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Snap Inc., the parent company of image-messaging service Snapchat, has shed around two dozen employees in its New York and London offices, according to CNBC. The layoffs included several members of the company’s content team, which curates both feeds for user-generated Snaps, known as Our Stories, and the publisher-initiated Discover channels. Snapchat has had a hard time keeping up with its larger rival, Facebook-owned Instagram, as it has copied several Snapchat features. While Snapchat reported 178 million daily active users in November, Facebook’s global head of sales Carolyn Everson says that Instagram Stories is reaching 250 million daily active users. Snap lost nearly $179 million during the third quarter of 2017. The new layoffs come after Snap cut the size of the team that produces Spectacles, its sunglasses that can be used to record images, and dropped close to 20 jobs from its recruiting team as part of plans to slow hiring this year.
 David Shipley |
Bloomberg is shutting down its financial commentary brand Gadfly in an effort to place all the opinion offerings of its news service under one umbrella. Launched in 2015, Gadfly, designed as an extension of the Bloomberg View opinion column, aimed to offer fast analysis of financial, corporate and technology news. Gadfly content can be accessed on Bloomberg terminals or at bloomberg.com. “We’re simply combining our various opinion brands into a unified global platform, Bloomberg Opinion,” Bloomberg commentary editor David Shipley told the Wall Street Journal. “Labels may change, but the jobs, journalism and goals remain the same.”
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Bonnier, the Swedish publisher behind such titles as Field & Stream and Popular Science, is turning five of its magazines into digital-only brands. It has also laid off the editor-in-chief, creative director and photo editor of food and travel focused Saveur, which will go from six issues a year to four. The magazine will now share resources with other publications in a fashion similar to that used by Conde Nast and other major publishing houses. About 70 employees in all are set to lose their jobs due to the changes. The titles that will be no longer be produced in print are WaterSki, Wakeboarding, SportDiver, Baggers and Dirt Rider.
 Natasha Bertrand |
The Atlantic has hired Natasha Bertrand, currently a political correspondent for Business Insider, as a staff writer for its Politics & Policy team, covering national security and the intelligence community with a focus on developments in the Trump-Russia investigation. The magazine has also brought on James Somers as a contributing editor, writing about technology, data and computing. Last week, the publisher announced that Elaina Plott and Reihan Salam will join as politics staff writer and contributing editor, respectively. Readership of TheAtlantic.com grew nearly 30% in 2017, and the print magazine now has more than 570,000 subscribers.
The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach an agreement that will make a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars available for use by Sora, OpenAI’s short-form generative AI video platform... CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has moved Tony Dokoupil, a co-host at “CBS Mornings” since 2019, into the anchor’s chair for the “CBS Evening News,” following the departure of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois... USA Today editor-in-chief Caren Bohan has left the paper.
Michael Kaminer, who was responsible for the Observer’s “Power List” for the past 13 years, has cut ties with the publication... The New York Times Company continues the march toward its goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027... The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing more than $6 million in funding to eight organizations working to address the challenges local news and information environments face along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Conservative outlets Fox News, Newsmax and the Daily Caller are holding back from signing Pete Hegseth’s edict restricting press access in the Pentagon... CBS News sees the first executive departure of the Bari Weiss era as head of standards and practices Claudia Milne exits... Indiana University shuts down the print version of The Indiana Daily Student.
Rothschild family plans to unload 26.7 percent stake in The Economist... STAT, a digital media company that focuses the life sciences, brings back Damian Garde, who anchored its biotech newsletter and podcast from 2016 to 2024... High Times officially resumes print publication (following its 2024 shutdown) with the release of a limited-edition, collectible 50th anniversary issue. 
CBS News is set to hand over its reins to The Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss as Paramount acquires her site for $155M... C-SPAN comes on board as an official media partner of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is charged by Congress to lead the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence... A new Gallup survey says that the level of trust that US audiences have in the media has hit a new low.
