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| Alexi McCammond |
Condé Nast parts ways with Alexi McCammond, who was hired as editor of Teen Vogue on March 5. Her departure follows complaints from readers, the publication’s employees and two major advertisers (Burt’s Bees and Ulta Beauty) over a series of racist and homophobic tweets that she had posted more than a decade ago. McCammond, who covered the Biden campaign for Axios and served as a contributor to MSNBC and NBC, had apologized for the tweets in 2019. Condé Nast chief executive Roger Lynch and chief content officer Anna Wintour had been aware of some of the tweets before McCammond was hired.
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The Boston Globe opinion staff, along with the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, is bringing The Emancipator, a pre-Civil War abolitionist newspaper, back to life as a new media platform. A biweekly newsletter called Unbound, named after one of the first issues of an early abolitionist newspaper, will also be published. “This project will amplify critical voices, ideas, and evidence-based opinion in an effort to reframe the national conversation and hasten racial justice,” a statement on The Emancipator’s website said. Set to launch later this year, the platform will be free, with sponsorship from yet-to-be-named philanthropic sources. The Globe is currently conducting a search for two co-editors-in-chief.
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The National Football League has signed long-term agreements with Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC. Fox, CBS and NBC are each set to pay $2 billion annually, about twice the amount they are paying in their current deals. ESPN will see the price of its Monday Night Football package jump from $2 billion to $2.7 billion, and Amazon will fork over about $1 billion for its right to exclusively stream Thursday night games. The amounts being paid reflect the dominance of the NFL in the broadcasting—and streaming—industry. According to NFL.com, 24 of the top 25, and 77 of the top 100 most-watched programs on television over the past five years have been NFL games.
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.
Michael Kaminer, who was responsible for the Observer’s “Power List” for the past 13 years, has cut ties with the publication... The New York Times Company continues the march toward its goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027... The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing more than $6 million in funding to eight organizations working to address the challenges local news and information environments face along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Conservative outlets Fox News, Newsmax and the Daily Caller are holding back from signing Pete Hegseth’s edict restricting press access in the Pentagon... CBS News sees the first executive departure of the Bari Weiss era as head of standards and practices Claudia Milne exits... Indiana University shuts down the print version of The Indiana Daily Student.
