New York magazine just dialed down its print presence to biweekly status, but it's now upping its, um, live presence with the launch of The Vulture Festival, 16 events planned for May 10-11 at Milk Studios  "meant to bring the [magazine's entertainment] site's pop culture sensibility to life," writes Lucia Moses. The festival will "offer everything from interviews to live discussions to performances, with a heavy focus on TV but including music and theater as well."

Ezra Klein wants consumers to eat their vegetables. Yes, the star journalist who recently left the Washington Post to launch a new media venture at Vox Media, plans to make the "vegetables" of the news world -- those stories people don’t read despite their health value -- tastier. Previously know only as "Project X,” Klein’s site has been named Vox.com. “The editors also hint at a new format they're developing to put the news in context,” New York magazine writes of the new site. 

Forbes will begin publishing a Central American edition in March "featuring the wealthiest people in the region," writes Chris Roush.

NBCUniversal will host an upfront event for a combination of its 17 cable channels, which include Bravo, E!, Esquire Network, Oxygen, Sprout, Syfy and USA Network, for the 2014-2015 TV season -- unlike the last several years, when NBCU hosted its cable upfronts separately. "The rethinking of how NBCUniversal goes to the upfront market... came after the company reorganized its advertising sales operations by content (that is, entertainment, live programming, lifestyle) to better reflect how marketers now buy commercial time," writes Stuart Elliott.

Seventy-five percent of Millennials surveyed in a recent study said they still pay for TV through a traditional cable or satellite company, according to Verizon Digital Media Services ("the company’s cloud video unit," not affiliated with its Fios network, but still....) "And most (64%) also pay for an online streaming subscription, versus 33% of surveyed non-Millennials," writes Jeff Baumgartner. "Only 14% of the Millennials surveyed said they had never watched TV from an online source, versus 44% among non-Millennials."

What's reportedly the first-ever major TV commercial for medical marijuana has begun running on Comcast networks including CNN, ESPN, Comedy Central, AMC, and Discovery, in New Jersey and Chicago this week. The spot, for MarijuanaDoctors.com, will air in Massachusetts next week, writes Jacob Kastrenakes.

This June will see the launch of NewsmaxTV, a 24-hour cable news channel designed as "a kinder, gentler Fox," says Christopher Ruddy, CEO and founder of conservative media company Newsmax Media. “Our goal is to be a little more boomer-oriented, more information-based rather than being vituperative and polarizing,” Ruddy told writer Karl Taro Greenfeld.

While local alternative weekly newspapers are fading out, either dead (like The Boston Phoenix) or seriously changed after being bought by a larger corporation (like New York City's Village Voice), they definitely still fulfill a need, writes Baynard Woods, a senior editor at the Baltimore City Paper. Alt weeklies "report on the cultural life of a city in a way that neither big daily papers nor websites can."

The New York Times will debut three digital offerings that cost less than a full digital subscription in the next few months,  including a news digest app and a recipe app, in what the paper's head of digital products calls an "unbundling” of the paper, writes Christopher Williams.

As it turns outs, privacy is not an inalienable right, and, to get it, U.S. consumers will have to pay an ever increasing premium. Yes, that’s the new reality of American life, according to reporter and author Julia Angwin. “In our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good,” Angwin writes in the opinion pages of The New York Times. “After all, as the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product … And currently, we aren’t paying for very much of our technology.”