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| Lauren Petterson |
Lauren Petterson has been named president of FOX Business Network. Petterson has been with Fox since 2008, most recently as senior vice president of morning programming and talent development. She has also overseen “Fox & Friends” for the past 11 years. Before coming to Fox, Petterson served as an executive producer at both CBS News and WPIX-TV in New York. In addition to her new role, she will continue to oversee talent development. Petterson succeeds Brian Jones, who helped launch FOX Business Network in 2007, and took over as president when Bill Shine left in 2017. Fox gave no reason for Jones’s departure.
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| Richard Gingras |
Google has made changes to its search guidelines that the company says will prioritize original reporting and make it more visible online. “While we typically show the latest and most comprehensive version of a story in news results, we’ve made changes to our products globally to highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting,” Google vp, news Richard Gingras wrote in a Sept. 12 blog post. “Such articles may stay in a highly visible position longer.” The new guidelines will also give a higher profile to news sources that have a strong reputation for original reporting. The announcement comes as Google, along with Amazon, Apple and Facebook are receiving increasing scrutiny from the US government. According to MediaPost, leaders of the House Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on antitrust have sent letters to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt requesting information regarding antitrust concerns.
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A recently released report from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism looks at the problems facing local news and picks the brains of 54 media executives to find some possible solutions to those problems. The Medill News Leaders Project 2019 is part of the school’s attempt to find the markers of success for local news outlets and to provide supporting data for what they call “Market-Based Opportunities in Local News Innovation.” The executives offering their opinions include senior vice president of news at Gatehouse Media Bill Church, Washington Post director of strategic initiatives Jeremy Gilbert and Vox Media publisher Melissa Bell. Among the takeaways: transitioning to a user-pay model is seen as a key method to develop a sustainable business model for local news; local TV is almost certainly going to see the same kinds of disruption that have faced print media; and nonprofit news organizations are experimenting with promising new revenue models that include philanthropic support. To read the full report, click here.
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.
