the original “Star Wars” trilogy and the successful spinoff “Rogue One.”

“It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm,” Kennedy said in a statement.

The 2018 film “Solo,” which introduced a new actor as the smuggler made famous by Harrison Ford, flopped in theaters.

Disney put the “Star Wars” movies on hiatus in 2019 to focus on live-action TV series, including “The Mandalorian” starring Pedro Pascal and the popular character Baby Yoda.

George Lucas hand-picked Kennedy as his successor to lead Lucasfilm. Getty Images for Disney

Disney scrapped planned “Star Wars” films from directors Patty Jenkins and Rian Johnson as Kennedy worked to reset the film strategy.

Filoni, meanwhile, oversaw many popular and acclaimed TV series including “The Mandalorian” and “Ahsoka.”

Both Kennedy and Filoni worked with Lucas, the creator of the original “Star Wars” film series that debuted in 1977. The franchise, about a group of rebels in a galaxy far, far away, has brought in more than $10.3 billion at global box office receipts, according to Comscore.

Dave Filoni is a protégé of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and the co-creator of “Star Wars” streaming TV series “The Mandalorian. REUTERS

Lucas hand-picked Kennedy as his successor to lead Lucasfilm. The five films she oversaw brought in a combined $5.9 billion. The most successful, 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” surpassed $2 billion in worldwide ticket sales.

Lucasfilm expanded into producing live-action streaming TV series under Kennedy, including Filoni’s “The Mandalorian,” which debuted with the launch of the Disney+ streaming service in 2019. Other series included “Ahsoka” and “Andor.”

The company also added “Star Wars”-themed lands at Walt Disney World in Florida and at Disneyland in California.

Kennedy and Filoni at a fan convention last year. AP

In 2005, Lucas hired Filoni to help build a “Star Wars” animation studio. Filoni, often spotted at Hollywood premieres and fan events wearing a cowboy hat, helped create the animated TV series “The Clone Wars.”

“The Mandalorian” will head to the big screen in May in a film co-written by Filoni called “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” The movie “Star Wars: Starfighter,” featuring Ryan Gosling, is scheduled to reach cinemas in May 2027. Kennedy will continue to work as a producer of those films.

Daisy Ridley, star of the sequel trilogy that began in 2015, also has said she is returning to a new “Star Wars” project.

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Wilson, who played the ambitious Dwight Schrute on the hit show, voiced his complaints to MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle during an interview with her on his “Soul Boom” podcast Tuesday

“Office” star Rainn Wilson slammed MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle over her views about the mistrust in the media. Soul Boom w/Rainn Wilson

He said left-wing outlets like MSNBC were in denial in their coverage of Biden’s faltering mental acuity and issues important to voters like inflation and illegal immigration — but are now overly negative in their coverage of Trump and the White House.

“This is where I would push back: when I see this kind of insight and passion being directed at the current administration and the lack of this kind of insight and passion being directed at the previous administration,” Wilson said.

“I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about left-leaning news media organizations — were kind of like, ‘La la la la, everything’s fine. Look, the economy is great, la la la, immigration’s not that much of a problem,’ and really being Cleopatra, queen of denial.”

Wilson said the mistrust in the media stemmed from how it covered President Biden, among other issues. Soul Boom w/Rainn Wilson

Ruhle claimed that Trump along with Musk, who owns X, are to blame for the loss of trust in the media.

“Losing that trust is not by accident, it’s by design. If you remember when President Trump was running the first time, Steve Bannon once said, ‘The goal is to blow the whole thing up,’” said the host of “The 11th Hour.”

“The news media is, in my opinion, the last line of defense of holding power accountable.”

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In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a tech entrepreneur, sent an email to his colleague Steve Huffman with an ominous subject line: “Meet the enemy.”

The body of the email contained just one line — a link to Digg, a community-focused social message board where people shared and discussed news articles and links to other sites they found interesting. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman, who had founded a similar effort called Reddit, set their competitive sights on Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.

In the 20 years since, these entrepreneurs have gone onto other projects and, in true Silicon Valley fashion, dipped into other parts of tech. Along the way, Digg, which went from popular to not, all but died.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he had bought back Digg for an undisclosed sum from Money Group, a digital media company, and would rebuild it to take on Reddit. And he is doing it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.

“This is the perfect time to revisit this idea with fresh eyes,” Mr. Rose, 48, now a venture capitalist at True Ventures, said in an interview. He said social media had become so ubiquitous that “it doesn’t need to be winner take all,” adding that “we don’t need to take down Reddit to win.”

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are relaunching Digg when social media is in tumult. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, has turned the platform into a mirror of himself. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is becoming more video-focused to compete with TikTok. And Reddit, which went public a year ago, has added gamelike features to nudge users into spending more time on the site — and more time looking at advertising.

Amid this upheaval, Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian sensed an opportunity to reinvent Digg in a way that could cut through some of the pitfalls of modern social media and focus on “connection and humanity” online.

“The world has changed so much in the past few years,” Mr. Ohanian, who left Reddit’s board in 2020, said in an interview. “When Kevin told me he was buying back Digg, there was a part of me that thought, ‘Well, damn, could we do it again?’”

Not long ago, Digg was on top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was among a class of early social news sites, such as Slashdot, del.icio.us and Reddit, that relied on a community of unpaid users to curate articles or topics of interest from across the web. Digg stood out for its robust user base of active contributors, who regularly returned to the site.

The company raised tens of millions of dollars and fielded acquisition offers from Google and others. In 2006, Mr. Rose posed for a now-infamous photo on a BusinessWeek cover, sporting a wide grin and giving two thumbs up, with the headline “How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months.” (Mr. Rose hated the photo.)

