The Digiday Podcast

Shortly after Daisy Auger-Dominguez joined Vice Media Group as its chief people officer in May 2020, the murder of George Floyd spurred companies across the media industry to pledge improvements to their organizations’ levels of diversity, equity and inclusion. VMG then took the further step of uploading its DE&I initiatives into a dashboard for all employees to see the company’s plans and track i...

Everything has accelerated since the pandemic, including the historically slow-moving TV ad market. Not only did this year’s upfront cycle blow by, but early talks ahead of next year’s upfronts are already underway. “We’re having earlier conversations,” said Kim Kelleher, president of commercial revenue and partnerships at AMC Networks, in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Maybe it’s bec...

Ten years after its debut, Vox Media’s technology news publication The Verge hasn’t necessarily changed all that much — at least not compared to its ambitions from the outset. Rather than changing course over the past decade, the outlet has followed through on its original trajectory. “The biggest difference between The Verge now and The Verge 10 years ago is that we have the staff and the capabil...

When the Biden administration named antitrust reform scholar Lina Khan as chair of the FTC, it didn't take long before Amazon and Facebook asked for her recusal in cases related to the two companies. But even as lawmakers call for regulators to rein in big tech algorithms, some have pushed against giving a Khan-led FTC any more money or power to help do it. And some who recall the 1980s-era episod...

Condé Nast Entertainment is not a new player in the TV and film industry. Formed in 2011, the magazine publisher’s entertainment division has had a hand in adapting Condé Nast’s content into shows and movies, including an article by GQ that was made into Netflix documentary series “Last Chance U” and a short story from The New Yorker into Robert Redford-starring film “The Old Man and the Gun.” But...

When the FTC alleged that period tracking app maker Flo Health shared people's private health information with Facebook and Google without permission, its settlement with the company required some changes in how it gathers and uses people's data. But some believed it was just another example of a feeble approach to enforcing the agency's authority. The settlement soon led to a controversial enforc...

TV news networks are swarming streaming, and NBCUniversal News Group is no exception. The Comcast-owned news organization already operates three standalone news streaming outlets — NBC News Now, Today All Day and MSNBC’s The Choice — and is stepping up its streaming operations. NBCUniversal “is becoming a streaming company in large ways, in addition to parks and other things. And so streaming is c...

Wellness and self care became two top categories for online shopping in 2020 — perhaps second only to online grocery and toilet paper — thanks to people managing stress levels and tending to personal care from their homes, rather than seeking out those services elsewhere. For Leaf Group’s digital wellness brand Well+Good, that surge in interest was a boon to its e-commerce business, something it’s...

When Danielle Belton started as HuffPost’s editor-in-chief in April, she stepped into a newsroom that had spent a year in tumult. In addition to the trials of covering and living through the pandemic, the news outlet’s staff had gone through a sale from Verizon Media to BuzzFeed that eventually led to 70 HuffPost employees being laid off. And all the while, the newsroom had been without a leader....

When the bankrupt Gawker shut its doors in 2016, it seemed unlikely that the site known for snarky opinions, celebrity gossip and haughty critiques would return. But rumblings of the site’s return — and its snippy attitude — came in July 2018 when BDG CEO Bryan Goldberg paid just under $1.5 million for the defunct website. Three years later, Gawker is back up and running (after an initial false st...

Maria Reeve didn’t set out to become the first person of color to oversee the newsroom of a major metropolis’s flagship news organization. For much of her career, the executive editor of the Houston Chronicle didn’t even have her eyes on editor roles altogether. “I really liked the process, the work of reporting in journalism. And as I became a manager, I really liked the process of helping people...

The role of editor-in-chief looks a lot different than what it did 20 years ago — or even two years ago. For digital-first media companies, the nuances of what it takes to run a successful newsroom, particularly during a pandemic, are more complicated than ever before. For Vox Media, it meant having two new top editors for its brands Vox and The Cut, who have fresh perspectives on what the job mea...

In February 2018, Cheryl L. Bedford threw a party. The invite called for women of color to unite, and the event spawned Women of Color Unite, the nonprofit organization Bedford oversees that supports women of color in the entertainment industry. “We basically built Women of Color Unite on the idea of exclusion by familiarity and ending it,” Bedford said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast...

