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The New York Times Co. reported today that Q2 net income surged 51.7 percent to $23.6M, driven by a robust growth in its digital subscription business.
It gained 109K digital-only subscribers during the period, which brings the number of digital-only customers to 2.9M of the NYTC’s 3.8M total subscriptions.
CEO Mark Thompson noted that NYTC has retained a large number of subscribers who signed up during heady days of the “Trump Bump” 2016 election and post-election periods.
Subscription revenues account for nearly two-thirds of the NYTC’s $414.6M Q2 revenues.
On the advertising front, revenues declined 9.9 percent to $119.M.Print ads dropped 11.5 percent to $68.2M, while digital dipped 7.5 percent to $51M.
Thompson expects a “return to strong year-to-year growth for third-quarter.”
Underscore Media, a new creator-led media venture dedicated to New York sports, is built around three established New York sports personalities, Sal Licata, Jimmy Traina, and John Jastremski.
McClatchy, which owns 29 daily papers across 14 states (including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star), launches a wave of layoffs that extends to at least 13 of those papers... The Toledo Blade, which was founded in 1835, is set to shut down on Dec. 31, unless owner Block Communications manages to find a buyer for it... A bill awaiting approval by California governor Gavin Newsom would give local newsrooms a boost. 
Fox News Media issued a pretty sparse release to announce the departure of one of its stars. “Effective today, Maria Bartiromo is no longer with FOX News Media,” it reads.
Brunswick Group partner John Simons has joined CNN as senior director of business & media. He held top jobs at Time and the Wall Street Journal.
WNET, the nation’s largest public media company, names Edward O’Keefe its next president and CEO, effective September 21. O’Keefe succeeds Neal Shapiro, who becomes president emeritus and will retire at the end of the year... The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, which would empower news publishers and other content providers to defend themselves by mandating transparency for all bots crawling their sites, in introduced in the House by Rep. Laurel Lee (R-FL) and Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC)... Google gets socked by European Union regulators with a $1 billion fine for using the platform’s dominance as a search engine to illegally undercut competition.
