Media Moves

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.”