For the Record

Atlantic Faces Losses as Subscriptions Slow:

Despite a "substantial" subscription surge in 2020, The Atlantic "lost more than $20 million and [is] on track to lose another $10 million this year," according to slides of a presentation by CEO Nicholas Thompson shared with Dylan Byers of NBC News. However, Thompson believes that the magazine is on track to attain profitability in 2023, whereupon every staff member will receive "$10,000 or a 10 percent salary bonus" in recognition of their work. "We did four years of business last year," said Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief and a past Pulitzer juror. "One of the core challenges is, how do we keep all those new subscribers?" Byers added that philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs (who purchased a majority stake in the magazine four years ago through her Emerson Collective organization) "did not buy The Atlantic as a philanthropic endeavor" and isn't willing to cover losses beyond a certain window. "I've said many times that Laurene and  Emerson Collective both have strategic patience and have made the support of quality journalism their main goal here, but that they also believe that readers will pay for high-quality journalism," said Goldberg. "They expect The Atlantic, a maker of high-quality journalism, to become profitable over time. I think Laurene is an excellent owner who is in this for the long run." 

AP Photojournalist Attacked in Havana:

AP photojournalist Ramon Espinosa "can be seen in a photo taken by AFP photographer Adalberto Roque on Sunday struggling with a police officer while surrounded by a group of people" as he covered the recent Havana protests against against Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, Kelly McLaughlin of Insider reported Tuesday. Another Roque photo "showed Espinosa with injuries covering his face and a camera still in his hand." Centered around the Malecon promenade, the Sunday protests were prompted by food shortages and inflation stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and resurgent sanctions initially imposed by the Trump administration. "We are fed up with the queues, the shortages. That’s why I'm here," one protester said to the Associated Press. Authorities also blocked social media sites during the demonstrations.

Google Fined $593 Million in French Regulatory Case:

Google "was fined 500 million euros ($593 million) in France after the search giant failed to follow an order to thrash out a fair deal with publishers to use their news content on its platform," Gaspard Sebag of Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The search giant "ignored a 2020 decision to negotiate in good faith for displaying snippets of articles on its Google News service, the Autorité de la concurrence said Tuesday," prompting the second-largest antitrust penalty in the republic for a single company. Earlier this year, Australia "required digital firms like Facebook and Google to pay local publishers for news," while the platform also has been paying publishers "on its own terms" with the $1 billion Google News Showcase initiative. "The sanction of 500 million euros takes into account the exceptional seriousness of the breaches observed," said Isabelle de Silva, president of the French regulatory agency. Additionally, the form "was ordered to enter negotiations within two months of fresh requests from the plaintiff press publishers or face daily fines reaching as much as 900,000 euros a day."

Veteran D.C. Journalists Launch Media Company:

Former Vox Politics Editor Laura McGann and past Smithsonian Institution commercial media czar Mark Bauman "are teaming up to launch a yet-to-be named media company," Sara Fischer of Axios reported Saturday. The duo said they are "looking to build a newsroom that goes deep on select topic areas," including misinformation, climate and Chinese geopolitics. "Our goal is to build a newsroom of beat reporters, subject matter experts, visual journalists and editors that all come together to cover the biggest stories of the day," said McGann. "We'll be creating new formats that give our audience a fuller look at big news stories that can be confusing if you read them piecemeal." The company "has already raised more than $10 million in a series A funding round from two investors," including an anonymous U.S.-based individual and International Media Investments, a United Arab Emirates-based fund "that has a minority stake in Euronews, Europe's top international news network, Sky News Arabia and others." Its board includes such notables as David Ensor, Chris Isham, Madhulika Sikka, Alberto Fernandez and John Defterios, while Matthew Yglesias will join the news organization as an editor at large. "He's going to pioneer new policy writing formats for us," said McGann, who added that Yglesias "will be key in helping the newsroom work with outside experts, like academics." Other hires include Kay Steiger, a former Washington editor for Vox, and Tom Nagorski, the former chief operating officer of the Asia Society. The outlet "is expected to launch officially in late September."

State Department OIG: Pack Erred in Firing Whistleblowers:

A Thursday review from the State Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that former U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) CEO Michael Pack "erred in his dismissal" of six Voice of America employees, actions which "likely [retaliated] against whistleblowers and wrongly stripped some of them of their security clearances," according to Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill. During Pack's 2020-2021 tenure. the broadcast agency "paused signing off on visas for the foreign journalists hired by VOA and pushed back" on COVID-19 protocols. "What is shocking are OIG's discovery of the many more ways Pack and his political appointees – while running USAGM for a mere six months – managed to break the law, abuse authority, endanger public health and safety and grossly mismanage the agency," said David Seide, a whistleblower attorney with the Government Accountability Project who represented one of the employees. The employees were lauded by incumbent Interim CEO Kelu Chao for going "to great lengths to try to defend the firewall" designed to preserve the editorial independence of Voice of America and its sister agencies in February, with several of the employees ultimately resuming their roles in the new administration. Pack, a documentary filmmaker and former chief executive of the Claremont Institute, also "spent $2 million in government funds to investigate journalists employed through USAGM."

