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Quibi, the short-form entertainment platform that was recently shuttered by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, will soon be available to stream for free on the ad-supported Roku Channel. The sale price for the more than 75 shows and documentaries produced for Quibi was less than $100 million, according to Deadline. The agreement requires that Roku present the programming in its original short form, rather than linking separate episodes together to create longer shows. The content will be exclusive to Roku for the time left in Quibi’s original two-year window with creators. After that, Roku will be able to stream the programming until 2027. While Quibi started out strong, raising $1.75 billion in funding, it sputtered out less than six months after its launch. The company has pledged to return $325 million to its early shareholders.
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Meredith has sold Travel + Leisure to Wyndham Destinations, a company that manages 230 timeshare resorts, for $100 million. Wyndham has also agreed to buy $30 million worth of ads in Meredith publications over a five-year period. The company will rename itself as Travel + Leisure Co. and control the publication’s travel clubs, which have about 60,000 members who pay $100 to $300 a year. Production of the magazine, however, will remain under Meredith’s control. Under a 30-year renewable licensing agreement, Meredith will continue publishing Travel + Leisure, with its staff remaining Meredith employees. The publication was owned by Time Inc. before Meredith purchased the company in 2018. According to the Wall Street Journal, its circulation has held at 950,000 since the sale and Meredith said in August that it sold 735 pages of print advertising in the most recent fiscal year.
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The Tampa Bay Times is closing and selling its printing plant in March. The closure will result in pink slips going to 150 employees, 90 of whom are full-timers. The paper’s remaining full-time staff will have their salaries cut by 10 percent for the next six months. In April, the Times, which was printed daily up until that time, cut five days a week from its schedule, only printing a paper on Wednesday and Sunday. Those papers will now be printed at Gannet’s Lakeland Ledger facility. Proceeds from the sale and some of the savings from the pay cuts will be used to pay down debt and possibly fund pensions, said Times president Conan Gallaty's decision to sell the printing facility follows similar moves at other papers. In November, the Kansas City Star sold its press, and other papers who have outsourced their printing include the Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer and Hartford Courant.
Trump Media & Technology Group today reported a $58.2M net loss on $4.1M in 2023 revenues, a disclosure that drove its stock price down 22.6 percent to $47.96.
Barry Pollack, an attorney at Wall Street’s Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler, has registered Julian Assange as a client with the Justice Dept. “out of an abundance of caution.”
Paramount Global to slash 800 jobs in what chief executive Bob Bakish calls part of an effort to “return the company to earnings growth"... Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman is exiting at the end of the month due to disagreements with chief executive Gus Wenner over the direction the magazine is taking... The New York Times broke the $1 billion barrier in annual revenue from digital subscriptions in 2023... Press Forward is investing more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms.
The majority of news articles are read within the first three days of publication, according to a recent report.
The Los Angeles Times gives pink slips to 115 people or 20 percent of its newsroom staff... TIME is also laying off about 30 employees, which is approximately 15 percent of its editorial staff... The Baltimore Banner, which was launched by Stewart Bainum in 2022 after he failed to buy the Baltimore Sun, added 500 subscribers per day in the three days following Sinclair Broadcast Group's deal to purchase the Sun.
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