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NBCUniversal says that the Beijing Winter Olympics racked up the smallest prime-time audience ever recorded for the games. This year’s average of 11.4 million viewers was down 42 percent from the 19.8 million average number of viewers brought in during the 2018 Pyeongchang games. Those figures follow a similarly disappointing perfomance for the 2020 Tokyo games, which only managed to pull in an average of 15.5 million viewers—down more than 43 percent from the 27.5 million recorded for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro games. NBC is in the middle of a $75.5 billion that gives it the US right to air the Olympics through 2032.
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Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social-networking platform, is up and running—sort of. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, some potential users say they were unable to create an account or got error messages when they tried setting up an account. But snafus do not seem to be dimming the platform’s prospects. Truth Social currently sits at #1 on the App Store’s ranking of free apps, and Digital World Acquisition Corp., the blank-check company that is merging with Trump Media & Technology, saw its shares jump by 19 percent in premarket trading on Feb. 22. “I’m sure this isn’t the company’s fault,” one App Store commenter said. “I’m sure it’s the corrupt liberals at Apple.”
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Tegna, which owns 64 television stations in 51 US markets, is acquired via a partnership deal between private equity firms Standard General and Apollo Global Management. Standard General founding partner Soo Kim will become Tegna's chairman, and its CEO, Deb McDermott, will serve as Tegna’s chief executive officer. The partners beat out a rival offer from Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group. Apollo acquired a controlling interest in the TV stations that had been operated by Cox Media Group in 2019, and the Hollywood Reporter says that Tegna stations in Austin, Dallas and Houston are expected to be acquired by Cox in the wake of the deal. Tegna was spun off from Gannett in 2015 as a separate, publicly traded company.
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.
