 Charles Krauthammer |
Charles Krauthammer, longtime Fox News contributor and Pulitzer Prize winner died June 21. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he was chief resident of the psychiatric consultation service at Massachusetts General Hospital, an official at HHS and a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale before embarking on his career as a political analyst and commentator. He wrote for such publications as Time, the New Republic, the Weekly Standard and the National Interest, winning his Pulitzer for essays that were published in the Washington Post. On June 8, Krauthammer publicly released a letter saying the cancer he thought he had beaten was back in a particularly virulent form. “This is the final verdict. My fight is over,” he wrote. “I leave this life with no regrets.”
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AARP the Magazine remains at the top of media and consumer research company GfK MRI’s list of the 20 most-read magazines in the U.S. With 38.6 million readers, AARP The Magazine, which is distributed for free to all paying AARP members, saw a slight uptick (+0.03 percent) in its audience—one of only three publications in the top 20 to do so. (The other two were The Costco Connection, another freely-distributed membership-based publication and monthly video game magazine Game Informer.) Coming in at second place was former number-one People, whose 35.9 million readers represented a drop of 11.9 percent. Two of the publications that Meredith currently has on the auction block, Time (16.9 million readers) and Sports Illustrated (16.4 million readers), were in the top 10. GfK MRI’s figures represent readership from September 2017 to May 2018, and record the number of individuals who read each publication as opposed to the number of copies that are sold.
 Cristina Silva |
Newsweek news director Cristina Silva is leaving the company. Silva came to Newsweek Media Group in 2014 as a senior editor at the company’s International Business Times. She was promoted to managing editor in 2016 and moved to the news director slot at Newsweek last year. Silva survived the wave of turmoil that swept through the Newsweek offices earlier this year, when Newsweek editor-in-chief Bob Roe, executive editor Ken Li and investigative reporters Celeste Katz and Josh Saul were all let go following a piece about the company’s ownership. While it is unclear who Silva’s successor will be, a source at the magazine told the Wrap that the company is doing an external search. According to a memo from current Newsweek editor-in-chief Nancy Cooper, Silva plans to return to freelance writing and teach as an adjunct professor at NYU.
 Dick Delson |
Dick Delson, a publicist and awards consultant whose clients included Sylvester Stallone, Walter Matthau, Harold Robbins and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, died Sunday after a long illness. Delson was Universal’s New York-based director of publicity and subsequently served as director of publicity at Filmways Pictures and vice president, publicity at Disney. In addition to partnering with the late Murray Weissman at Weissman Delson Communications from 1998 through 2005, he had his own firm, Dick Delson & Associates. Delson helped out on Miramax campaigns for more than a decade, assisting on pictures including Pulp Fiction and Oscar best picture winner Chicago. At MCA/Universal, he worked on campaigns for several best picture winners, including The Sting and The Deer Hunter. He was 81.
Versant Media Group, the NBCUniversal cable TV spin-off, today reported its first financial results as 2025 revenues dipped 5.3 percent to $6.7B and standalone EBITDA dropped 9.1 percent to $2.2B.
Trump Media & Technology Group is discussing a spin-off of the Truth Social platform following the expected closing of its $6B merger deal with TAE Technologies... Condé Nast sells off Them, the digital LGBTQ-focused platform it launched in 2017, to Equalpride, publisher of Out, The Advocate, Out Traveler, Health PLUS Wellness and Pride.com... CBS News has parted ways with longevity influencer Peter Attia, one of the 19 contributors that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss brought on as part of her plan to present a wider variety of voices on the platform. 
Symbolic.ai forms a partnership with News Corp to begin using the company’s AI-native publisher platform in the newsrooms of News Corp publications to augment research, writing and publishing... Mediaite launches a newsletter that promises to give readers a summary of—media newsletters... The Fund for American Studies launches the Journalism Excellence Fellowship, a program that will provide promising young journalists the opportunity to work alongside top writers, reporters, and media professionals.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has roots going back to 1786, is going out of business, the paper’s owners, Block Communications, announced on Jan. 7... GQ editor Will Welch is stepping down to take on a new Paris-based role with the musician Pharrell, who is also men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton... Semafor says it has raised $30 million on a $330 million valuation, following its first profitable year. 
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.
