 Edward Felsenthal |
The editorial merry-go-round continues to spin at several major magazine publishers. Edward Felsenthal is taking over for Nancy Gibbs as editor-in-chief at Time. Gibbs announced her resignation on Tuesday. Felsenthal has been with Time since 2013, first as editor of Time Digital and then as group digital director, news and lifestyle for Time Inc. Before coming to Time, he was co-founder and executive editor of digital news site The Daily Beast and spent 15 years at the Wall Street Journal. Condé Nast has seen its second editor-in-chief leave in the past two weeks as Cindi Leive announced her departure from Glamour. Leive has run the title since 2001, and has been with Condé Nast for 29 years. She will remain with the company until the end of the year.
 Hope Hicks |
Hope Hicks, who has served as interim White House communications director since August 16, will now assume the position on a permanent basis. Before taking the interim position, Hicks was the President’s director of strategic communications. She will be the Trump administration’s third full-time communications director, replacing Anthony Scaramucci, who was fired in July. Her working relationship with Trump started when she was employed by Hiltzik Strategies. She left that job to work for the Trump Organization. The White House has also appointed Republican strategist and commentator Mercedes Schlapp as a senior communications adviser, in addition to promoting Raj Shah to principal deputy for press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Steven Cheung to head of strategic response.
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Russia Today, which is funded by the Russian government, is being investigated for possibly violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It says on its website that “the company that supplies all services for RT America channel, including TV production and operations, in the US, has received a letter from the US Department of Justice, claiming that the company is obligated to register under FARA due to the work it does for RT.” The name of that company, however, was not disclosed. This comes on the heels of an FBI investigation of Sputnik, another Russian-based news service. In both cases, it is claimed that the news service in question runs as a propaganda arm of the Russian government. According to The Hill, a January report from the U.S. intelligence community called RT America a “state-run propaganda machine” that “has positioned itself as a domestic U.S channel and has deliberately sought to obscure any legal ties to the Russian Government.”
Versant Media Group, the NBCUniversal cable TV spin-off, today reported its first financial results as 2025 revenues dipped 5.3 percent to $6.7B and standalone EBITDA dropped 9.1 percent to $2.2B.
Trump Media & Technology Group is discussing a spin-off of the Truth Social platform following the expected closing of its $6B merger deal with TAE Technologies... Condé Nast sells off Them, the digital LGBTQ-focused platform it launched in 2017, to Equalpride, publisher of Out, The Advocate, Out Traveler, Health PLUS Wellness and Pride.com... CBS News has parted ways with longevity influencer Peter Attia, one of the 19 contributors that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss brought on as part of her plan to present a wider variety of voices on the platform. 
Symbolic.ai forms a partnership with News Corp to begin using the company’s AI-native publisher platform in the newsrooms of News Corp publications to augment research, writing and publishing... Mediaite launches a newsletter that promises to give readers a summary of—media newsletters... The Fund for American Studies launches the Journalism Excellence Fellowship, a program that will provide promising young journalists the opportunity to work alongside top writers, reporters, and media professionals.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has roots going back to 1786, is going out of business, the paper’s owners, Block Communications, announced on Jan. 7... GQ editor Will Welch is stepping down to take on a new Paris-based role with the musician Pharrell, who is also men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton... Semafor says it has raised $30 million on a $330 million valuation, following its first profitable year. 
The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach an agreement that will make a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars available for use by Sora, OpenAI’s short-form generative AI video platform... CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has moved Tony Dokoupil, a co-host at “CBS Mornings” since 2019, into the anchor’s chair for the “CBS Evening News,” following the departure of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois... USA Today editor-in-chief Caren Bohan has left the paper.
