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Pride Media, which owns Out, Advocate, Plus and Pride.com, is acquired by production company Equal Entertainment and rebrands as Equal Pride. The company says it will now become “the leading LGBTQ+ owned and certified voice to the LGBTQ+ community.” Since 2017, Pride Media was owned by Adam Levine, CEO of Los Angeles-based investment firm Orevea, who acquired it via a management-backed buyout of Here Publishing. Equal Pride will be helmed by Equal Entertainment founder Mark Berryhill, who was also president and senior executive producer at Celebrity Page TV & Network. Celebrity Page, along with the Reelz and Ovation cable channels, will be part of Equal Pride.
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Higher Ground, the production company founded in 2018 by Barack and Michelle Obama, signed on with Amazon’s Audible following its decision not to renew its contract with Spotify. One key reason behind the move may be that Audible offers some of its original material on other platforms, while Higher Ground’s content on Spotify was exclusive to the platform. In a June 21 statement, former First Lady Michelle Obama said that the new relationship with Audible will allow Higher Ground to “keep striving to tell compelling, provocative, and soulful stories — while doing everything we can to make sure they reach the folks who need to hear them.” Higher Ground’s contract with Spotify runs through October. The company also has an exclusive film and TV production deal with Netflix.
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| Mark Shields |
Mark Shields, the political columnist, advisor and commentator who was perhaps best known for his face-offs with David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour from 2001 to 2020, passed away on June 18. The pairing with Brooks was the capstone of a career that included stints on the campaign staffs of presidential candidates Edmund Muskie, Morris Udall, Sargent Shriver and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as working as an editorial writer for the Washington Post and an on-air contributor to Inside Washington and Capital Gang. While he was highly opinionated and would often hold to his beliefs with a bulldog-like tenacity, Shields was also known for something that is increasingly rare in the news media: an open mind. “He was interested in, not appalled by, encounters with people who saw the world through different lenses from the ones he used,” Michael Sean Winters wrote in the National Catholic Reporter. And Brooks, in a New York Times column written to mark Shields’ retirement from the NewsHour in 2020, wrote: “After decades in journalism, Mark still puts the character lens before the partisan lens. He has been quick to criticize Democrats when they are snobbish, dishonest or fail to live up to the standards of basic decency.”
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.
