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HBO is pulling the plug on “Vice News Tonight,” the nightly news show from Vice Media that has run on the cable network for the past seven years. Vice chief executive Nancy Dubuc made the announcement in a Monday email to staffers. News chief Josh Tyrangiel, who came to Vice from Bloomberg in 2015, will step down at the end of June, staying on as a consultant until the show ceases production in September. New York Post publisher Jesse Angelo is coming aboard to oversee Vice’s news, digital and television divisions. “Jesse is joining us to create expanded platform opportunities and franchises,” Dubuc said in the email, which a Vice spokeswoman showed to the Hollywood Reporter. Vice is also planning to stay in the daily news game. “A daily VICE news show will continue,” Dubuc said in the email, “and I’ll be able to share with you all the details in the coming weeks.” The company is currently developing a “news-centric” show for streaming channel Hulu.
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Subscribers to The Forward, which ended its print run with the April/May 2019 issue, will now be receiving print issues of Moment in its place. The addition of The Forward’s 16,000 subscribers will bring Moment’s total readership to 75,000. Founded in 1975 by Elie Wiesel and Leonard Fein, Moment has an extensive digital presence. The acquisition of The Forward’s subscribers is part of an overall expansion of its print presence. The magazine launched its own publishing imprint, MomentBooks, in partnership with Mandel Vilar Press this year. “People of all ages still love the feeling of holding a magazine in their hands,” said Moment editor-in-chief and CEO Nadine Epstein. “And studies have shown that reading the printed word on paper is critical to information retention.”
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BET Networks, a part of Viacom, is planning to launch a streaming-video service, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The service, to be called BET+, is set to start up this fall. It will feature content from Tyler Perry Studios as well as programming from MTV, Comedy Central and VH1, all of which are also owned by Viacom. Perry, who already has a five-year deal with Viacom, will also be a financial stakeholder in BET+. While pricing for the service has not been set, Viacom executives say they expect it to cost more than the company’s Comedy Central Now service, which has a price tag of $3.99 a month. It will be available on Apple and Android phones, Amazon Fire, Roku and AppleTV.
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.
Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. has replaced CEO and former California Congressman Devin Nunes with Kevin McGurn, a seasoned media sales executive.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is being bought by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit that is the parent organization of the Baltimore Banner... The British Broadcasting Corporation is axing approximately 2,000 jobs, about 10 percent of its work force... Snap, the company behind Snapchat, is also succumbing to layoff fever, announcing plans to lay off 16 percent of its employees, about 1,000 people.
CBS News Radio will go off the air on May 22, part of the axe-swinging managerial plan put into play by CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss... The Economist, which was first published in 1843, is changing hands. Canadian billionaire Stephen Smith has agreed to acquire a 26.9 percent stake in the publication from Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, her family and family foundation... Nexstar Media Group says it has closed its acquisition of TEGNA, the broadcast, digital media and marketing services company that was formed in 2015, when the Gannett Company split into two publicly traded companies.