MEL Magazine Ends Hiatus, Rehires Staffers:

Venture-equity-backed digital media company Recurrent Ventures is acquiring MEL Magazine, a defunct "men's health and culture publication, from Dollar Shave Club," Sara Fischer of Axios reported Wednesday. The publication, which had been backed by the e-commerce company since its inception six years ago, entered an indefinite hiatus as the financial relationship between the entities ended in March. Longtime Editor-in-Chief Josh Schollmeyer will remain in his role under the new ownership, while as many as 18 of the publication's two dozen employees will be rehired. Schollmeyer said that MEL "hopes to leverage Recurrent's technology to help introduce affiliate marketing and programmatic advertising to its publication." A subscription model may be implemented at a later juncture, he added. Schollmeyer said that he fielded 50 investor inquiries "in the first week or two after our hiatus announcement," ultimately winnowing it down to "5-6 serious players."

Peretti Forecasts 'Modest' BuzzFeed News Loss as SPAC Offering Approaches:

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti "expects BuzzFeed News to make a 'modest loss' his year and eventually achieve profitability" as parent company BuzzFeed's newly acquired HuffPost division remains on track for profitability, Anna Nicolaou of the Financial Times reported Thursday. The founder also "pledged to adopt more financial discipline than he has in the past as he laid out plans to consolidate the digital media industry once he has taken his company public" via a special purpose acquisition company. "There were a lot of missionary type founders who [...] invested in news beyond where the revenue could support it,” said Peretti of the 2014-2016 digital media boom. "I feel like I learned from that mistake [...] you need to have more financial discipline in the short term to make sure you’re growing in a sustainable way." Although BuzzFeed News recently received its first Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Chinese government's detention of Muslims under the editorship of 2000 International Reporting winner Mark Schoofs, the division's British and Australian offices closed last year. Despite the emergence of Substack and other independent writing platforms, Peretti remains sanguine about the future of digital media organizations. "The market was very hot but nobody had built sustainable companies yet, including BuzzFeed," he said. "Now the strongest companies are emerging from the other side. We're at the start of this next stage of appreciation of valuations. [...] We now have a sustainable engine for growth. Especially if we can do quick M&A. It's a scalable business."

USA Today Launches Paywall:

USA Today is "becoming the final major national daily to require readers to pay to read news online," shifting to a paywall for most stories save for certain types of breaking news, Marc Tracy of The New York Times reported Wednesday. The digital subscriptions "will help fund an already beefed-up investigations unit and visual journalism," said Publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth and Editor in Chief Nicole Carroll. "This is a big change; our digital news has always been free," they added. "But USA Today was founded on boldness. Your subscription is an investment in quality journalism that’s worth paying for, journalism that strengthens our communities and our nation." Mayur Gupta, parent company Gannett's chief marketing and strategy officer and a former executive at Spotify, said that the company also may begin to bundle the national newspaper with local Gannett-owned publications amid the advent of USA Today-branded sports betting and games sites: "It’s inevitable that at some point we will create a much stronger value proposition from stitching it all together." USA Today "routinely receive[s] around 90 million unique visitors per month," the company said, placing it "on par with rivals with paywalls such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, according to Comscore, a media measurement company." (Carroll is a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.) 

Outside: 40% of New Subscribers Choose Bundle:

Since launching a subscription bundle in May, lifestyle publisher Outside "has seen 40% of new subscribers choose the Outside+ bundle over an individual subscription for one of its 20 titles," Sara Guaglione of Digiday reported Monday. The media company hopes that Outside's 1.5 million existing subscribers "will also convert to pay for its subscription bundle as cycles renew." Guaglione added that the $99/year bundle "is actually a revamp of Active Pass, which was created in June 2020 to give readers access to the company’s endurance titles" while serving as as a pilot program for the current iteration. In addition to "access to the company’s 20 publications and one-year delivery of two of Outside’s print magazines," the bundle offers access to member-only digital content and online courses, the Outside TV streaming channel and product discounts. "This is an example of a publisher that is throwing a lot of things into the mix in an effort to sell a magazine subscription and keep up their rate base," said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital. "It is hard to sell a magazine subscription alone to an audience under 40 these days, and if that ad revenue is still a primary source of revenue, their print rate base matters a lot. So it seems like they are spicing up the offering to make the magazine a more attractive sell to the consumer." The magazine (which was co-founded by Jann Wenner, William Randolph Hearst III and Jack Ford in 1976) currently operates such publications as Yoga Journal, Backpacker and Vegetarian Times.

Hannah-Jones, Coates Join Howard Faculty:

2020 Commentary winner Nikole Hannah-Jones and 2016 General Nonfiction finalist Ta-Nehisi Coates will join the faculty of Howard University "in a major recruiting victory for the private institution in the nation’s capital," Lauren Lumpkin and Nick Anderson of The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Hannah-Jones' appointment comes "less than a week after trustees for UNC-Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones" amid protests from faculty members and students. In a Tuesday interview with Gayle King of CBS, Hannah-Jones said she believed "a decision about tenure for her at UNC was delayed because of political opposition to her work and discrimination against her as a Black woman." In a statement, UNC-Chapel Hill Journalism Dean Susan King said she and her colleagues "wish [Hannah-Jones] nothing but deep success and the hope that UNC can learn from this long tenure drama about how we must change as a community of scholars in order to grow as a campus that lives by its stated values of being a diverse and welcoming place for all." At Howard, Hannah-Jones will hold the tenured Knight chair in race and journalism and also will serve as founding director of the historically Black university's Center for Journalism and Democracy. Coates "will be a writer-in-residence in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences and hold the Sterling Brown chair in the English department." He also plans to finish his undergraduate degree, which he started in 1993 at the institution.