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| Ben Smith |
New York Times media columnist Ben Smith is exiting the paper to serve as editor-in-chief for a news organization being started by Justin Smith, who is leaving his position as chief executive of Bloomberg Media. In a tweet, Justin Smith said that the proposed platform would be “a new kind of global news media company that serves unbiased journalism to a truly global audience.” Before coming to the Times in 2020, Ben Smith was editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed News and he previously wrote for Politico. Justin Smith joined Bloomberg in 2013 after serving as president of Atlantic Consumer Media. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the venture, with the working title “Project Coda,” is expected to feature platforms including digital publishing, email newsletters, podcasts and digital video.
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| John Lee |
NBC Universal launches NBCUnified, a first-party identity platform that it says will let advertisers track and monitor consumer relationships without cookies or device IDs. The platform will combine data from streaming viewership, newsletter subscriptions, theme park visits and ecommerce purchases to create person-level IDs and household IDs. That information can then be matched up with first-party data from marketers and third-party data from licensed providers. “The demand for advanced audiences to be utilized is growing at an incredible pace, so we are trying to stay ahead of that,” NBCUniversal Adversiting & Partnerships chief data officer John Lee told Television News Daily.
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| Matt Abramovitz |
New England Public Media hires Matt Abramovitz as president, effective Feb. 1. Abramovitz is currently vice president of programming for New York classical music station WQXR, a part of New York Public Radio. He helped launch WQXR as a public station in 2009 and has served as its program director and interim general manager. Previously, he worked at WNYC, Blue Note Records and Sirius XM Radio. At NEPM, Abramovitz will be responsible for leading its efforts across radio, television, and digital media platforms. “He is committed to the mission and goals of public media and the role that it plays in creating and supporting a strong, vibrant, local community,” said Robert Feldman, chair of the NEPM presidential search committee. Abramovitz succeeds Martin Miller, who announced his decision to retire as president of New England Public Media last year.
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.
Boston Globe Media acquires InstaTrac, a company that provides subscription-based services aimed at making government information easier to find, track, and understand... AARP names former New Republic CEO and publisher Michael Caruso as its SVP and chief content officer, unifying the organization's portfolio of media, live events and digital platforms... The Fund for American Studies, an educational nonprofit, awards its inaugural Journalism Excellence Fellowships.
Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. has replaced CEO and former California Congressman Devin Nunes with Kevin McGurn, a seasoned media sales executive.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is being bought by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit that is the parent organization of the Baltimore Banner... The British Broadcasting Corporation is axing approximately 2,000 jobs, about 10 percent of its work force... Snap, the company behind Snapchat, is also succumbing to layoff fever, announcing plans to lay off 16 percent of its employees, about 1,000 people.
CBS News Radio will go off the air on May 22, part of the axe-swinging managerial plan put into play by CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss... The Economist, which was first published in 1843, is changing hands. Canadian billionaire Stephen Smith has agreed to acquire a 26.9 percent stake in the publication from Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, her family and family foundation... Nexstar Media Group says it has closed its acquisition of TEGNA, the broadcast, digital media and marketing services company that was formed in 2015, when the Gannett Company split into two publicly traded companies.
