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| Alan Finder |
Former New York Times reporter and editor Alan Finder died at 72 on March 24, several weeks after having tested positive for COVID-19. Finder served in a variety of positions at the paper, including city hall bureau chief, and was assistant editor on the foreign desk when he retired in 2011. Before coming to the Times, he had been a reporter at Newsday and The Record in Hackensack, NJ. After retiring from the Times, he returned to The Record to edit a weekly feature news section. In a Twitter post, Times reporter Kevin Sack called Finder “a terrific reporter, a calming presence and, as anyone who knew him will attest, one of the menschiest guys around.”
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Esquire, which is owned by Hearst Magazines, is cutting its print circulation from eight issues a year to six, according to a report in the New York Post. The move follows last year’s cutback from 10 issues a year. Hearst Magazines president Troy Young told the Post that the reduction is not related to the coronavirus crisis. He added that he plans to put more money into “video and digital.” According to the Alliance for Audited Media, Esquire’s print circulation for the first half of 2019 was 709,575.
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The postponement of the Tokyo Olympics is tightening the screws on a difficult economic situation for Comcast, parent company to NBCUniversal. The launch of NBC Universal’s Peacock streaming service, which is set to go wide in July, was expected to get a big boost from the games. In addition, the Los Angeles Times reports that, as of the beginning of March, NBCUniversal had sold 90 percent of the advertising spots for the games, with a price tag of $1.25 billion. NBC paid $1.1 billion for rights to the Olympics. The company has already seen the cancellation of other sporting events it carries, as well as closing its theme parks and delaying theatrical distribution of films domestically and internationally. Comcast has lost about 20 percent of its market value in the last month.
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Sports journalism website The Athletic is coming up against a pretty tough problem: It has next to nothing to write about. Founded in 2016, The Athletic is an ad-free site, covering its expenses through subscription revenue. Company co-founder and CEO Adam Hansmann told the Financial Times that readership numbers for the site have been dropping, and he expects revenue for the site to drop over the next few months. The FT also reports that the site, which expanded to the UK in August, is dropping the £4.99 (about $5.86) monthly paywall in the country for the next three months. US readers still pay $9.99 a month (or $4.99 per month for an annual subscription). For now, the site is filled with stories on such subjects as how a restarted NBA season could work and what soccer players are looking for during the COVID-19 precipitated shutdown.
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.
