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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.
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.
