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Condé Nast will be putting all of its titles behind a paywall by the end of the year. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired already require consumers to subscribe in order to access more than four articles each month. The new paywalls, affecting such publications as Architectural Digest, Vogue and GQ, will not uniformly follow that plan. “Some brands may have specific content that will be gated, and some will have a wider metered paywall,” Bob Sauerberg, the exiting CEO of the company, said in a memo. “Every brand is distinct, and every brand’s paywall will be its own distinct product.” The paywalls are part of what the company says is a plan to generate $600 million in new revenue. Condé Nast is reported to have lost $120 million in 2017.
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A day after racking up 15 Oscar nominations for its films, Netflix has officially joined the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade association representing Hollywood’s six major film studios (Disney, Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros.). “Adding Netflix will allow us to even more effectively advocate for the global community of creative storytellers,” said MPAA chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin in a statement. Netflix is the first internet streaming service to become a member of the group. The MPAA has long been active in the fight against online piracy, a topic that has become more important to Netflix as the streamer continues to produce more original content. Netflix left the Internet Association, a trade group representing such tech companies as Google, Amazon and Facebook, earlier this month.
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San José Spotlight, a news site serving the San Jose Silicon Valley region, has launched. Solely funded through community contributions, it will be the South Bay region’s first nonprofit news organization dedicated to political and business reporting. The site has raised nearly $84,000 from 320 individual donors. The San José Spotlight team is led by editor Ramona Giwargis and director of development Joshua Barousse. Giwargis has served as state government reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and city hall reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. Barousse has been a policy analyst in the offices of San Jose City Councilmembers Ash Kalra and Sylvia Arenas and state Sen. Jerry Hill. “San José Spotlight aims to be a conversation-starter around the issues affecting residents as well as be a responsible voice of journalism for those in our community,” said Giwargis. Singer Assocs. handled the Spotlight launch.
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.
