CNN Money
The brawl between Hulk Hogan and Gawker is being postponed until next year. “Florida Judge Pamela Campbell, who will preside over Hogan's lawsuit against the gossip site, said her docket was clogged with cases until March 2016,” CNN Money reports. “Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, is suing Gawker for $100 million claiming an invasion of privacy for showing a sex tape that involved Hogan.”
Re/code
BuzzFeed is reportedly close to securing a $250 million investment from NBCUniversal at a valuation of about $1.5 billion. “People familiar with the proposed deals say they’re part of a new effort from NBCU CEO Steve Burke to bet on digital outlets he thinks can tap into millennial audiences,” Re/code reports.
VentureBeat
Yahoo has something new in mind for Katie Couric. The company plans to feature its global news anchor in a live news show, dubbed Yahoo News Live. “Some may think this [is] an effort by Yahoo to get their money’s worth out of Couric,” Venture Beat writes. “Last month Couric renewed her contract with Yahoo and upped her salary from roughly $6 million annually to $10 million.”
Nieman Journalism Lab
How did New York magazine respond after its site was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack? Rather than waiting on the tech department to restore order, “it started implementing a strategy to make [its cover story about Bill Cosby’s accusers] more visible on its other social-media platforms,” Nieman Lab reports. “Throughout all, there was a sense that this was not a story New York was going to allow to be suppressed.”
Re/code
Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder and recently reappointed CEO, doesn’t appear to have regained order within his troubled company. Rather, Reddit’s head of community, Jessica Moreno, just headed for the door. As Re/code reports: “Her exit is the latest by a female higher-up at the social news site at a time when the company’s efforts to rein in the most toxic elements of its community have been in the spotlight.”
New York Observer
Having survived a rocky debut, female-focused media upstart Bustle appears to be doing well. “Nearly two years [post launch], Bustle is thriving,” The Observer reports. “The site has amassed readers at an enviable rate (30 million unique page views per month) and this past December, the company raised $15.5 million in a Series C round of funding, bringing its total to $27 million.”
The New York Times
Amid a lawsuit or two and top editorial defections, Gawker’s Nick Denton talked with The New York Times about his company’s future. While Denton admits that a marriage and age have dulled his own edge, “Gawker will be at the very edge of the mainstream,” he assures. “It will look for real stories either in the compromises of mainstream media companies, or in the principled anarchy of free-for-all web communities such as Reddit … I don’t think The New York Times should relax just yet.”
Vox
Ezra Klein has seen the future of media, and it doesn’t bode well publishers who expect some control over distribution. “Reporters will write their articles, and their content management system will smoothly hand them to Facebook, Snapchat, or Apple News,” he writes. “There's nothing new here, really -- this is already how RSS feeds work … But there will be more of them, and they will matter much more.”
TechCrunch
At least for now, Flipboard doesn’t appear to be selling out to Twitter, or any other potential suitor. Rather, the digital news platform just raised another $50 million, according to documents that the company filed in Delaware. The latest round most likely values the company at about $800 million, TechCrunch suggests. Flipboard previously raised just over $160 million.
The New York Times
Traditional media isn’t alone in its struggle to find a new identity in the digital age. Writing in The New York Times, Jonathan Mahler points to the unrest at Reddit and Gawker to illustrate new media’s own growing pains. “In trying to recalibrate their identities, Gawker and Reddit are demonstrating that digital media companies are struggling to manage a difficult transition of their own.”