 |
The San Diego Union-Tribune is sold to MediaNews Group for an undisclosed amount. MediaNews Group is owned by Alden Global Capital, which owns approximately 200 publications, including the Chicago Tribune and Denver Post. Its Southern California News Group papers include the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Daily News. The Union-Tribune was previously owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought it from Tribune Publishing in 2018. In keeping with Alden’s reputation for slashing costs at its papers, Sharon Ryan, executive VP of California for MediaNews Group said in an email to employees that cutbacks will be necessary to “offset the slowdown in revenues as economic headwinds continue to impact the media industry.”
 |
The New York Times is making “an evolution in how we cover sports” by closing down its sports department and moving its coverage of teams and games over to The Athletic, the sports platform it purchased for $550 million last year. According to Times executive editor Joe Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake, there no plans to eliminate any staff positions as part of the change. The shift promises to alter the tone of the paper’s sports coverage. “We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to the Times newsroom. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.” While The Athletic has been gaining in readership—hitting three million in March—it still does not report an operating profit, losing $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year.
 |
Microsoft’s bid to acquire to acquire video game publisher Activision Blizzard for $69 billion now has one less hurdle in its way. The Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to delay the deal, which argued that the acquisition would stifle competition, got a thumbs-down from Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on July 11. Following that decision, Britain's antitrust regulator said it was open to Microsoft changing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard to address its concerns that blocked the deal in the UK in April. The merger could now go through in the US as early as this month.
Trump Media & Technology Group today reported a $58.2M net loss on $4.1M in 2023 revenues, a disclosure that drove its stock price down 22.6 percent to $47.96.
Barry Pollack, an attorney at Wall Street’s Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler, has registered Julian Assange as a client with the Justice Dept. “out of an abundance of caution.”
Paramount Global to slash 800 jobs in what chief executive Bob Bakish calls part of an effort to “return the company to earnings growth"... Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman is exiting at the end of the month due to disagreements with chief executive Gus Wenner over the direction the magazine is taking... The New York Times broke the $1 billion barrier in annual revenue from digital subscriptions in 2023... Press Forward is investing more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms.
The majority of news articles are read within the first three days of publication, according to a recent report.
The Los Angeles Times gives pink slips to 115 people or 20 percent of its newsroom staff... TIME is also laying off about 30 employees, which is approximately 15 percent of its editorial staff... The Baltimore Banner, which was launched by Stewart Bainum in 2022 after he failed to buy the Baltimore Sun, added 500 subscribers per day in the three days following Sinclair Broadcast Group's deal to purchase the Sun.
Have a comment? Send it to 
No comments have been submitted for this story yet.