 Justin Dearborn |
Tribune Publishing chairman and CEO Justin Dearborn has stepped down. Tim Knight, currently president of the company will move to the CEO spot and will join Tribune’s board. David Dreier will assume the chairman role. Dearborn had been chief executive since 2016, when he took over from Michael Ferro, who resigned following allegations of sexual misconduct outside the company. In December, the company terminated negotiations to sell the newspaper chain to the California-based McClatchy Co.
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The Forward, which started out as TheJewish Daily Forward in April 1897, is stopping its print editions. It will continue to produce an English-language and a Yiddish-language edition online. The publication also plans to lay off about 40 percent of its editorial staff — including editor-in-chief Jane Eisner, executive editor Dan Friedman, digital director David Goldiner, design director Kurt Hoffman and vice president of marketing Kathleen Chambard. Started as a Yiddish-language daily, the Forward launched an English-language weekly edition in 1990, which became a monthly magazine in 2017. Over the years, writers at the paper have included Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick and Phillip Lopate. The Forward says the shift to digital-only is meant to capitalize on its growth among under-35 readers who prefer to read news online. Currently it says that segment amounts to a third of total readers.
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INTO, the news platform launched in August 2017 by gay dating app Grindr, laid off all editorial and social staffers on Jan. 15, according to a statement issued by the site’s editors. Grindr says it is shifting its focus from editorial content to a video-based format. “This decision was driven by the high user engagement and development we see through channels such as Twitter and YouTube,” the company said in a statement to The Wrap. INTO’s editor-in-chief, Zach Stafford, left the site to take the EIC post at The Advocate last year following anti-LGBTQ comments made by Grindr president Scott Chen.
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.
Boston Globe Media acquires InstaTrac, a company that provides subscription-based services aimed at making government information easier to find, track, and understand... AARP names former New Republic CEO and publisher Michael Caruso as its SVP and chief content officer, unifying the organization's portfolio of media, live events and digital platforms... The Fund for American Studies, an educational nonprofit, awards its inaugural Journalism Excellence Fellowships.
