Media Moves

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.

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.”