Ziff

Ziff Davis, which owns such tech publications as Mashable, IGN and Lifehacker, picks up CNET from Red Ventures, which holds a portfolio of digital and media businesses, in a deal valued at over $100M million. In 2000, CNET Networks Inc. paid $1.6B for Ziff-Davis Inc. and its online services company, ZDNet. A long string of transactions led to Red Ventures acquiring CNET, along with a few smaller websites, from ViacomCBS, now Paramount Global, in 2020 for $500M and Ziff Davis emerging as a public entity after owner J2 Global spun off its cloud business in 2021. Axios reported in January that Red Ventures was trying to sell CNET for around $250M, but that deal did not go through. Ziff Davis’s chief executive, Vivek Shah, says the acquisition of CNET was part of the company’s strategy to acquire digital-media businesses with its roughly $800M in cash on hand.

Oliver Darcy
Oliver Darcy

Oliver Darcy, who took over CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter when Brian Stelter exited the company in 2022, has left to start up Status, an independent, subscription-based news site dedicated to the media industry. The site is set to make its debut on Aug. 12, and for now Darcy will be reporting solo. He told the New York Times that Status, which has no outside investors, is launching with an undisclosed initial sponsor as well as an ad sales partnership with The Ankler, a start-up founded by former Hollywood Reporter editor Janice Min that covers the entertainment business. Subscriptions to Status will begin at $15 a month or $150 per year; an elite membership, with such perks as private Zoom calls, is available for $595 annually. Darcy, who had been with CNN since 2017, was previously the politics editor for Business Insider and deputy managing editor of The Blaze. “My pitch to readers is this is a 100 percent independent voice,” he told the Times. “I don’t think there’s one product out there that does exactly what we do.”

Axios

Axios is handing out pink slips to about 50 staffers—or about 10 percent of its staff—according to company CEO Jim VandeHei. In a company memo, VandeHei calls the decision “a painful but necessary move to tighten our strategic focus and shift investment to our core growth areas.” VandeHei is getting a little heat for the way he let staffers know about the firings, with Fast Company noting that the announcement was “cleverly formatted like an Axios newsletter.” While he said that Axios would still be hiring in “key areas” VandeHei added that the platform faces competition within the industry for business an talent, a fragmenting of reader attention and the development of AI models that can summarizing news.