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American Media has sold the National Enquirer, along with the Globe and National Examiner, to James Cohen, the former owner of newsstand operator Hudson News, for $100 million. In addition to legal problems stemming from hush-money payments the paper admits having made to women who alleged that they’d had affairs with president Trump, the Enquirer has also seen a precipitous drop in its readership. The Alliance for Audited Media says that while the paper sold an average of 516,000 copies per issue in 2017, that number had plummeted to 218,000 by December 2018. Earlier this year, it tried to refinance $400 million in debt, according to the Washington Post. AMI still owns such titles as OK!, Star and Us Weekly.
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The Mueller Report may not be popular at the White House, but it is proving to be a big draw for readers. One version of the report, published by Skyhorse with an introduction by Alan Dershowitz, was at #1 on Amazon’s list of best-selling books and #2 on barnesandnoble.com’s list early Friday afternoon. While the print versions of the report have a publication date of April 30, ebook versions are available now. The Skyhorse version has a few competitors: Scribner’s version is touted as “the only book with exclusive analysis by the Pulitzer Prize-winning staff of The Washington Post, and the most complete and authoritative available,” while Melville House’s, which comes with no commentary, is meant to be “a non-partisan document” according to Melville publisher Dennis Johnson. For those who don’t want to shell out their hard-earned dollars, there is also a free version of the report, which can be downloaded from Barnes & Noble.
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Meredith is taking Money off the market and is also turning the 47-year-old publication into an online-only property. Money’s June/July print issue will be the last to hit newsstands. Meredith had been shopping the title with a $10 million price tag, but no one took the bait. “We are going to invest in the digital money.com brand site itself as well as leverage the Money content across our portfolio,” a Meredith spokesperson said, according to the New York Post. Money is one of the four publications that Meredith put on the auction block after its acquisition of Time Inc. last year. Fortune was sold to Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon for $150 million and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne paid $190 million for Time. Private equity firm TPG Capital was reportedly a prime contender to pick up Sports Illustrated, but the Post report says that the sale has been called off. Meredith had been hoping to rake in $500 million from the sale of all four properties.
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.