The cover proved ill fated. Digg later launched a redesign of its site that its community widely rejected. Users eventually left in droves, as did executives. Mr. Rose left Digg in 2012. That same year, the company was divvied up and sold for parts to Betaworks, LinkedIn and The Washington Post.

In contrast, Reddit became a viable business. Mr. Huffman, who had left the site for other projects, returned in 2015 and stabilized the company. Now 41, he has made Reddit’s once laissez faire content moderation policies more stringent, leading advertisers to embrace the site.

Some of those changes generated a backlash. Some Reddit moderators of “subreddits,” the forums dedicated to topics like guitars or basketball or cute puppies, said they felt neglected by management. In 2023, hundreds of subreddits went dark after several executive decisions upset moderators, threatening Reddit’s business.

Seeing the uproar, Mr. Rose, who had dabbled in investing and other start-ups, decided to act. He was itching to get back to his roots in social and community sites, he said, and always regretted the way things had ended with Digg.

“I look back on how that company was run, and I was just very fearful to stand up for myself in a lot of cases,” Mr. Rose recalled. “I just didn’t have the maturity to go out and ask the tough questions.”

Mr. Rose began laying the groundwork for a Digg comeback. He ran thousands of dollars’ worth of targeted ads across Reddit with detailed questionnaires for moderators, asking about the biggest difficulties overseeing subreddits and other issues. He ran the results through an artificial intelligence program to think of new ways for addressing the problems.

“These moderators are pouring their lives into this,” he said. “We think we can do it better.”

He also reached out to Mr. Ohanian, with whom he had bonded over the scars of running their platforms. Mr. Ohanian said he had “all love” for his former company. “At the end of the day, Reddit was a huge part of my life,” he said.

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian raised an undisclosed amount of funding to repurchase Digg and to build a new version of the company. Their investors include True Ventures, where Mr. Rose is a partner, and Seven Seven Six, a venture firm founded by Mr. Ohanian.

They also hired fewer than a dozen engineers and designers for the new Digg and brought on Justin Mezzell, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Rose’s, to be chief executive. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian will join Digg’s board, with Mr. Rose as chair.

Invitations to the new Digg will be distributed in the coming weeks, they said, and the site will primarily be aimed at people on mobile devices. A.I. will also play a larger part in making Digg more accessible to users, Mr. Rose said. For instance, he said, a community of science-fiction enthusiasts could have their discussions translated into Klingon, the language used by the “Star Trek” alien race of the same name. A.I. tools can also help reduce spam, misinformation and harassment, he said.

Less glamorous — but perhaps most important — will be their attention to moderators. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Rose said they wanted to empower moderators with better tools to help maintain online communities, which keeps the site welcoming to users.

“What we never focused on is the back end,” Mr. Ohanian said, referring to the tools and features that moderators lean on. “But it’s the back end that really, really matters.”

The initial reaction to Digg’s relaunch may be muted, Mr. Rose said, with some people likely to see the resurrection as a cute nod to a retro version of the social web. But he has grand plans, he said.

“Because there are so many giants in this space that are going to be slow to move, it means that we can be nimble,” Mr. Rose said. “We won’t have everything we want Digg to be on Day 1. But a year from now, we will be having a very different conversation.”

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Camping World — which runs more than 250 RV dealerships across the country — raised the new gigantic flag at its Greenville, NC, location in October, according to WLBT.

Greenville, NC, officials have demanded that the massive American flag over a Camping World dealership come down because of zoning regulations. WITN

Local zoning officials say the Stars and Stripes fluttering over the RVs is 15 times bigger than allowed. Even the 120-foot flagpole is too big, coming in at nearly twice the height permitted by local law.

The city started citing Camping World on Wednesday, and the penalties are racking up quickly: As of Friday, there had already been six violations that will cost about $1,150 in fines.

Lemonis said it doesn’t matter because Old Glory is not going anywhere.

“The flag is not coming down,” said the 50-year-old tycoon, whose reality show involves him investing his own money in struggling small businesses.

“You can fine me all you want City of Greenville North Carolina. #NoAmericanFlagIsTooBig,” Lemonis wrote in the social-media post.

It’s not the first time Camping World has gone to battle against local zoning laws over the American flag. In August, a dealership outside Stockton, Calif., demanded the firm take down a similarly huge banner over worries the flagpole could fall over.

Camping World CEO Marcus Lemonis of TV’s “The Profit” says that no matter how many fines he gets, Old Glory isn’t coming down. Getty Images

Lemonis was just as obstinate then, ordering the dealer to keep it up.

“If we felt like we were putting people in danger or causing any issues with air traffic, which would absolutely not be OK, then I wouldn’t do it,” he told Fox40 at the time.

San Joaquin County officials later gave the dealership the green light to keep the flag flying, Fox 26 News said.

Camping World has more than 250 spots across the country. WITN

But Greenville has proven more forceful in its condemnations.

The City Council denied the company’s request to permit the flag earlier this month, claiming Camping World knew what it was doing when it knowingly broke the size regulations.

“Violators shall be issued a written citation which must be paid within 72 hours,” the document issuing the fine read, according to the station.

“If a person fails to pay the civil penalty within 72 hours, the city may recover the penalty together with all costs by filing a civil action in the general court of justice in the nature of a suit to collect a debt.”

City officials told Camping World they would write tickets every day the flag flies — and the flagpole must also be pulled out.

So far, the city hasn’t gone to court to collect the fines.

During the spat over the California flag last year, the Lebanon-born entrepreneur said the big banners are “symbolism about how we feel about this country. “

“I happen to be an immigrant,” he said. “I was given the blessing of being able to enter this country and become a citizen, and I’m grateful for it.”

Such expressions of patriotism “have been part of my life since I was a little child down in Miami, Florida, where we had the largest flagpole in Miami at our car dealership,” he said.

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