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| Dan Peres |
The reboot of news and gossip site Gawker, which was announced earlier this year, has been postponed, according to a report in the New York Post. The site’s entire staff, including former Details editor Dan Peres, has been laid off. Bustle Digital Group, which owns Gawker, said in a statement that it was putting the site on the back burner for the time being in favor of “our most recent acquisitions, Mic, The Outline, Nylon and Inverse.” Bustle’s owner Bryan Goldberg, who also founded sports site Bleacher Report, purchased Gawker at a bankruptcy auction last summer. That auction came after Gawker Media lost a legal battle against wrestler Hulk Hogan over its publication of a sex tape. Goldberg told the Post he plans to relaunch the site at a later, unspecified date.
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Newsday Media Group is offering voluntary buyouts to some employees as it shifts its focus toward events and video production. The number of buyouts to be granted has not yet been determined, but the company says that those taking the buyout will receive three weeks’ pay for every year of service. The eligible employees work in Newsday’s newsroom, advertising, marketing and finance departments. “Newsday is transforming from a traditional newspaper into a leading-edge multimedia and multiplatform content-generation machine,” said company spokeswoman Kim Como. The buyouts come as Newsday Media Group prepares to move into a new headquarters building that has a television studio and theater equipped for live broadcasts, and follow a round of involuntary buyouts for pressmen, truck drivers and collators that were made last year.
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Johnson Publishing, the former owner of Ebony and Jet magazines, has sold its photography archive, which contains close to a million photographs and 3.35 million unprocessed negatives dating back to 1948. A group of private foundations led by the J. Paul Getty Trust placed the winning $30 million bid for the archive at a bankruptcy auction in Chicago on July 24. The group also includes the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The foundations have pledged to donate the archives to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and “other leading cultural institutions for the public benefit and to ensure the broadest access for the general public and use by scholars, researchers, journalists and other interested parties.”
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.
USA TODAY brings on Jamie Stockwell as VP of news, effective March 30. Stockwell was most recently deputy managing editor of news for the Washington Post... YouTube expands its likeness detection capabilities to a pilot group of government officials, journalists and political candidates... The AP Fund for Journalism adds 50 news organizations to its local news program, bringing the total number of participating newsrooms to 100. 
