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USA Today becomes the last major US daily to put up a paywall. While part of the paper’s content will remain free, a selection of stories will now be marked "subscriber only." The rest of Gannett’s papers have already made the switch to a subscription model. According to a July 7 note from USA Today editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll and publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth, the money from the paywall will help fund its investigations unit and visual journalism. USA Today says its digital destinations receive approximately 90 million unique visitors per month.
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| Jason Angrisani |
Bloomberg appoints Jason Angrisani as global chief marketing officer. Angrisani has been part of Bloomberg’s marketing department since 2010 and has helped implement a global planning framework, integrating marketing automation systems with Bloomberg’s proprietary technology. Before coming to Bloomberg, Angrisani was marketing director for IBM’s brand advertising team at Ogilvy & Mather. He will now oversee the marketing for all Bloomberg businesses globally. Bloomberg’s marketing organization is responsible for promoting the Bloomberg brand and engaging key audiences around the world.
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Knewz, a News Corp-backed news aggregation site that was intended to compete with Google and Facebook’s control over what articles users read, has shut down just 18 months after its launch. The site was partly a response to arguments within the news industry that Google and Facebook were not fairly compensating publishers. Curated by artificial intelligence and editors, Knewz promoted itself as publisher-friendly, pulling from sources across the political spectrum. The platform’s website now only has a farewell statement thanking its readers and points them toward such News Corp properties as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and MarketWatch.
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.
