The Hollywood Press Association (HFPA) has sued Penske Media, charging that Penske plans to monopolize the awards market and to that end fraudulently acquired the Golden Globes, The Hollywood Reporter reports. The HFPA alleges that Penske leveraged its control over the Hollywood trades to instigate a boycott of the group and make it vulnerable to acquisition. The suit asks for at least $150 million. Penske owns The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Rolling Stone and other publications,  

BuzzFeed is cutting 35% of its workforce following its takeover by Allen Media, KHQ reports.  About 180 jobs will be eliminated from the staff of around 500, including positions in its HuffPost and Tasty divisions. The layoffs will save about $30 million per year, BuzzFeed says. BuzzFood sold a 51% stake to comedian Byron Allen for $120 million in May.   

CBS News is adding several name journalists to "60 Minutes," including New York Times columnist Ross Douthat as a correspondent and author/documentarian Sebastian Junger as a contributor, The Wall Street Journal reports. The hires are part of Executive Producer Nick Bilton’s effort to reshape the program. Norah O’Donnell, CBS Evening News and morning show anchor will join “60 Minutes” as a correspondent. 

Eventual, a new media company, is partnering with Polymarket to provide a media platform for news and analysis for top prediction market traders, Axios reports. "Prediction markets have gotten it right when pollsters, pundits and so-called experts got it wrong, over and over," said seed investor Richard Greenfield. "The traders making those calls are a new type of expert class and are among the sharpest forecasters in the world, but they've been hiding in Discord servers and niche corners of the internet. Eventual makes them the centerpiece of a new kind of media business."  

InMobi Advertising, part of global technology company InMobi, has launched Frame Attention, an in-app video attention model, across Mobile In-App Video and Connected TV (CTV), Martech Cube reports. The company says the new offering addresses a limitation in how digital video has been bought and measured. “Brands have spent years optimizing for impressions that were never really seen,” said Kunal Nagpal, chief business officer at InMobi. “Frame Attention changes the equation.

Philippines-based artist Elmer Saflor has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Memes Apps, Gizmodo reports. The complaint alleges that Memes Apps offered customers a Saflor comic, “Running Away Balloon,” as a template for ads via its paid AI service without permission. Saflor said he hopes to raise “broader questions about how AI-powered platforms use creators’ work, what licensing obligations they may have, and how copyright law applies when viral Internet culture becomes a commercial product.”

Podcasts may be a new frontier in political advertising, but campaigns prefer personal appearances—earned media—Campaigns & Elections reports. Eric Harpootian, vice president at Republican media planning agency Strategic Media Services, says, “I’m always pushing campaigns to try to get their candidate on the podcast, not as much advertise on the podcast. The whole reason why listeners tune in is to hear whatever subject or…whatever guest appearance is gonna be on that podcast.” 

Although it commands the largest share of retail media spend, Amazon falls behind Kroger and Instacart in return on investment, according to data from Keen Decision Systems, Supermarket News reports. Investments in Kroger grew by 54.2% YOY. Overall retail media investments have risen from 5.6% in 2020 to 11.1% in 2024, and are still rising. 

Website traffic from bots and AI agents surpassed human traffic for the first time last month, AdExchanger reports, according to data shared to Cloudflare. Advertisers have historically avoided bot traffic that was caused by fraud, unauthorized scraping and low-value that shows little sign of consumer intent. Measurement and ad tech platforms will need to better identify non-human activity that signals. 

ChatGPT was hit with a major outage that affected users worldwide, including those in the U.S. and Europe, Bleeping Computer reported on Saturday. The incident, which also affected OpenAI’s coding platform Codex, started at 5 a.m. ET. OpenAI acknowledged the outage on its status platform and said it is “investigating the issue for the listed services.”