 Jemele Hill |
Jemele Hill, who started up a media firestorm when she called President Trump a “white supremacist” in a tweet posted last September, is permanently leaving the 6 p.m. hour of ESPN’s SportsCenter, according to The Hollywood Reporter. While her last day on the program will be Feb. 2, she is just one year into a four-year contract with the network, and will continue to write for its online vertical, The Undefeated, and host town halls. Michael Smith, Hill’s SportsCenter co-host, will now host the hour on his own. The move follows Hill’s two-week suspension in October in the wake of her tweets about Trump as well as Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his statements about the NFL controversy surrounding players who knelt during the National Anthem. (“If there is anything that is disrespectful to the flag, then we will not play,” Jones told the Dallas Morning News.) Hill’s tweet in response to the comment was “If you feel strongly about JJ’s statement, boycott his advertisers.” Her suspension soon followed.
 Casey Neistat |
CNN has closed the door on Beme, the video-sharing app that the company purchased in late 2016 in a deal estimated at more than $20 million. Founded by Casey Neistat, a viral online filmmaker with a large YouTube following, and former Tumblr VP, engineering Matt Hackett, Beme was acquired with the intention of making it a central part of CNN’s digital presence. “Casey and I will be moving on, but the team and technology will be pulled into CNN,” Hackett said in a post on Medium. “Ultimately, while we have built some valuable things, we didn’t hit the escape velocity the business needed to exist independently.” According to Hackett, most of Beme’s employees will be asked to stay on with CNN. A report on BuzzFeed News said that CNN’s digital unit racked up a $20 million budget deficit last year.
 Nate Silver |
ESPN is considering either selling Nate Silver’s stat-driven Fivethirtyeight website or handing it over to another Disney entity, such as ABC News. The site was started up as a blog in 2008, and its content was licensed by the New York Times from 2010 until its 2013 sale to ESPN. While Fivethiryeight’s main focus has been aggregating polling and demographic data and analyzing statistics as they relate to politics, it has also subjected sports, economics and other fields to its numbers-crunching analyses. According to a report that appeared on USA Today’s Big Lead vertical, The Atlantic is a possible buyer. “FiveThirtyEight is a tremendous asset to ESPN, and together we’ve created exceptional content. We are exploring, with Nate, a variety of options for the future,” an ESPN spokesperson told Variety. “Any discussion of exactly what that might look like would be premature.”
Trump Media & Technology Group today reported a $58.2M net loss on $4.1M in 2023 revenues, a disclosure that drove its stock price down 22.6 percent to $47.96.
Barry Pollack, an attorney at Wall Street’s Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler, has registered Julian Assange as a client with the Justice Dept. “out of an abundance of caution.”
Paramount Global to slash 800 jobs in what chief executive Bob Bakish calls part of an effort to “return the company to earnings growth"... Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman is exiting at the end of the month due to disagreements with chief executive Gus Wenner over the direction the magazine is taking... The New York Times broke the $1 billion barrier in annual revenue from digital subscriptions in 2023... Press Forward is investing more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms.
The majority of news articles are read within the first three days of publication, according to a recent report.
The Los Angeles Times gives pink slips to 115 people or 20 percent of its newsroom staff... TIME is also laying off about 30 employees, which is approximately 15 percent of its editorial staff... The Baltimore Banner, which was launched by Stewart Bainum in 2022 after he failed to buy the Baltimore Sun, added 500 subscribers per day in the three days following Sinclair Broadcast Group's deal to purchase the Sun.
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