The compensation gap is closing, albeit slowly and unevenly. In the effort to create balanced workplaces, LinkedIn occupies the position of potential catalyst. The Microsoft-owned business-centric social network not only provides a platform with tools through which hiring practices can be made more meritocratic but also offers an example of an equitable organization. It even has an executive charg...

Many media companies have set out to be the Disney of X. But Jubilee Media seems to have carved out a niche for itself by aiming to become the “Disney for empathy,” according to the media company’s founder and CEO Jason Y. Lee. Empathy is a pretty unusual content category, though, of which Jubilee Media is well aware. “A lot of people have trouble putting us into a particular category or box. And...

The media and marketing industries seem to be approaching another inflection point. The delta variant is beginning to put the brakes on the return to normal that had been underway since the start of the year. That makes mid-August — already a typically slower part of the year — an opportune time to catch up on the top trends of the ever-changing moment. In this week’s Digiday Podcast, co-hosts Kay...

Travel, to no surprise, was one of the largest industries impacted by the pandemic and publishers like Atlas Obscura that cover exploration, wanderlust and gastronomy had to quickly adapt and figure out both what content output and brand deals would like in this new reality. Luckily for Atlas Obscura, the concept of exploration meant more than its tourism and trip-planning business, which accounte...

Good Housekeeping set a standard at Hearst UK that the rest of the portfolio wants to replicate. For nearly 100 years, the homelife magazine has cultivated a following of readers who trust its product recommendations, reviews and seals of approval enough to spend their money on those tried and tested items. Now, the Good Housekeeping Institute has expanded into the Hearst Institute, enabling the r...

Yahoo is on a mission to drive brand affinity across its portfolio by turning casual readers into fanatics who are willing to spend money with the media company. That strategy has led the company to experiment with new mediums and types of content, as well as new innovative partnerships, said Joanna Lambert, head of consumer at Yahoo. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, she said she want...

Many athletes have made moves into the media business, from Derek Jeter with The Players’ Tribune to LeBron James with Uninterrupted and SpringHill Entertainment to Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim and Simone Manuel with TOGETHXR. That list also includes Kevin Durant. Through their company Thirty Five Ventures, the NBA star and his business partner Rich Kleiman have been building a media business...

Architectural Digest’s global editorial director Amy Astley does not want the 100-year-old magazine to feel stuck in a legacy mindset. While print subscriptions are still an increasing area of the business, she said, the brand’s digital presence and social media content have become significant ways for AD to grow a much younger and more diverse audience. Enter global digital director David Kaufman...

NBC News’s “Meet the Press” is the longest-running show on TV. For the program to remain relevant in the streaming era, it needs to appeal to people who are not tuning in to traditional TV. This notion is not lost on the show’s host Chuck Todd, who also anchors “Meet the Press Reports,” a streaming-only series that debuted on NBCUniversal’s Peacock in September. However, Todd also saw an opportuni...

The wave of media consolidation is cresting again. The latest example is BuzzFeed’s acquisition of Complex Networks. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and Complex Networks CEO Rich Antoniello joined the Digiday Podcast to talk about the deal. The conversation with Peretti and Antoniello ranged from how Complex Networks will fit inside BuzzFeed to how BuzzFeed’s brands could cross over into Complex’s prop...

As the chief data and technology officer at IPG, Arun Kumar has plenty on his plate at the moment. Apple is limiting tracking on iPhones and iPads. In less than a year, Google’s Chrome browser is supposed to cut off third-party cookies. And both Apple and Google are threatening the advertising industry’s adoption of the IP address as a cross-platform identifier. “’Stress’ is the middle name of my...

A decade ago, Cornell students Jordana Abraham, Aleen Dreksler and Samantha Sage created a satirical blog called Betches to share their observations of student life. Now in 2021, the blog has become a multi-platform media company for millennial women that reaches a monthly audience —they tout — of 43 million. The blog grew with its audience, said Dreksler on the latest episode of the Digiday Podca...